As population and human aspirations increase, land becomes an increasingly scarce resource, calling for land-use planning. Land-use planning is important to mitigate the negative effects of land use. (anitpromoters.com)

How Land-Use Planning Benefits Big Business over Small

It is widely recognized that central-government attempts to completely plan economies are destined to fail. But even lower levels of government can have debilitating impacts on an economy by undermining private property rights through planning and regulation.

The planners’ knowledge deficiencies, however, are not the only reason that planning is destined to fail. Planning and regulation are inevitably destabilizing because the government’s rules continuously change in the face of a spiraling process of competition to influence the allocation of property “rights.” Consider an example.

The Oregon legislature created a new state agency in 1973, the Department of Land Conservation and Development, headed by the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC). This department was vested with the power to establish statewide land-use policy and established 19 goals over a three-year period. establishment of urban-growth boundaries, preservation of farm lands, and preservation of forest lands. All local governments were ordered to develop comprehensive land-use plans, to be approved by the LCDC, that implemented the statewide policy goals.

Regulation Is Destabilizing

The primary reason for the destabilizing impact of planning is that regulation to implement the plans involves the assignment of property “rights” and enforcement of those assignments. Property rights dictate the distribution of both material and nonmaterial wealth. Therefore, whenever regulation alters the assignment of property rights, some individuals lose; wealth is in fact taken.

One of thousands of examples from Oregon involves a 40-acre parcel of land zoned for forest use in Hood River County. When the owners purchased the land in 1983 for $33,000, the applicable land-use regulations allowed construction of a single-family dwelling. Following the purchase, Hood River County adopted new regulations to bring its comprehensive plan into compliance with statewide goals. Construction of a dwelling on the property was now prohibited. The Oregon Supreme Court ruled for the county because the regulation did not result in loss of all economic benefits from using the property. In particular, the court noted that the ability to generate $10,000 in revenues from the timber on the land “certainly constitutes some substantial beneficial use.” The implication is that if the regulation allows some beneficial use of the land, the owner has not been deprived of his property.

Levels and Process.

Planning can be at various levels: local, town, district, state, regional, national, and international. A two-way link between these levels is important for successful planning. A "bottom-up" type of planning starts at the local level and links to the next higher level with active local participation. Local acceptability of the plan is a critical element of a successful plan.

A typical planning process involves the following steps:

• Establishing goals and a baseline;
• Inventorying and organizing resources;
• Analyzing problems;
• Establishing priorities and alternatives;
• Checking for land suitability;
• Evaluating alternatives and choosing the best option;
• Developing a land-use plan;
• Consulting and implementing the plan; and
• Revisingthe plan.

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