Agenda - 03-21-1990 - Laserfiche WebLink

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s ' • 156 LAND USE AND ENVIRONMENT [12] Jersey something that will be far more valuable in the long run than inclusionary housing and increasing the supply of higher- density, lower-cost market housing. The decision will require that elected and appointed officials spend countless hours with their lawyers and planners attempting to understand the legal limits of their land use choices. the rationale for the decision, the need for carefully written ordinances setting forth the standards for development approvals, and the requirement that the local version of the "public will" be subordinated to process and law. In the process, New Jersey's grass-roots body politic may be reformed. Economic Incidence25: The Theoretical Justification for Inclusionary Set-Asides • Some economists, academics, and politicians are genuinely troubled by the fact that governmental activities can greatly affect land values and cause either losses or benefits for land- owners and developers. These benefits or losses are, they feel, unearned and unwarranted. Government should devise mecha- nisms, these people argue, that recapture windfall profits from those who benefit and compensate those landowners who suffer losses due to governmental activities. In the absence of • widespread support for such megasystems, these egalitarians • have argued since the 1960s that local government could use its land use powers to solve such local problems as the need for affordable housing, not by more taxation, but by simultaneously rezoning land to higher densities and requiring mandatory set- asides in such a way that the benefit received would either be equal to or greater than the obligation imposed. These housing • advocates argue that if the cost of distributing the low- and moderate-income housing is less than the increase in the value of the land resulting from the rezoning, there is no economic hard- ship, no taking, no illegal taxation of one segment of the economy—and the landowner should be grateful. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on the economic impact of an inclusionary device that just increases costs without a 25 The author is indebted to an article by Dean Misczynski. which appeared as Chapter 6 in Hagman and Misczynski's seminal Windfalls for Wipeouts (1978). The author also wishes to acknowledge his intellectual debt to the late Donald Hagman. not only for the work cited, but also to Hagman's unpub- lished Taking Care of One's Own: Bootstrapping Low and Moderate Income Housing by Local Government.which was delivered to the Lincoln Institute's Housing Seminar in April 1981.