Relying on the property tax

New England states are more dependent on the property tax to fund local services, including schools, than most other regions. Nationwide, about half of local revenues come from the property tax. But older industrial cities need to charge higher rates on lower assessed values to get the revenue they need, said Barry Bluestone, Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University in Boston. Bluestone spoke at a Lincoln Lecture Nov. 2 at Lincoln House titled “The Potential for Uneven Economic Development in Massachusetts: The Role of Property Taxation and State Local Aid.”
The property tax is a stable source of revenue generally, but it does put older industrial cities such as Pittsfield, New Bedford, Fall River, and Lawrence at a disadvantage: the more they raise rates, the harder it is to attract economic development. The state does step in to make up for shortfalls in local revenue, mostly in the area of school funding. But the state revenue stream is subject to vagaries of the economy, resulting in instability for non-educational local government funding. Spending on police per capita appears even across municipalities, but a closer look reveals much greater police spending per crime in thriving suburban communities, Bluestone said.
One surprising finding in Bluestone’s research: the inequities would be much greater without Proposition 2 ½, which limits the increase in revenue raised from the property tax across all 351 Massachusetts cities and towns.

http://www.lincolninst.edu/news/atlincolnhouse.asp

What’s land got to do with it?
Because climate change is the “ultimate externality,” as MIT’s Robert Solow has put it, the world of land policy faces complex questions. How much impact does land use have on emissions and energy efficiency? If one city, region or state ties land policies to reducing emissions, will the impact be diluted because the neighboring jurisdiction does not? Are other things more central in the climate debate, such as continued international reliance on coal-fired power plants or the price on carbon?
Those were some of the questions that planners and policy leaders wrestled with at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s New England Smart Growth Leadership Forum, attended by about 100 people at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Nov. 1. In the conference, titled “Climate Change: The Emerging Role of Land Use,” Tufts University research professor Paul Kirshen catalogued the New England industries that are already feeling the results of changes in temperatures: fishing, blueberries and cranberries, maple sugar, dairy farms, and ski resorts to name a few. Steve Winkelman, manager of the transportation program at the Center for Clean Air Policy, explored “why sidewalks are as sexy as hybrids” - that is, how zoning, design, and transportation funding priorities can produce environments that reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT). “Cars last 15 years,” he said. “A street grid is for a century.” Better ways of quantifying the relationships between the built environment and auto use are needed, he said.
In a panel discussion, Geoff Anderson, director of the EPA’s Development, Community and Environment Division, said in the years ahead a new measure may emerge, showing how development of various kinds affects greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. “I’d like to go to the Multiple Listing Service and see it right along with the property tax - how much am I going to drive if I live here?” he said. There may not be a silver bullet to counter the global warming challenge, said Beth Nagusky, project director of Grow Smart Maine, echoing comments by Bill McKibben, “smart growth may be the silver buckshot.”
Douglas I. Foy, former secretary of the Office for Commonwealth Development in Massachusetts and founding partner of the firm Serrafix, said in keynote remarks that the framework for land use and settlement patterns is slowly changing. “Congestion is a good thing, not a problem,” he said. The goal of transportation policy should shift from mobility to “being there,” in walkable or transit-accessible environments.
Armando Carbonell, chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute, said there was clearly a role for land policy and cities in the challenge of climate change. “It may be useful to think of cities as great carbon-reduction machines,” Carbonell said. “We’ve got to fix the cars, but we’ve also got to address VMT growth, and that is done by providing environments where one can walk or take transit. Planners are on the supply side of the problem, providing places for people to live with lots of amenities and diversity in housing - and by the way, such attributes are increasingly in demand anyway.”
There may well be a cap-and-trade regime in place in the years ahead and a price on carbon, he said, and at that time urban environments will be even more in demand.
The real estate industry has begun to come to grips with climate change, largely for business reasons. At a recent Urban Land Institute conference, industry leaders expressed concern that office space and other buildings will be obsolete fairly soon because they lack “green building” features. Rising sea levels are also seen as a threat to extensive property holdings in coastal cities.
The Lincoln Institute continues to be engaged on land use and climate change, convening 30 big city planners to share best practices in climate action plans, sponsoring research by New Orleans recovery director Ed Blakely on how urban planning must adapt to the inevitable impacts of global warming, and participating in the Superstition Vistas project on 275 square miles of desert state trust lands in Arizona, new development with a goal of being carbon-neutral.

http://www.lincolninst.edu/news/atlincolnhouse.asp

The ULI does it again in this piece from their annual meeting held in the urban sprawling metropolis of Las Vegas…

http://thegroundfloor.typepad.com/the_ground_floor/2007/10/gen-y-and-housi.html

The first observations are interesting to note. I don’t know where they obtained these data and how valid they are, but I can relate to what these data indicate. The vast majority of my colleagues and friends desire similar such areas to find a home.

Some takeaways from this session:

What Gen Y members don’t want: big houses on big lots, isolated from everything.

What they do want:
housing that fulfills their need for instant access and convenience.

With the oldest members of Generation Y (those in their mid-20s)
starting to enter the housing market, the characteristics of this
demanding, strong-willed generation provide many clues to their
preferences in living arrangements.
For instance, they:

    Favor the quirky, unique and different.
    Seek diversity in all aspects of their lives.
    Prefer urban over suburban environments.
    Multi-task (One observation: “Most don’t wear watches because watches only do one thing.”

The second interesting observation is the change in demographics - changing households from couples, young males being replaced by single-women households.

One key signal of a housing shakeup resulting from Gen Y: changes in
household formation and more single Gen Y women entering the housing
market. In the years ahead, look for the decades-long prevalence of
married couples with children to be increasingly replaced with
single-women households. With more women than men now graduating from
college, women in many markets will soon be making more than men,
placing women in a position of affluence and authority that will affect
housing decisions. Because they will likely delay marriage to pursue
careers, their housing choices will be far different than those made by
their baby boomer mothers. The likely favorite: close-in multifamily
rental or for-sale units in mixed-use communities that emphasize
communal space and social interaction. “This bodes well for urban
communities,” one panelist said.

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Recent news from the Environmental Building News bringing new studies to light regarding the full emissions profiles of Green Buildings - with the focus on Transportation.

That’s right—for an average office building in the United States, calculations done by
Environmental Building News (EBN) show that commuting by office workers accounts for 30% more energy than the building itself uses. For an average
new office building built to code, transportation accounts for more than
twice as much energy use as building operation.

LEED buildings - while a great step, and with recent advances in viable buildings with minimal GHG footprints - transportation remains the biggest hurdle to develop sustainable, green buildings. The article describes eight key factors that contribute to the energy intensity of buildings… “D-factors,”
including density, distance to transit, diversity of uses, and design
of streetscapes.

Given recent documented improvements in building efficiency can be done economically and marketed

The answer: for newly built multifamily housing, virtually all of it.
At the annual ULI Shaw Forum (endowed by the late Charlie Shaw) held
last week, Solara,
an affordable housing development in San Diego with 56 units and a
2,100 square foot community center, was showcased; its operating carbon
footprint has been reduced by 95%.

We still need to be aware of the location of our new buildings….

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article from Env. News Network
Regulation key to greener buildings

This post will include a follow-up as more information becomes available. However, The Grist has published a great article today about the interesting effects of globalization on the US Fruit market - rather than exporting our subsidized corn and cotton out to developing counties - we are experiencing the reverse effect - Cheaper foreign goods changing our markets.

Once piece of this of direct interest and concern to me is the question: - How can we maintain a rural landscape that can either (1) support working farms to provide a source of local, sustainable, and reliable food; and (2) support a diversity of environmental resources important to our long-term survival as a species.

The Grist states the following:

What happens when farmers can no longer work their land profitably? They generally sell it to developers, and land under cultivation succumbs to low-density sprawl. Again, that’s already happening in California. In the state’s lush Central Valley, home to probably the nation’s most valuable territory for growing fruits and vegetables, developers bulldozed 100,000 acres of prime farmland in the 1990s alone, according to American Farmland Trust. If present trends continue, AFT warns, another million acres of farmland could vanish within a generation.

Now, I am very opposed to using subsidies to skew the market for US Fruit to a point of being able to compete with foreign fruit because the true cost of growing our US fruit just IS that much higher and should not a burden on the US taxpayer. However, with appropriate buy-local economic programs, readily available labor force, and land use regulations in place - we should be able to maintain our working landscape and prevent the sprawlification of our landscape.

I think we can almost all agree that the desert is not the best place for booming metropolis. - Now, with a tough water year, Las Vegas is feeling the heat. Lake Mead, the primary water source for the western United States and especially Las Vegas, just to the nort, is experiencing a drought. This is bringing water levels to new Lows -

Read the article here -
Tough times in the desert for the City of Las Vegas.

LAKE MEAD, Nevada — Two wooden piers that once extended into Lake Mead, Nevada, now loom over a desert landscape, monuments to the insatiable need for water in nearby Las Vegas and other parts. A “No Fishing” sign perhaps 600 hundred yards from the shrinking lake and a ring of white magnesium deposits marks the high water level like a giant, half-full bath tub that has dropped more than 100 feet in seven years.