National Center for Smart Growth

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/21472

The National Center for Smart Growth (NCSG) works to advance the notion that research, collaboration, engagement and thoughtful policy development hold the key to a smarter and more sustainable approach to urban and regional development. NCSG is based at the University of Maryland, College Park, housed under the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, with support from the College of Agriculture & Natural Resources, the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the School of Public Policy, and the Office of the Provost.

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End date: 2009Subject: search.filters.subject.Land Use

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 27
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    The Puzzle of Local Double Taxation: Why Do Private Community Associations Exist?
    (The Independent Review, 2009) Nelson, Robert
    Private community associations have spread quickly in many parts of the United States, even though their members must pay both association dues and local taxes for similar services. Not only do private community associations offer several advantages over traditional governance structures, but local governments often encourage developers to establish them.
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    The Rise of Private Neighborhood Associations: A Constitutional Revolution in Local Government
    (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002) Nelson, Robert H.
    A revival of the neighborhood is seen by many commentators as a key element in a wider effort to reenergize the intermediate institutions of American society. The weakening of these institutions is blamed for a decline in trust, public spirit, and generally an erosion of civic values in the United States in recent decades. The rise of the private neighborhood follows in the wake of the rise of the corporate form of business ownership of property in the late nineteenth century, both representing fundamental turns away from individual ownership of private property and towards new collective forms of private ownership. Indeed, the rise of private neighborhood associations represents the most important property right development in the United States since the rise of the modern business corporation.
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    Assessing the impact of urban form measures in nonwork trip mode choice after controlling for demographic and level-of-service effects
    (2003) Rajamani, Jayanthi; Bhat, Chandra R.; Handy, Susan; Knaap, Gerritt; Song, Yan
    The relationship between travel behavior and the local built environment continues to be a contentious issue, despite several research efforts in the area. The current paper investigates the significance and explanatory power of a variety of urban form measures on nonwork activity travel mode choice. The travel data used for analysis is the 1995 Portland Metropolitan Activity Survey conducted by Portland Metro. The database on the local built environment was developed by Song (2002) and includes a more extensive set of variables than previous studies that have examined the relationship between travel behavior and the local built environment using the Portland data. A multinomial logit mode choice model results indicate that higher residential densities and mixed-uses promote walking behavior for nonwork activities.
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    Internally Connected, No Commercial, With a Touch of Open Space: The Neighborhoods of New Homes in the Portland Metropolitan Area
    (2004) Song, Yan; Knaap, Gerrit
    For many years, neighborhoods have been classified as either “suburban” or “traditional.” But new homes today are built in many different types of neighborhoods with many different design features. In this paper, we develop a quantitative method for classifying the neighborhoods of new homes in the Portland metropolitan area. We proceed in three steps. First we measure urban form attributes of neighborhoods around newly developed homes. We then use factor analysis to identify a small set of factors that capture essential differences in urban form. Finally we use cluster analysis on these factor scores to identify distinctly different neighborhood types. Applying these methods to neighborhoods around new single family homes in the metropolitan Portland, Oregon, we are able to identify eight factors of urban form and six neighborhood types. We then show that most new single family homes in metropolitan Portland are built in new suburban neighborhoods but a substantial portion is occurring in traditional urban neighborhoods.
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    Information Technology in the 1990s: More Footloose or More Location-bound?
    (2002) Sohn, Jungyul
    This paper examines if information technology has worked towards dispersion or concentration of economic activities in two steps of analysis. The first analysis using locational Gini coefficient and Moran’s I focuses on distribution of the urban area as a whole and finds that dispersion was prominent over the years. The second analysis using Gi* statistic as the dependent variable in the regression model, however, shows that the technology has induced more concentration rather than dispersion at an intrametropolitan scale, reflecting that there is a discrepancy in the results of the two analyses depending on the spatial scale of the analysis.
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    The Transportation-Land Use Policy Connection
    (2005) Knaap, Gerrit; Song, Yan
    In this paper, we explore the transportation-land use policy connection. More specifically, we consider the question: can land use policy be used to alter transportation behavior? The answer is of some importance. If the answer is yes, then there is hope that land use policies can be designed and implemented that will bring some relief to the gridlock and complex transportation problems facing US metropolitan areas. This is the underlying assumption behind most smart growth policy reforms. If the answer is no, then land use policy may still be important, but is not likely to play an important role in resolving transportation issues. We proceed as follows. First we offer a schematic that identifies necessary conditions for land use policy to play a role in addressing transportation issues. Specially,we argue that for land use policy to play an effective role, three conditions must hold. First, land use must be able to alter transportation behavior. Second, transportation infrastructure must not fully determine land use. Third, the condition on which we consider most extensively, land use policy must significantly and constructively affect land use. After presenting the schematic, we consider the evidence on each of these conditions. Based on our review of the evidence, we conclude that land use policy can play an effective role in addressing transportation issues, but that the role is likely to be small, often counter productive, and most effective at the neighborhood scale.
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    Travel and Environmental Implications of School Siting
    (2003) Ewing, Reid
    Travel and Environmental Implications of School Siting, released by the EPA on October 8, 2003, is the first study to empirically examine the relationship between school locations, the built environment around schools, how kids get to school, and the impact on air emissions of those travel choices. Over the next few decades, communities making decisions about the construction and renovation of thousands of schools will be challenged to meet multiple goals -- educational, fiscal, and environmental. The study finds that: School proximity to students matters. Students with shorter walk and bike times to school are more likely to walk or bike. The built environment influences travel choices. Students traveling through pedestrian-friendly environments are more likely to walk or bike. Because of travel behavior differences, school location has an impact on air emissions. Centrally located schools that can be reached by walking and bicycling result in reduced air emissions from driving. More data collection and research are needed to add further to the understanding of these effects. Specifically, improved data about both school travel and the built environment as well as new modeling techniques can build on these results. For some time, there has been a trend toward construction of big schools and requirements for large sites. Guidelines, recommendations, and standards that encourage or require building large schools on new campuses or discourage renovation are embedded in a variety of state and local regulations, laws and funding formulas. This study provides important information about the effect of school location on how children get to school. It shows that school siting and design can affect choices of walking, biking, or driving. In turn, these changes in travel choices could affect traffic congestion, air pollution, and school transportation budgets.
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    Measuring the Health Effects of Sprawl: A National Analysis of Physical Activity, Obesity and Chronic Disease
    (2003) Ewing, Reid; McCann, Barbara
    The findings presented here are from the article, Relationship Between Urban Sprawl and Physical Activity, Obesity and Morbidity, by Reid Ewing, Tom Schmid, Richard Killingsworth, Amy Zlot, and Stephen Raudenbush, published in the September 2003 issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion. This report is intended to make this important piece of research more accessible to the general public. In addition to presenting research findings, this report summarizes recent research done by others on the links between the way we’ve built our communities, physical activity, and health. It also includes recommendations for change and resources for those interested in further exploration of this topic.
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    Identifying and Measuring Urban Design Qualities Related to Walkability
    (2005) Clemente, Otto; Ewing, Reid
    In active living research, measures used to characterize the built environment have been mostly gross qualities such as neighborhood density and park access. This project has developed operational definitions and measurement protocols for subtler urban design qualities believed to be related to walkability. METHODS: Methods included: 1) recruiting an expert panel; 2) shooting video clips of streetscapes; 3) rating urban design qualities of streetscapes by the expert panel; 4) measuring physical features of streetscapes from the video clips; 5) testing inter-rater reliability of physical measurements and urban design quality ratings; 6) statistically analyzing relationships between physical features and urban design quality ratings, 7) selecting of qualities for operationalization, and 8) developing of operational definitions and measurement protocols for urban design qualities based on statistical relationships. RESULTS: Operational definitions and measurement protocols were developed for five of nine urban design qualities: imageability, visual enclosure, human scale, transparency, and complexity. CONCLUSIONS: A field survey instrument has been developed, tested in the field, and further refined for use in active living research.
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    Local Government as Private Property
    (2002) Nelson, Robert
    Critics of private community associations often argue that they represent an undesirable combination of “private” and “governmental” powers. They suggest that the significant differences between a suburban municipality and a private community association should be reduced. The private status of a community association, for example, should not be allowed to shelter it from free speech and other constitutional requirements normally applied to local municipalities. Voting rights in private community associations perhaps should be newly extended to renters. In this paper, I suggest the opposite tack. Instead of requiring private community associations to conform to the legal requirements and social expectations of a municipality, I propose to liberate the municipality to function in the manner of a private business. Local government in America will continue to evolve towards a new form of collective private property – and this will be a good thing.