The Analysis Of Land Value Trends And Their Implications For Development

The aim of this book is to bring methods of land-market and land-price analysis to the foreground. It relates substantive research findings for land and urban development and blends these with a focus on research design and methodology. Its findings have relevance beyond the topics of housing and land: it broaches the whole question of how research design and general approach may lead to fundamentally different findings, different priorities, and different policy prescriptions and preoccupations. It is based on work done in the Third World, but is also relevant to studies of the industrialized world.

The book draws together the economic literature relating to the supply of land for development. The standard view appears to be that the owners of land have no interest other than to allow their land to be used for the activity which would yield the highest income. But in reality this is not so and the book's aim is to demonstrate this, to set out the reasons and to show the economic effects of the fact that landowners have other motives. The book covers the supply of land for urban development and shows how land has characteristics which differentiate it from other factors of production which will also affect its supply for some uses, e.g. land is fixed in location and its price and value are inseparable from where it is. New light is cast on the market for land (by concentrating on the supply side), and on land use planning (by taking an economic viewpoint).

'Principles of City Land Values' is a study book on the valuation of land and buildings in the American real estate market. When placed in charge of the Mortgage Department of the U. S. Mortgage & Trust Co. in 1895, the writer, Richard M. Hurd, searched in vain, both in England and this country, for books on the science of city real estate as an aid in judging values. Finding in economic books merely brief references to city land and elsewhere only fragmentary articles, the plan arose to outline the theory of the structure of cities and to state the average scales of land values produced by different utilities within them. The material for this study of the structure of cities - including their locations, starting points and lines of growth - has been gathered from a large number of local histories of American cities, old maps, commercial geographies, etc.

The region surrounding Burlington, Vermont is in the midst of sparse, decentralized growth which threatens the sense of place from which it has thrived. Many have argued that such development tendencies result from a disconnect between land use incentives at the individual level and the fruits of compact settlement, which materialize at larger scales. Two overarching problems are understood to contribute to this disconnect; the ability to privately appropriate the collectively-created value of land, and the inability to recognize ecological opportunity costs of natural land conversion in land use decisions. One proposed solution is the Land Value Tax (LVT). By raising the cost of holding urban land idle and lowering the cost of development, LVT has been shown to increase housing supply and density within existing urban boundaries as well as decrease housing prices. However, despite its purported benefits, the tax reform is value monistic in its definition of optimal land use and therefore does little to address the second overarching problem. This research sought to explore the efficacy of a conventional and expanded land value taxation scheme to address both aforementioned problems that contribute to urban sprawl. In article 1, we used a top-down empirical approach via a spatial probit model and a random forest classifier model to understand recent housing development choices across Chittenden County, Vermont as they relate to various parcel and locational characteristics. We then used developers' revealed behaviors to forecast future development given various LVT schemes. Results suggest a trend toward suburban sprawl, with developers favoring locations with higher car dependence and commute times as well as locations closer to farmland. A parcel's LVT burden yielded a significant, positive effect on development likelihood such that a one unit increase in log-transformed LVT per acre (a $933 increase for the average parcel) is associated with an 11.7% higher development likelihood. However, predicted development under a higher LVT was not found to support suburban sprawl remediation as hypothesized. In article 2, we utilized a bottom-up theoretical approach via a spatially-explicit agent-based model of land-use behaviors to explore the impact of a conventional and expanded LVT scheme that internalizes the ecological impact of land use change into a parcel's tax burden. Findings suggest that both LVT schemes can increase housing availability and urban infill while mediating the negative effects of land speculation. Furthermore, the expanded land value taxation scheme encouraged more urban density and ecosystem service preservation.

U.S. land and real estate markets went on a roller coaster ride in the 1980s and early 1990s. The combination of economic growth, demographic change, and federal tax and banking policies that stimulated this boom-bust cycle affected regional economic performance, the affordability of housing, and local governments' fiscal health. This report discusses whether and how local government should attempt to mitigate the effects of such cycles and examines a range of available land and tax policy tools.