Urban Regeneration of Industrial Areas: Affordable Housing for Low Income Populations in Cities

The UK-China Sustainable Development Dialogue (SDD) is a partnership between the UK and Chinese Governments to promote collaboration and good practice on sustainable development. It is framed by a 2004 joint Prime Ministerial declaration and was formally established in 2005 by an agreement signed by UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and State Councillor Tang. The SDD was founded on the recognition that, in an interdependent world, international co-operation is needed to ensure that learning is shared and efforts are made collectively towards achieving common goals. This report is the 13th and Final Paper in the SDD (Urban Strand. It draws together the core conclusions from the previous twelve papers and offers recommendations for taking the dialogue forward

Secure tenure for home ownership and economic development on land subject to native title

The public policy debate on land rights, the struggle of Indigenous peoples to have their pre-colonial possession of land recognised and interests in how land rights might be exercised to fulfil Indigenous peoples’ hopes for economic development and home ownership.Those people who have had their native title rights and interests in land legally recognised are contemplating the implications for their future prosperity. They are pondering the types of investments they can make to develop their land for social and economic purposes, the use and development rights they might temporarily exchange for income, or, as a last resort, the rights and interests they are prepared to relinquish in return for compensation. Western Australia (WA) presents a unique case in the Australian context because, unlike other states and the Northern Territory, WA does not have a statutory Aboriginal land rights system despite its large and remote Aboriginal population. What is termed ‘Aboriginal land’ in Western Australia covers approximately 12 per cent of the state but has generally been granted at the discretion of the Minister for Lands, or else is held in trust as a reserve for the ‘use and benefit of Aboriginal inhabitants’.1 This estate has not been transferred to Aboriginal ownership under state legislation on the basis of statutory rights conferred on Aboriginal people as the result of a formal claim based on their cultural connections to the land or waters. According to the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma (AHRC 2005), this reflects ‘protection’ style legislation from the 19th century, which has been the basis of calls for reform of the system since the early 1980s (Seaman 1984; Bonner 1996; Casey 2007)

Solar+Storage for Low-and Moderate-Income Communities: A Guide for States and Municipalities

The Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA) has produced a new report for states and municipalities on solar+storage for low- and moderate-income (LMI) communities. The report explains how solar+storage can benefit LMI residents and describes a variety of policy tools for doing so, including grants, rebates, utility procurement standards, financing support, opening markets, and soft cost reduction

Carbon Free Boston: Social equity report 2019

OVERVIEW: In January 2019, the Boston Green Ribbon Commission released its Carbon Free Boston: Summary Report, identifying potential options for the City of Boston to meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The report found that reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 requires three mutually-reinforcing strategies in key sectors: 1) deepen energy efficiency while reducing energy demand, 2) electrify activity to the fullest practical extent, and 3) use fuels and electricity that are 100 percent free of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The Summary Report detailed the ways in which these technical strategies will transform Boston’s physical infrastructure, including its buildings, energy supply, transportation, and waste management systems. The Summary Report also highlighted that it is how these strategies are designed and implemented that matter most in ensuring an effective and equitable transition to carbon neutrality. Equity concerns exist for every option the City has to reduce GHG emissions. The services provided by each sector are not experienced equally across Boston’s communities. Low-income families and families of color are more likely to live in residences that are in poor physical condition, leading to high utility bills, unsafe and unhealthy indoor environments, and high GHG emissions.1 Those same families face greater exposure to harmful outdoor air pollution compared to others. The access and reliability of public transportation is disproportionately worse in neighborhoods with large populations of people of color, and large swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods, from East Boston to Mattapan, do not have ready access to the city’s bike network. Income inequality is a growing national issue and is particularly acute in Boston, which consistently ranks among the highest US cities in regards to income disparities. With the release of Imagine Boston 2030, Mayor Walsh committed to make Boston more equitable, affordable, connected, and resilient. The Summary Report outlined the broad strokes of how action to reach carbon neutrality intersects with equity. A just transition to carbon neutrality improves environmental quality for all Bostonians, prioritizes socially vulnerable populations, seeks to redress current and past injustice, and creates economic and social opportunities for all. This Carbon Free Boston: Social Equity Report provides a deeper equity context for Carbon Free Boston as a whole, and for each strategy area, by demonstrating how inequitable and unjust the playing field is for socially vulnerable Bostonians and why equity must be integrated into policy design and implementation. This report summarizes the current landscape of climate action work for each strategy area and evaluates how it currently impacts inequity. Finally, this report provides guidance to the City and partners on how to do better; it lays out the attributes of an equitable approach to carbon neutrality, framed around three guiding principles: 1) plan carefully to avoid unintended consequences, 2) be intentional in design through a clear equity lens, and 3) practice inclusivity from start to finish

Inclusionary Eminent Domain

This Article proposes a paradigm shift in takings law, namely “inclusionary eminent domain.” This new normative concept serves as a framework that molds eminent domain takings and economic redevelopment into an inclusionary land assembly model that is equipped with multiple tools to help guide municipalities, private developers and communities construct or preserve affordable housing developments. The tools to achieve this include Community Benefits Agreements (“CBAs”), Land Assembly Districts (“LADs”), Community Development Corporations (“CDCs”), Land Banks (“LABs”), Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and Neighborhood Improvement Districts (“NIDs”). The origins of the concept derive from the zoning law context, where exclusionary zoning in the suburbs excluded affordable housing for low-income residents. Courts intervened, applying exclusionary zoning doctrines, which led to the enactment of inclusionary zoning programs to achieve a fair share of housing. Exclusionary eminent domain in urban areas, similarly, has displaced and decreased the stock of or denied access to affordable housing through the power of takings. Under an exclusionary eminent domain doctrine, courts would apply heightened review to condemnations in a locality that has less than its fair share of affordable housing. But in a post-Kelo era of takings, doctrinal solutions may not be enough. Analogous to inclusionary zoning, inclusionary eminent domain helps us rethink how to fix these ubiquitous land problems. Indeed, this Article moves us beyond the doctrinal muddle and instead incorporates both the intellectual musings of takings and zoning law with an assessment of how innovative tools can be practically applied to construct and preserve affordable housing in eminent domain takings for economic redevelopment

Lawmakers as Job Buyers

In 2013, Washington State authorized the largest state tax incentive for private industry in U.S. history. It is not remarkable for a state legislature to use tax benefits to retain a major employer—in this case, the global aerospace manufacturer Boeing. Laws across all states and thousands of cities routinely incentivize companies such as Amazon to relocate or remain in particular areas. Notably, however, Washington did not recover any of the subsidies it authorized despite Boeing’s significant post-incentive workforce reductions. This story leads to several important questions: (1) How effective are state and local legislatures at influencing business-location decisions?; (2) Do such incentive programs actually achieve their goals of increasing and maintaining jobs?; (3) Is the public protected from imprudent spending? This Article looks specifically at the role of state and local governments in encouraging businesses to locate in their jurisdictions. In such cases, state and local lawmakers act as buyers of jobs. This Article argues for a two-step proposal to limit subnational government actions to incentivize business-location decisions. The first step involves a bidding process where companies are awarded incentives based on the lowest subsidy dollar amount required to create or retain a job of a certain quality or pay rate. The second step involves defining job metrics based on certain preconditions and recapturing incentives should a company fail to maintain or achieve a defined number of job and qualities inherent in each job. This two-step proposal has regulatory benefits and it mollifies the political concern for jurisdictions to appear competitive and the need for public financial protection

Entrepreneurial managerialism: mobilisation of redistributive mechanisms for entrepreneurial redevelopment of Penghuqu in a Chinese third-front city

This thesis aims to investigate the change of urban governance in post-socialist China, as illustrated by the redevelopment of a shantytown or penghuqu neighbourhood established during the Third Front Construction (1964-1981) in Luzhou, a city in Western China. In the literature on Western cities, the change of urban governance in the neoliberal era has been described as a shift from managerialism towards entrepreneurialism. While this is often depicted as to entail a qualitative transformation of the state, we cannot regard such a change as a fundamental shift. As argued in this thesis, the state, however entrepreneurial it is, would still maintain some redistributive functions, rendering the mode of urban governance nowadays bearing the characteristics of managerialism and entrepreneurialism simultaneously. This would be evident in China. On the one hand, the local state in China, which depends heavily on a land-based accumulation system, is becoming more entrepreneurial. On the other hand, as China remains a “socialist state”, the legitimacy of the state is still founded partly upon accountability to its people, especially those disadvantaged ones. Drawing upon a series of ethnographic data collected from fieldwork between 2015 and 2017, this thesis will argue that entrepreneurialism and managerialism not only co-exist in the contemporary mode of urban governance in China, but intertwine in an integrated way, which may be termed “entrepreneurial managerialism”. The redevelopment of penghuqu, a national project aiming at improving the living conditions of disadvantaged urban residents with some degree of managerial features, has been strategically appropriated by the local state to serve its entrepreneurial vision. Furthermore, within the course of housing expropriation, the redistributive mechanism that could be dated back to the Maoist era with some modifications, have been mobilised to differentiate residents, and legitimise expropriation. The mode of urban governance that combines managerialism with entrepreneurialism also has significant implications for residents, shaping their minds and responses that bear such dual features