Agenda - 03-21-1990 - Laserfiche WebLink

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22 166 LAND USE AND ENVIRONMENT [22] Some people in Utopia who do not care about whether the landowner should have received $10 million are worried about the inclusionary ordinance because it is so popular that the city council, the city attorney, and the professor are working to- gether to "tap residual land capacity" to pay for more of the things that the city council would like to do but is unwilling to increase taxes to pay for directly. These people are concerned that an idea that worked well in Fairhaven, where it was care- fully applied, has become too popular and will be misapplied. They feel that Utopia's ability to create value by increasing permitted land use intensities is too limited a resource in Utopia to be relied upon to fuel governmental largess. Most people in Utopia, however, are pleased with the city council, and its members have been reelected again and again with overwhelming landslides. Real-World Applications and the Incidence Problem . In Utopia, the mandatory set-aside inclusionary mechanism worked relatively well in the case that was examined, mainly because the city council followed the professor and the city attorney's four rules. The city council took care to "create" more value through benefits than it extracted through obligations and made sure that both the obligations and the benefits were applied to the land at the same time. The landowner was appar- ently not hurt because his land increased in value. The builder was not hurt because he knew the cost of the obligation and deducted that from the value of the market units when he bought the land.Since no one suffered or was economically squeezed, it must be assumed that no one incurred unexpected costs that they would attempt tospass on or litigate over or that would cause them to go bait The system worked well because it P upset no expectatio In the real world , _`-T. little care is taken by government generally to make sure .t the cost of the obligation is balanced y{w. with the benefits, and geryone argues about who is paying. In New Jersey, where municipalities will voluntarily or pursuant to court order adopt manatory set-asides on a scale that will dwarf the Orange County; periment, the problem has not even been addressed beyondatement by the supreme court to the effect that builders are entitled to their profits. No great care was taken in California, particularly in Orange County, to value either the benefit or the cost of: hsr;obligation. In some cases, it appears from the literature..thOindowners received no new benefit. S.