Problems of containment and the promise of planning

Book ChapterWhen the expansion of cities is constrained either by natural barriers, such as New Orleans, or by policy efforts to limit urban sprawl, development pressures in hazardous areas can markedly increase. As floodplains, steep slopes, earthquake fault zones, and other hazardous locations are converted to urban uses, the locality's vulnerability to hazard events increases as does the potential for serious losses of lives and property in natural disasters. The devastation of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina is an extreme example of the phenomenon. But this threat can be neutralized if hazards are recognized in advance of exposure and appropriate counter-measures are adopted. The difficulty is that in the absence of state planning and hazard mitigation requirements, many localities ignore hazards in planning for and regulating urban development, as shown most recently by Steinberg and Burby (2002). New Orleans and Miami, Florida, provide excellent examples to evaluate the effects of adequate planning and preparation for cities in hazardous areas. New Orleans provides an example of what can occur in a city with severe constraints on buildable land and a lack of adequate public concern for hazards or urban development planning. In contrast, decisions made by policy makers in the State of Florida and by the Miami-Dade County Government illustrate how concern for hazard avoidance and resource protection can lead to policies that sharply limit development in flood-prone areas. To see if lessons revealed by these two cases could be replicated nationwide, we examine natural disasters and associated property damages in samples of metropolitan counties with varying degrees of containment brought about by policy decisions or natural conditions and with varying degrees of planning. And our findings are extremely telling. Metropolitan counties with either natural or policy containment experienced higher property losses in disasters when states left planning and development decisions wholly to local government discretion. Where states intervened and demanded that localities plan and manage development with hazard mitigation in mind, property losses are strikingly lower

Financial Performance Guarantees: The State of Practice

Financial performance guarantees are tools for ensuring that funds needed to pay for improvements called for by development permits and approvals are available in the event a developer defaults on permit requirements. Once limited to surety bonds and cash escrows, new types of guarantees have been developed and are coming into common use. Standby letters of credit, in particular, are being used more widely and have a number of advantages. To use guarantees successfully, municipal governments must make careful decisions about a number of administrative matters. Evidence from 309 municipalities reported in this article can help local planners make the right choices

Public Policy for Suburban Integration...The Case for New Communities

In this Article we examine the integration experience of one type of suburban community - new communities developed from the ground up - to determine whether integration has been beneficial to blacks and low- and moderate-income households, whether it is acceptable to the affluent white majority, and whether new community development is a desirable means of fostering integration

State and Local Programs for Flood Hazard Management in the Southeast

Flooding is a serious national problem. It affects every state, over half of the communities, and an estimated seven percent of the land area in the United States. In an effort to slow escalating flood losses and reduce mounting expenditures for structural protective works and flood disaster assistance, federal flood hazard mitigation policy has increasingly stressed the need for a balanced approach to flood problems. Such an approach employs both structural and non-structural measures. While structural measures, such as dams, levees, and channel alterations have a long history of successful application, a number of non-structural measures have drawn increasing attention. They include land use regulations, floodproofing, flood forecasting, flood insurance, and post flood recovery planning. Most of these non-structural measures cannot be implemented by the federal government acting alone; they require a cooperative effort among federal, state, and local governments

Fifteen Steps to Effective Code Enforcement

Few would argue with the assertion that urban crime is out of control in cities across the United States. The less-told story is the crisis in another type of crime: violations of building, environmental and land-use regulations. Yet here the evidence of system failure is equally stark. In North Carolina, recent reviews of compliance with erosion and sedimentation control permits (Burby et al. 1990) and coastal permits (Brower and Ballenger 1991) revealed rates of violation in excess of 50 percent. Reports from other states are equally distressing and the consequences especially tragic. In south Florida following Hurricane Andrew, fully a quarter of the more than $20 billion in property losses was attributed to shoddy construction not in compliance with the building code (Building Performance Assessment Team 1992). In Kansas City in 1980, 113 people were killed and 200 others injured when the skywalk in the Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed, due to design faults, according to some reports, that were not caught by the code enforcement system (Waugh and Hy 1995). Twenty-three years ago, Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky wrote in their classic book, Implementation (famous for its subtitle: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland Or Why It's Amazing Federal Programs Work at All This Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on the Foundations of Dashed Hopes) that even the most carefully thought out programs often failed to accomplish their ends because of glitches in the way they were carried out. Planners, who spend untold hours crafting new land-use regulations and ever more detailed development permit conditions, have yet to learn this lesson, since they spend little time thinking about whether permit conditions will ever be fulfilled. In part, this neglect may stem from ignorance of what to do to make enforcement more effective. Some attention has been given to the use of financial performance guarantees to assure compliance (e.g., Feiden et al. 1989), but key texts such as The Practice of Local Government Planning (So and Getzels 1988), Urban Land Use Planning (Kaiser et al. 1995), Managing Community Growth (Kelly 1993), and Growth Management Principles and Practice (Nelson and Duncan 1995) make no mention of enforcement, and only one Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Memo has been prepared on this subject (see Kelly 1988). This article has two purposes. One is to urge planners to pay more attention to code enforcement. The other is to suggest concrete steps local governments can take to improve the chances that building and development regulations will be followed by developers and building contractors. These suggestions are based on the results of a national survey of city and county building departments and an analysis of the code enforcement practices of thirty-three North Carolina local governments

Sunshine Laws: Legal Rights to Solar Access

The North Carolina Energy Policy Act of 1975 created the Energy Policy Council to advise the Governor and the General Assembly on matters of energy policy. In 1981, the Council recommended to the Governor that he name a Task Force on Solar Law to determine the nature of the legal and institutional barriers to the full development of solar energy in North Carolina. In April 1982, the Governor appointed a task force of twelve regular members and nine advisory members selected from agencies and institutions of state government. The final report of the task force was published in January 1984. It includes recommendations dealing with electric utilities, financing solar energy development, and solar access. The task force's findings and recommendations regarding solar access are presented in the following article

A Report Card on Urban Erosion and Sedimentation Control in North Carolina

In 1973 North Carolina enacted what has become one of the most stringent erosion and sedimentation control programs in the nation. This article discusses how a survey of 128 construction sites in North Carolina turned up evidence that practice falls short of state goals to curb urban erosion and sedimentation. The authors then discuss policy options to remedy these shortcomings