Limits of end-state planning

Peer reviewedPreprin

Reforming Local Property for an Era of National Decline

Following a century of rapid growth, the global human population is predicted to crest and then decline in the coming generations. Some industrialized countries are already grappling with the economic and societal consequences of population loss. Others, including the United States, have only started to realize that decline might arrive on their doorsteps far sooner than originally anticipated, a prospect for which policymakers and legal scholars are presently unprepared. Global and national demographic change threaten to cause far-reaching dislocations, and local municipalities, too, will be asked to reckon with the aftermath. Yet local governance in the United States has long followed a dominant vision of population growth, with decline left stigmatized as a regional anomaly-as a symptom of crisis rather than a discrete catalyst for it. The growth gospel prevents local officials from preparing for decline preemptively when the resources can still be mustered to confront shifting demographics and dwindling tax streams. On the other hand, once a locality enters an era of decline, it runs headlong into vexing problems of property law. Underutilized land cannot simply be deleted or removed. It cannot be exchanged with utilized lands elsewhere in order to retain density, maintain vibrancy, and consolidate local infrastructure. As scholars have explored in the context of climate change, another looming challenge of the coming century, property law's traditional preference for intergenerational stability hinders its utility when preparing for a changing world. Keeping pace requires that the institution evolve to become more adaptive and dynamic

Towards Mission Creep: Fragmented Local Governance in the Face of Crisis

In December 2018, following a contentious debate, Kent County's Board of Commissioners-the legislative arm of the western Michigan county that includes Grand Rapids-narrowly voted to dissolve the Kent County Land Bank (KCLB), a local governmental agency that had operated in the region since 2009.' The Board's decision came down to one core concern: mission creep. While agreeing that the KCLB had successfully targeted and rehabilitated distressed properties over the prior decade, a majority of the Board believed that the entity-which had recently rebranded itself as "Innova- LaB" and announced a shift into modular housing construction across Michigan-had strayed from its original purpose.2 Detractors argued that the KCLB was now competing with the private construction market during a boom economy, a role that it had no business playing. Supporters of the KCLB saw its foray into state-wide modular housing construction as a commendable effort to address housing affordability in Michigan.

Confronting the Local Land Checkerboard

Fractured public land is hidden in plain sight. In communities across the country, a patchwork assortment of local governments share splintered ownership over surplus public properties, which can be found scattered in residential neighborhoods and alongside highways, in the shadows of development projects and in the scars of urban renewal. The ripple effect of this fragmentation extends across the spectrum of local governance. It creates needless costs and bureaucratic headaches at a time of acute fiscal distress for cities and counties. It contributes to an inequitable imbalance of local power between formal and informal landowners in a community. And curiously, the operative legal regime enables the problem while simultaneously muddying pragmatic ways to confront it. This Article seeks to shed light upon the local land checkerboardand in doing so, the cluttered and opaque world of local government law that it inhabits

A Legal Map of New Local Parkland

Public parks play consequential roles in local communities. Parks can raise property values, encourage or inhibit sprawl, and promote health, safety, and social cohesion. The decision to create a park affects development in the surrounding area and dictates which residents can easily access the property's new amenities-and which residents cannot. Yet, public stakeholders are given few signposts in making and monitoring public park acquisitions. Data on new parkland is scarce; moreover, the legal framework undergirding the process is poorly understood and rarely explored, particularly at the local government level. Although local governments are America's leading stewards and gatekeepers of public park property, the actions of a parks department when acquiring new land receive bare direction from the formal legal regime and little attention from legal scholars. Instead, state law and judicial precedent grants almost unconstrained local discretion when acquiring parkland, a framework that delegates lawmaking to the lowest level of governance: to the local and sublocal institutions whose internal policies and unwritten practices determine what parkland is acquired, how potential land acquisitions are reviewed, and which stakeholders and priorities carry most weight in the process. Viewed as a whole, these policies and practices constitute an informal, heterogeneous legal regime of local parkland acquisition

Reforming Local Property for an Era of National Decline

Following a century of rapid growth, the global human population is predicted to crest and then decline in the coming generations. Some industrialized countries are already grappling with the economic and societal consequences of population loss. Others, including the United States, have only started to realize that decline might arrive on their doorsteps far sooner than originally anticipated, a prospect for which policymakers and legal scholars are presently unprepared. Global and national demographic change threaten to cause far-reaching dislocations, and local municipalities, too, will be asked to reckon with the aftermath. Yet local governance in the United States has long followed a dominant vision of population growth, with decline left stigmatized as a regional anomaly—as a symptom of crisis rather than a discrete catalyst for it. The growth gospel prevents local officials from preparing for decline preemptively when the resources can still be mustered to confront shifting demographics and dwindling tax streams. On the other hand, once a locality enters an era of decline, it runs headlong into vexing problems of property law. Underutilized land cannot simply be deleted or removed. It cannot be exchanged with utilized lands elsewhere in order to retain density, maintain vibrancy, and consolidate local infrastructure. As scholars have explored in the context of climate change, another looming challenge of the coming century, property law’s traditional preference for intergenerational stability hinders its utility when preparing for a changing world. Keeping pace requires that the institution evolve to become more adaptive and dynamic. Drawing upon recent property theory, this Article advocates for a reconfigured tenure form, the callable fee simple, which can be harnessed to create a new intergenerational mechanism for population decline: Future Consolidation Districts, or FCDs. After sketching the contours of an FCD, the Article explores how one could be created in a manner that provides flexibility to tackle future demographic dislocations, overcome implementation and equity challenges, and comport with existing local government and property norms, even while pushing the limits of both. Although today’s demographic forecasts may ultimately prove inaccurate, existing regimes cannot, and will not, remain static forever. They should be reconfigured deliberatively in advance rather than by necessity down the road

Confronting the Local Land Checkerboard

Fractured public land is hidden in plain sight. In communities across the country, a patchwork assortment of local governments share splintered ownership over surplus public properties, which can be found scattered in residential neighborhoods and alongside highways, in the shadows of development projects and in the scars of urban renewal. The ripple effect of this fragmentation extends across the spectrum of local governance. It creates needless costs and bureaucratic headaches at a time of acute fiscal distress for cities and counties. It contributes to an inequitable imbalance of local power between formal and informal landowners in a community. And curiously, the operative legal regime enables the problem while simultaneously muddying pragmatic ways to confront it. This Article seeks to shed light upon the local land checkerboard— and in doing so, the cluttered and opaque world of local government law that it inhabit

Interlocal Power Roulette

Local governments inhabit a crowded ecosystem. Cities, counties, and school districts—and many more—share overlapping territorial jurisdictions. Overlapping jurisdiction goes hand-in-hand with redundant local power, defined as a scenario where multiple governments hold independent authority to take the exact same action in the exact same territorial space. In Maine, for example, state law empowers three local bodies to operate the same sewer infrastructure. In Detroit, two separate entities are equally tasked with managing the city’s streetlights. And in communities across the country, local governments are broadly authorized to own the same parcels of public land, including in Oakland, California, where public properties are splintered between a grand total of fifteen different government bodies. How do localities navigate their shared powers in a shared governance ecosystem? In the absence of state guidance, local governments fashion ad hoc, largely circumstantial, and often informal regimes of interlocal power. Sometimes they compete with each other to control a public asset, while at other times they coordinate and exercise power in a joint manner. Sometimes they abstain from acting, on the hope or expectation that another local entity will take the lead, and at other times they bandwagon onto the governance decisions of another body. Rarely are these relationships set in stone. Instead, a relationship built on collaboration may devolve suddenly into competition, while even written agreements that delineate how two governments will exercise their redundant powers can prove illusory on the ground. Uncertainty reigns supreme in this interstitial universe, yielding an interlocal governance haze that this Article aims to highlight and moderate. The Article demonstrates why redundant and muddled power is so common, how it manifests in practice, and why state legislatures generally take a hands-off approach to the issue. Yet as it also demonstrates, legislatures sometimes do intervene, at times aggressively, to reorder interlocal power in pursuit of substantive policies or particular political goals. Intergovernmental power dynamics can thus lurch between the polar nodes of local indeterminacy and haphazard, state-imposed change. To break the impasse, this Article considers a counterintuitive strategy for local government officials: proactively asking the state to limit their power by creating an administrative oversight framework where none currently exists. Such a framework would enhance local democracy by shedding sunlight on conversations that today often occur in the shadows. It could also carve a middle-ground approach between the well-trod and often politically-fraught poles of state fiat and local autonomy, one where, instead, local actors can pursue a procedural initiative today to ward off unpredictable state interventions down the road

A Legal Map of New Local Parkland

Public parks play consequential roles in local communities. Parks can raise property values, encourage or inhibit sprawl, and promote health, safety, and social cohesion. The decision to create a park affects development in the surrounding area and dictates which residents can easily access the property’s new amenities—and which residents cannot. Yet, public stakeholders are given few signposts in making and monitoring public park acquisitions. Data on new parkland is scarce; moreover, the legal framework undergirding the process is poorly understood and rarely explored, particularly at the local government level. Although local governments are America’s leading stewards and gatekeepers of public park property, the actions of a parks department when acquiring new land receive bare direction from the formal legal regime and little attention from legal scholars. Instead, state law and judicial precedent grants almost unconstrained local discretion when acquiring parkland, a framework that delegates lawmaking to the lowest level of governance: to the local and sublocal institutions whose internal policies and unwritten practices determine what parkland is acquired, how potential land acquisitions are reviewed, and which stakeholders and priorities carry most weight in the process. Viewed as a whole, these policies and practices constitute an informal, heterogeneous legal regime of local parkland acquisition

Response Time and Puzzle Solving Skills in Gamers vs. Non- gamers

Video gaming requires rapid response times, problem solving skills, adaptive learning and attention to detail by continuously engaging cognitive and physical reactions to cues provided via visual stimuli. Gaming more than nine hours a week has been said to positively affect individuals’ reaction times and problem solving skills. Given the advancements of technology and video gaming, an increase in research on the effects gaming has on motor and cognitive skills has yet to come. PURPOSE: To compare the response times and problem solving skills between gamers and non-gamers. METHODS : Subject (N=68) were required to complete a survey, the tower of Hanoi puzzle, and a set of ten trials on a MOART board designed to measure response time. Gamers 9+ hrs/wk (N=24), sometimes gamers 1-8 hrs/wk (N=18), non-gamers 0 hrs/wk (N=26). On day 1 participants completed a series of 10 trials on the Moart Board which measured their reaction and movement times. On day two, individuals completed three trials on the Tower of Hanoi which was used to measure problem solving skills. Their objective was to move the stack of blocks from peg one to peg three while following two rules; only move one block at a time, and do not stack a bigger block on top of a smaller block. A one-way ANOVA (α =.05) was used to compare the aggregated mean scores in the Tower of Hanoi puzzle and the Response time of the MOART board. RESULTS: There was no statistical significance when comparing the groups for puzzle completion and error time when solving the Tower of Hanoi until the third trial. During the third trial of completion the significance between gamers and non-gamers was (p=0.016). Response time was only noted as statistically significant when comparing gamers and non-gamers (p=0.007). CONCLUSION: There was not statistical significance between gamers and non-gamers in many of the trials. However, there was a notable trend in the percent of subjects completing the trial. By trial 3, 80% of gamers completed the tower compared to only 38% of non-gamers. Not only were gamers solving the puzzle faster than the partial and non-gamers but there were more gamers solving the puzzle than any other group. There was no significance between gamers and sometime gamers (0.130) or sometime gamers and non-gamers (0.620). However, significance was present between gamers vs. non-gamers (0.014)