Magazine
Dispatches
Land Grab
A new report explores an alternative to eminent domain
As communities across the country grapple with how the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London will affect urban development, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has proposed an alternative to eminent domain—one that relies on consensus and community participation rather than legal threats and forced confiscations of property.
In “land readjustment,” as it is called, property owners pool their land rights and hand control over to a third party—usually a local government, developer, or trust created for the purpose—who then redistributes the land under a formula in which each landowner ideally receives a new plot that is the same size as the old one. The hoped-for end result is to consolidate disparate parcels of land into contiguous tracts for easier development without stripping anyone of their property.
“It really is one of the best ways you can put these large projects together in a voluntary manner,” says Patricia E. Salkin, associate dean and director of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School in upstate New York. “It’s a technique that should be examined before the use of eminent domain.”
While the United States may find the idea relatively novel, Europe, Israel, and Japan have utilized land readjustment for centuries. Most famously, it played a key role in the Japanese land reform movement beginning in the late 1910s, which aimed to merge farmland into plots that could be farmed mechanically; this continued through the American occupation of the country after World War II.
Yu-Hung Hong, an editor of the Lincoln Institute’s recently released Analyzing Land Readjustment: Economics, Law, and Collective Action, admits that land readjustment is easier to perform in a rural setting but cites examples of city governments successfully pushing through such plans. He points to Hong Kong, where a law was put in place that allows land readjustment schemes to go forward even without unanimous consent, provided a certain percentage of affected landowners agree to the process. A local development group used this law for so-called “vertical land readjustment.” They demolished high-rise apartments to make way for a taller building and relocated residents of the old structure into analogous apartments in the new building—a person living in a fifth-floor apartment facing west was moved into a fifth-floor apartment facing west.
While many countries accept such innovations as a part of life, Hong—who is a fellow at the Lincoln Institute and a visiting assistant professor of urban studies and planning at MIT—doesn’t foresee the wholesale adoption of these methods in the U.S. anytime soon (despite the fact that George Washington used a variant of land readjustment to develop the nation’s capital city).
“Nobody really thinks about this method as a way of assembling land,” he says, adding that resistance to adopting foreign approaches and an unfamiliarity with the process stand in the way.
Frank Schnidman, a senior fellow at the Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions at Florida Atlantic University, has been actively involved in land readjustment plans in the United States. He attributes this resistance to bureaucratic complexity and the reluctance of banks, developers, and city planners to use this more complicated option. Schnidman contends that current corporate law makes land readjustment frameworks possible by permitting landholders to organize into trusts and limited liability partnerships; however, the political processes underlying development give more weight to builders than landowners in redevelopment projects.
Hong is heartened, however, to see that the philosophy of land readjustment has inspired parts of the United States: A new Utah law passed after Kelo v. City of New London, for instance, requires 80 percent of affected residents to approve the use of eminent domain in their neighborhoods. But for Hong, eminent domain also has its place in what he terms the “toolbox” available to city planners and developers. Land readjustment best suits projects involving a transfer of land from one private entity to another, he argues.
“It’s a matter of context,” he says.
This article appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!
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