Not exactly land use law (in any earthly sense), but I really like this.
Part of “Compass to the Northern Sky,” Municipal Prints Co.
And stargazing isn’t completely unrelated to the art of town planning: Vitruvius advocated reference to celestial bodies when orienting the layout of new Roman towns.
I recently came across a short book, Administration of Building Regulations: Methods and Procedures for Enforcement, that presents a concise overview of US building codes. If you’re at all interested in the scope of American municipal building regulations, it’s worth the two hours or so that it takes to read. Published in 1973, it is a clear, well-written presentation, with a minimal number of unnecessary tangents. Building codes are direct heirs to the building bye-laws that Unwin discussed in Town Planning in Practice. They controlled, among other things, the geometry of development in the years before that aspect of land use regulation was subsumed by comprehensive zoning. Today’s building codes deal almost exclusively with technical specifications, including electrical, plumbing, and structural requirements. As its title suggests, this book also covers the broad legal frameworks and enforcement mechanisms of municipal building regulations.
It may not be the easiest title to find. They have a copy of the 1973 edition at the Rutgers law library in Newark.
In light of recent developments, I have stopped posting links to articles at the WSJ, or at any other News Corporation media outlet. This change is being made for obvious reasons, and until further notice.
I strongly encourage other writers to make the same decision.
Amalgamated Co-op, Bronx, NY.
If the single-family house has become a dog of an investment, what should communities do? I’d say this trend makes the case for developing a new generation of limited-equity (LE) neighborhoods, where the commitment benefits of ownership are separated from the mad lottery of house prices. Neighborhoods need stakeholders, not just tenants. (Hold your fire: I still rent.) Healthy communities require a critical mass of residents who have made temporal, legal, and financial commitments to remain. They require the political landscape that comes with the presence of enough people for whom it would be more trouble to move than it would be to notice and address local problems.
LE offers this: Cooperators buy shares in a stock company, and the company holds title to the real estate. Typically, starting prices for units are scaled to the pro rata costs of sinking the initial investment: basically, land and construction loans. When a cooperator moves out, he sells his unit to a new cooperator for roughly the same amount that he initially paid. And so, you have a cycle where cooperators who move out will recover their limited equity, and new residents will purchase housing at an affordable price. At the same time, ongoing maintenance costs are used to cover, well, maintenance costs. And taxes. Construction on cheap farmland or (clean) former industrial sites can significantly reduce property costs, making an LE venture an affordable possibility for cooperators with modest incomes. And so, you have a community of stakeholders that overlaps with a community of affordable housing.
The essence of the LE model can be traced back to the Principles of the Rochdale Weavers. In 1898, Ebenezer Howard proposed an LE model for his Garden Cities as a viable solution to the crowding and poverty that characterized the East End industrial slums of Victorian London. In 1902, Theodor Herzl advocated a similar financial model to pay for the founding of Israel. In the United States, labor-sponsored co-ops in New York City became the most ambitious examples of the limited-equity arrangement. But over the last generation, LE has faded out. In the only American locality where the ownership structure had ever gained a foothold, the build-out of affordable land in New York City, combined with the infamous dysfunction of Co-op City, effectively killed the prospect of further LE developments by the mid-1970s. (The 1971 death of Abraham Kazan simultaneously cost the concept its greatest advocate.) Presumably, most of the rest of the US was either too conservative, or too affordable during the post-war period, for such an idea to catch fire without a good sales pitch.
But limited equity housing remains a decent and practical idea, and the present flight of capital from urban land could open a new window for its economic viability. Politically, although LE is unquestionably a creature of the labor-left, it inherently dovetails with a number of fundamental conservative priorities, making it potentially palatable in non-left political landscapes. For example:
1. LE facilitates a broader base of private property ownership.
2. LE does not require any direct involvement by the State.
3. The LE entity is typically entirely local; by-laws can reflect local customs.
This is because LE was envisioned to work within the conservative, common-law legal system of the British Empire in the latter half of the 19th century. Rather than being a plank of a political program, it was and is a simple legal strategy. And because of its origin as a private law device, the LE model remains perfectly compatible with even the most conservative visions of the role of the State, as relates to property and economics. At the same time, the LE model can effectively advance the interests of those who require a degree of shelter from the vagaries of capital, by allowing individuals to enjoy a stable ownership stake in their homes and neighborhoods while maintaining a perpetual stock of affordable units in a fixed location. That is to say, in addition to its direct benefits as a business model, LE offers an approach that can avoid some of the triggers of political hostility while delivering a reliably equitable, even progressive social result. This quality would make LE a promising strategy for these uncertain political and economic times.
New Jersey 1884.
New Jersey Future presents a concise digest of a sobering new report by researchers at Rowan University, concerning the land use patterns of New Jersey since 1970. The report finds modest support for a positive impact from the Mount Laurel doctrine, but an overall increase in both exclusionary zoning policies and inefficient land use patterns. The report also finds a growing separation between the locations of housing and employment opportunities in Monmouth and Somerset, a trend that foreshadows more wasted resources and greater traffic congestion. This is not how the state should be developed.
For the last generation, Mexican migration to the United States has been one of the strongest factors driving neighborhood change, labor markets, and housing demand in American cities from California to New Jersey. Now the Times has a report, riffing off of research by Princeton’s Douglas Massey, that suggests that the long era characterized by heavy migration from Mexico may be coming to a close. If the trend is real, it will be interesting to examine how U.S. urban development is influenced by this change over the next several years.
NY's Mohawk Valley. Source: Google.
More than a dozen small towns dot the countryside of New York’s Mohawk Valley between Albany and Utica. In most, compact urban neighborhoods give way at their edges to farmland and forests: That is to say, the towns of this region still furnish the contrast between efficient development and pastoral nature that was blurred by the sprawling postwar model. Internally, a few are near perfect examples of artful, practical town plans.
I like the physical layouts of Little Falls and Canajoharie, in particular: Both are river towns, built on steep banks, with winding streets worked into the rough topography of the land. Both have very good surviving stocks of Victorian architecture– including factories, simple houses, and showcases– arranged around the common spaces that traditionally organized settlements in the Northeast. And both are, essentially, walkable time capsules. On a recent drive home from from the Adirondacks, I took some photos of these towns.
A slide show, here:
The Mohawk Valley has been settled for as long as nearby parts of New England. Visually, the region’s mountainous terrain casts a haunting daylight shade over certain twists in the river. The valley is largely forgotten by its former industries, and remains mostly undiscovered by sprawl developers or New York City vacationers. Notably, an Amtrak line that runs through the valley skips over the entire stretch between Amsterdam and Utica without a stop.
The development patterns of the smaller, most isolated Mohawk Valley towns reflect the old urban elements of the early-industrial, pre-automobile constellation. In particular, the influence of traditions, building codes, physical restraints, and market forces can be observed through the architecture, street layouts, and walkable accommodations of both topography and transportation routes in both towns. Historically, the the instrumentalities that linked these places with the wider world were the Mohawk River, Erie Canal, and N.Y. Central Railroad (in that order). From the maps of Little Falls and Canajoharie, it is apparent that the nodes of development were sited in proximity to these routes, and to meet the challenges posed by the rough topography on either side of the river. Similar evidence could still be found today in more developed regions, but the persistence of the Mohawk towns in the original matrix of a rural countryside allows much evidence of the early functionality of their patterns to be preserved. (Note the similar street patterns of the river towns along the lower Hudson, here, as they existed in 1906.)
A Google satellite map of Little Falls is here:
And one of Canajoharie:
One tradition worth noting in both towns is the presence of an open public space near the town center. In Little Falls, two separate greens characterize the upland neighborhood just north of the river, in the tradition of English town planning. Interestingly, the geometric convergence of several streets around a wide swath of pavement in Canajoharie is (in its current form) more reminiscent of a Continental plaza.
Hammond printed these three unique, regional maps of New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia in its 1910 New Reference Atlas of the World. All three are copyrighted before 1910, so they might also have been published in earlier atlases. Together, the maps offer a nice snapshot of development across three major Eastern regions at the end of the Victorian period, and just before cars really began to influence urban land use patterns. (Note the railroads.) These are the only three maps from Hammond’s regional series that I’ve been able to find. Would be nice to see others if they’re out there. (Chicago? San Francisco?) Maps of American states and cities-proper, from the same atlas, can be found at the US Digital Map Library.
New York City.
Boston.
Philadelphia.
The NYT has a lighthearted story by Sam Roberts about an abandoned railroad track right-of-way in Brooklyn. Neighbors have enclosed and taken possession of the strip of land for their own ordinary purposes. Reading the article led me to do some quick research: It turns out that, in 2008, the New York legislature enacted a statutory revision that seems to complicate what otherwise could have been the neighbors’ textbook common law adverse possession claim.
R.P.A.P. §§ 501(2), et seq., now states:
2. Acquisition of title. An adverse possessor gains title to the occupied real property upon the expiration of the statute of limitations for an action to recover real property pursuant to subdivision (a) of section two hundred twelve of the civil practice law and rules, provided that the occupancy, as described in sections five hundred twelve and five hundred twenty-two of this article, has been adverse, under claim of right, open and notorious, continuous, exclusive, and actual.
3. Claim of right. A claim of right means a reasonable basis for the belief that the property belongs to the adverse possessor or property owner, as the case may be. Notwithstanding any other provision of this article, claim of right shall not be required if the owner or owners of the real property throughout the statutory period cannot be ascertained in the records of the county clerk, or the register of the county, of the county where such real property is situated, and located by reasonable means.
(Emphasis added.)
What strikes me as interesting, and discordant, about this statutory revision is a statement made by its main sponsor, Elizabeth Little, a Republican state senator from the North Country. In a 2008 memorandum, quoted by Law of the Land, Senator Little wrote:
[If adverse possession claimants] have a reasonable basis to believe that it is their land then that is exactly the good faith dispute over title to real property for which the adverse possession doctrine was established. Adverse possession should be used to settle good faith disputes over who owns land.
This strikes me as a very inaccurate statement of the principles that underpin the doctrine. Adverse possession might occasionally come into play to settle such matters, but ordinary boundary and title disputes are readily addressed with other areas of the common law of property. Adverse possession, in a common analysis, is a teaching that was traditionally aimed at keeping fallow land from being tied up, in perpetuity, by individuals who not only did not make use of the land, but whose relationship with the land had become so tenuous that they’d failed to even object to its use by an uninvited party for an entire seven-year vesting period. That is to say, adverse possession is a traditional, common law incentive that works to encourage individuals to make use of abandoned property. It is a doctrine that values the sweat equity of those who would work the land more than it values the paper titles of those who would let it lie fallow. And it is a device for preventing the perpetual entrenchment of nonproductive, landed wealth. Put simply by Justice O.W. Holmes:
Sometimes it is said that, if a man neglects to enforce his rights, he cannot complain if, after a while, the law follows his example.
That said, an adverse possessor has always assumed the risk that his bluff would be called before the vesting period had run. But once such time had expired without an objection by the title-holder of record, the adverse possessor could expect to have a solid legal claim to the property. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, as its role is described in the NYT story, is exactly the sort of owner against whom adverse possession ought to work. The MTA, and its predecessors in title, have been absentee holders that have not exercised any incidents of ownership over the land at issue since, apparently, 1924. In the mean time, the parcel’s immediate neighbors have made productive use of the abandoned property. During this time, the neighbors’ use has never elicited any objection from the MTA or its predecessors in title.
Under Senator Little’s amendment to New York’s adverse possession statute, it appears that the MTA could maintain a live claim to the land, against the neighbors, in spite of its nearly nine decades of neglecting the property. Simply stated, this is not right; the common law approach is.
A Google satellite map of the block at issue (East 18th Street between Avenues U and V) is here:
A couple of relevant land-use stories have appeared in the WSJ recently. Speakeasy has an interview with Justin Martin, author of a new book, Genius of Place, about the life and work of Frederick Law Olmsted. Also, the straight news section has a piece about a recent uptick in approval numbers for apartment proposals in the suburbs of Long Island, New York.
