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Market Demand-Based Planning and Permitting: Special Case of Affordable Housing
Get PDFArthur C. Nelson has advanced the concept of market demand-based planning and permitting (MDBPP) as a way in which to balance the need for development within the limits of market capacity. Lacking MDBPP discipline, real estate markets are prone to over-development that can lead to economic downturns including notably the Great Recession of 2007-2009. This article will unpack the history and challenge of MDBPP and demonstrate its efficacy. Then, it will apply these principles to the specific wicked problem of housing affordability, which is both ongoing and emerging in nature. It will tie this problem to a call for MDBPP by noting that the problem of over-permitting continues with the single-family detached housing type, which overwhelmingly dominates the U.S. housing market. This problem continues as the market demand and critical need for more affordable housing types go unanswered by cities and developers
Becoming Henderson: How a Boomburg Used a Future-Focused Strategic Plan to Become a True Urban Place
Get PDFSince its incorporation in 1953, the City of Henderson, Nevada has grown from a sparsely populated, one-industry town into a “boomburb” comprised of numerous nationally recognized master-planned communities with an over-arching, future-focused strategic plan. This article is a case study of how this boomburb took advantage of its position in the American suburban landscape to become a true urban place. It also offers a checklist for other communities to consider as they plan for their own futures
Critical Legal Studies
No full textConstitutional police regulation is a complex tangle of substantive rights, remedies, and procedural rules. Together, they appear to scaffold a cohesive system of police restraint. Legal scholars tend to focus criticism on specific rules, impelled by faith that the system can be made to serve its core purpose: protecting civilians against police overreach and abuse. Drawing on critical legal studies, this Article contends that constitutional police regulation is incapable of realizing its putative purpose. Constitutional police regulation frames policing as a series of isolated, individual police-civilian encounters. This is compounded by the unpredictable interpretive interplay between substantive, remedial, and procedural rules. That interplay generates systemic indeterminacy. This Article offers a sociolegal account for why constitutional police regulation has developed as it has. Both courts and police derive legitimacy from the broadly shared perception that the former supervise the latter. The notion that there is a criminal justice system assumes a legal tether connecting the street to the courtroom. The tether is mythological. Constitutional police regulation symbolically sustains the appearance of judicial control over the police. That appearance mediates and disguises the chasm that separates the police from the courtroom. The descriptive account here supports calls for state and local legislatures to remake the police
Beyond Brownfields Redevelopment: A Policy Framework for Regional Land Recycling Planning
Get PDFThe fields of urban policy and urban planning lack a cohesive and comprehensive framework for recycling vacant and abandoned properties. Past and present efforts to repurpose vacant land and abandoned properties were often narrow responses driven primarily by economic redevelopment policies such as urban renewal of the 1950s & 1960s, deindustrialization of the 1970s & 1980s, and the public-private partnerships featured during the 1990s & 2000s. The 2008-2015 mortgage foreclosure crisis and Great Recession put the policy spotlight on how to address the widespread impacts from thousands of vacant and/or foreclosed homes that affected diverse markets and communities across the country. Even today, dozens of communities, especially those older industrial legacy cities, still have neighborhoods and districts with hundreds, even thousands of vacant homes. The COVID-19 Pandemic now presents policymakers with another socio-economic crisis that will dramatically impact our communities and its built environment. As communities begin the slow recovery process, they may confront waves of housing instability and business disruptions that could trigger significant increases in vacant homes and abandoned properties. This article outlines the core policy and program foundations for reclaiming vacant properties and abandoned buildings; identifies the policy and program innovations that can scale brownfields redevelopment to address challenges around equity, sustainability, and resilience; and provides a framework for a collaborative, cross agency, cross sector policy and planning framework that can address contemporary and future land recycling crises
Regulating Dynamic Risk in Changing Market Conditions
No full textHow successful are the SEC\u27s attempts to regulate dynamic risk in financial markets? Using mutual fund disclosure data from two financial shocks--the Puerto Rican debt crisis and COVID- 19--this Article finds evidence that SEC open-ended regulations, like the obligation to disclose changing market conditions, are largely successful in capturing dynamic, future risk. Funds engage in widespread and, often, detailed disclosures for new risks--although these disclosures vary widely in specificity. But not all funds disclose new risks. This creates perverse incentives for funds to opt out of disclosure or downplay threats with boilerplate language when new risks are emerging. This Article recommends several SEC interventions to improve dynamic risk disclosures including empirically monitoring disclosures, issuing guidance when problematic variation is observed, and enforcing disclosure standard
Using Insurance to Regulate Food Safety: Field Notes from the Fresh Produce Sector
No full textoodborne illness is a public health problem of pandemic proportions. In the United States alone, contaminated food sickens an estimated 48 million consumers annually, causing 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. Nowhere is this crisis more acute than in the fresh produce sector, where microbial contamination in growing fields and packing houses has been responsible for many of the nation’s largest and deadliest outbreaks. This Article examines emerging efforts by private insurance companies to regulate food safety on farms that grow fresh produce.Previous studies of using insurance to regulate food safety rely on economic theories that yield competing conclusions. Optimists argue that insurance can promote efficient risk reduction. Skeptics counter that insufficient information regarding the root causes of contamination renders insurance impotent to reduce food safety risk. This Article adds a sociolegal perspective to this debate. Based on interviews with insurance professionals, the Article documents how, notwithstanding limited information, underwriters employ a variety of techniques to encourage compliance with government food safety regulations and conformity to industry standards. These techniques include premium discounts for clients who adopt state-of-the-art food safety practices, coverage exclusions for high-risk activities, and loss control advice about how to avoid contamination.Insurance plays a growing and potentially transformative role in advancing food safety. Government food safety regulation has traditionally been hampered by inadequate inspection resources. This Article advocates expanding insurance to fill oversight gaps in the U.S. food safety system, and it offers specific recommendations for how to nurture emerging markets for food safety coverage.The findings presented in this Article have implications for understanding how insurance regulates risk more generally. Economic analysis of many well-established types of insurance—for example, life, health, homeowners, and auto—emphasizes the role of actuarial data in pricing premiums, determining coverage limits, and informing loss control advice. However, the underwriting professionals in this Article who describe their efforts to improve food safety on farms tell a different story. They operate in an emerging market with a low volume of claims and a dearth of actuarial data. Three aspects of their work stand out. First, underwriting in this area is more impressionistic than economic analysis assumes. When assessing the risk of microbial contamination on farms, underwriters rely more on their intuitions about a farmer’s competence and on media coverage of high-profile foodborne illness outbreaks than on actuarial data. Second, the mindset of these underwriters is more administrative than economic. They think in terms of regulatory compliance and standards conformity rather than optimal risk reduction. Third, farm size determines the role of insurance in managing risk. High-premium coverage for larger farms provides more underwriting resources for risk management than low-premium policies priced for small farms. These findings suggest that although economics explains the logic of insurance as form of risk regulation, understanding how underwriters regulate risk in practice, especially in emerging markets, requires attention to professional judgment, bureaucratic thinking, and resource constraints
SB 226: Amendments to the Quality Basic Education Act
Get PDFThe Act requires each local board of education to adopt a complaint resolution process to be used by its local school system to address parents’ or permanent guardians’ complaints alleging that harmful material has been provided or is currently available to a minor student