A Guide to Impact Fees and Housing Affordability
A Guide to Impact Fees and Housing Affordability

Author: Arthur C. Nelson

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2012-06-22

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1610910842

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Impact fees are one-time charges that are applied to new residential developments by local governments that are seeking funds to pay for the construction or expansion of public facilities, such as water and sewer systems, schools, libraries, and parks and recreation facilities. In the face of taxpayer revolts against increases in property taxes, impact fees are used increasingly by local governments throughout the U.S. to finance construction or improvement of their infrastructure. Recent estimates suggest that 60 percent of all American cities with over 25,000 residents use some form of impact fees. In California, it is estimated that 90 percent of such cities impose impact fees. For more than thirty years, impact fees have been calculated based on proportionate share of the cost of the infrastructure improvements that are to be funded by the fees. However, neither laws nor courts have ensured that fees charged to new homes are themselves proportionate. For example, the impact fee may be the same for every home in a new development, even when homes vary widely in size and selling price. Data show, however, that smaller and less costly homes have fewer people living in them and thus less impact on facilities than larger homes. This use of a flat impact fee for all residential units disproportionately affects lower-income residents. The purpose of this guidebook is to help practitioners design impact fees that are equitable. It demonstrates exactly how a fair impact fee program can be designed and implemented. In addition, it includes information on the history of impact fees, discusses alternatives to impact fees, and summarizes state legislation that can infl uence the design of local fee programs. Case studies provide useful illustrations of successful programs. This book should be the first place that planning professionals, public officials, land use lawyers, developers, homebuilders, and citizen activists turn for help in crafting (or recrafting) proportionate-share impact fee programs.

Out of Place
Out of Place

Author: Talmadge Wright

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9780791433690

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Discusses the impact of inner city redevelopment programs and policies on the homeless and shows the methods used (civil protests, squatting, and legal advocacy) by the homeless to organize a tactical resistance to restructuring efforts. Presents case studies of two different types of homeless organized resistance groups in Chicago and San Jose.

Planner's Estimating Guide
Planner's Estimating Guide

Author: Arthur Nelson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-01-03

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 1351177796

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The United States faces enormous changes in the next 25 years. Arthur C. (Chris) Nelson starts this book with a few projections: The population will grow by one-third to 375 million. We will need 60 million new housing units to house these people. There will be 60 percent more jobs, requiring 50 billion additional square feet of nonresidential space. The bottom line is that half of all development in 2030 will have been built since 2000. Nelson estimates the cost of new construction alone to be at least $20 trillion. This book gives planning practitioners a powerful tool to help decide where to put this new development. It does not advocate one development scenario over another, but it revolutionizes the job of estimating land-use and facility needs. Planner's Estimating Guide offers easy-to-use formulas and worksheets that are formatted in an Excel workbook on CD-ROM and carefully explained in the text. They make it easy to figure future requirements for countless scenarios. The workbook and text deal with a 20-year planning horizon for a fictitious county, but both the time projection and scale are entirely adaptable to myriad local circumstances. The program allows you to gather a first impression of future land-use needs, and revise it to reflect local limitations. For example, if the landscape in question won't support the land-use estimations, change the assumptions in the workbook to devise new estimates. The workbook shows the implications of growth based on standard assumptions; you can change the assumptions as needed to reflect local conditions — including public input — to see how outcomes change. Use the workbook as a model for testing local sensitivities with respect to land supply constraints and changes in policy assumptions. The results won't tell you what to do, but will reveal the numerical implications of different scenarios. The book is written principally for practitioners, and also for planning students as a primary or supplementary text. Used creatively, the powerful tools in Planner's Estimating Guide will help you determine the numerical implications of an almost infinite number of future circumstances that may affect your community.