Thinking Outside the Land Use Box

This post was written by The Ground Floor contributor and ULI senior resident fellow, Bill Hudnut.

How about some thinking outside the box...about how to solve some of our serious land use problems? Here are a few suggestions:

• To create more funds for affordable housing, and enable millions of Americans to claim a tax benefit for home mortgage interest for the first time, which would make owning a home more affordable, follow the advice of President Bush's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform, reporting in the fall of 2005, and replace the mortgage interest deductibility on first homes with a "home credit" in the amount of 15 percent of the interest paid on mortgage debt for that home (no credit or interest deductions would be allowed for second homes or home equity loans);
• To fund infrastructure improvements and new construction at the local and state levels, employ more user fees on the assumption that those who use should pay; and at the national level, establish an infrastructure improvement bank backed by a stable revenue source, i.e., an excise tax on automobiles, a national lottery, or government bonds;
• To do a better job with planning for land use and transportation in a metropolitan area, either sunset Metropolitan Planning Organizations and let the states develop new regional authorities, such as Georgia’s Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA) for the 14 counties around Atlanta, or give the states more responsibility for land use planning and more teeth to enforce their plans, even though "all zoning is local;
• To re-use dead retail space, convert obsolete malls into urban villages;
• To curtail sprawl and address escalating energy costs, create higher density development, especially around transit
• To promote sustainable development, find a market for rehabbing and retrofitting buildings with higher energy efficiency, and create "green" infrastructure, particularly on the fringe; and
• To move beyond outmoded Euclidian (single use) zoning toward more flexible regulations, utilize performance based zoning.

Just some ideas. Some may fly, others may not, but we need to begin thinking creatively about the impact of the changing metropolitan form on the way we develop the land and respond to challenges surfacing today.