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From Middle to Upper Class Sprawl? Land Use Controls and Changing Patterns of Real Estate Development in Northern New Jersey

2011; American Association of Geographers; Volume: 101; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00045608.2011.560062

1467-8306

Thomas K. Rudel, Karen M. O’Neill, Paul Gottlieb, Melanie McDermott, Colleen A. Hatfield,

Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

Abstract During the past twenty-five years the land use controls that shape residential real estate development in the United States have changed in potentially significant ways. From the 1950s to the 1980s, land use laws promoted middle-class sprawl by reserving extensive tracts of land for the construction of moderately priced, single-family homes on lots of less than one acre. More recently, suburbs have adopted land use controls that promote upper class sprawl by reserving large areas for the construction of small numbers of expensive homes on spacious lots. This regulatory shift can be explained in several ways: a homevoter hypothesis that derives the new controls from the economic interests of suburban homeowners and a regional spillover hypothesis that attributes the adoption of new controls to desires by planning commissioners, consultants, and nongovernmental organizations to do as other communities are doing. We assess these explanations through a case study of changing land use controls in the suburban New Jersey Highlands west of New York City. Between 1975 and 2002 the region saw large increases in preserved open space, a doubling of the required minimum lot area for houses, increases in the real price of housing, declines in the number of newly constructed homes, and a shift in residential real estate development toward the urban core. Multivariate analyses of the changes in land use controls support the regional spillover hypothesis. The implications of this dynamic for conservation policies, environmental injustices, and greenhouse gas emissions are briefly explored. Durante los pasados veinticinco años los controles de uso del suelo que configuran el desarrollo de la propiedad raíz residencial de los Estados Unidos se han transformado de maneras potencialmente significativas. De los años 1950 a los 1980, las leyes de uso del suelo promovieron un desparramamiento de la clase media al reservar extensiones de tierra muy grandes para la construcción de casas unifamiliares de precio moderado sobre lotes de menos de un acre. En tiempo más reciente, los suburbios han adoptados controles de uso del suelo que promueven una dispersión similar de clase alta al reservar grandes áreas para la construcción de un número pequeño de casas lujosas en lotes espaciosos. Este cambio regulatorio puede explicarse de varias maneras: una hipótesis del votante de hogar que deriva los nuevos controles de los intereses económicos de propietarios de casas suburbanas, y una hipótesis de excedentes regionales que atribuye la adopción de nuevos controles a los caprichos de los comisionados de planificación, consultores y organizaciones no gubernamentales por imitar lo que otras comunidades están haciendo. Evaluamos estas explicaciones por medio de un estudio de casos de cambio de los controles de uso del suelo en el suburbio de las Highlands de Nueva Jersey, al oeste de la ciudad de Nueva York. Entre 1975 y 2002 la región experimentó grandes incrementos de espacio abierto preservado, el doble del mínimo requerido para el área del lote para casas, aumentos en el precio real para vivienda, declinación en el número de nuevas casas construidas y un cambio en el desarrollo de la finca raíz residencial hacia el centro urbano. Los análisis multivariados de los cambios en los controles de uso del suelo apoyan la hipótesis de los excedentes regionales. Se exploran brevemente las implicaciones de esta dinámica en las políticas de conservación, injusticias ambientales y emisiones de gases de invernadero. Key Words: down zoningland use controlsopen spacesprawl关键词: 降低用途地带区划土地用途管制开放空间扩张Palabras clave: re-zonificacióncontroles de uso del sueloespacio abiertodesparramamiento urbano Acknowledgments This research was conducted under National Science Foundation Grant No. SES 0523309. We deeply appreciate the agency's support for this research. We would also like to thank the many citizens and municipal employees who aided us during the collection of the field data. The authors benefited greatly from comments made during presentations of this article at Columbia University, the University of North Carolina, Rutgers University, and SUNY—Environmental Science and Forestry. The anonymous reviewers for the Annals and the editor made a series of comments that significantly strengthened the article. Finally, we would like to thank Vanessa Beuschel Boulier, Caroline Phillipuk, Karen Stein, and Peter Vancura for indispensable research assistance on this project. Notes 1. This definition of upper class sprawl focuses on residential rather than commercial land uses because there does not appear to be a distinct pattern of upper class commercial sprawl. 2. The size of building lots that would distinguish between upper and middle-class sprawl will vary across housing markets with the price of land. 3. The dates of the sources for the 1970s land use data, usually municipal zoning maps, varied from municipality to municipality. For that reason we refer to the initial date of observation for the open space and required minimum lot area variables as the 1970s. 4. The categorization of open space preservation by decade in Figure 2 raises questions about the history of the preservation efforts. These efforts begin with waves of real estate development, but subsequent, sometimes lengthy legal proceedings over proposed land uses make it difficult to predict when the land will become preserved open space. 5. To calculate a region-wide change in minimum lot area, we computed a region-wide average for each year, weighting the required lot areas by the size of the community, so the required lot areas for the larger townships counted more than the required lot areas for the smaller boroughs. 6. We calculated these rates using a gross domestic product price deflator. 7. The models in Table 3 were also run using ordinary least squares (OLS) techniques. Substantively, there were no significant differences between the OLS and spatial lag results. 8. To reduce the influence of sharp annual fluctuations in housing market conditions, we aggregated the building unit data over two-year periods: 1994–1995, 2001–2002, and 2006–2007. The core includes three counties—Essex, Hudson, and Union—plus the southern municipalities in Bergen County. The remainder of Bergen County, Passaic County, Morris County, Somerset County, Hunterdon County, and Middlesex County constitute the suburban region. Warren and Sussex counties represent the rural–urban fringe region. With the exception of Bergen County, which we split into an urban core and an outlying suburban district, we have used county lines to delineate the different housing markets. Although this procedure has a coarse-grained quality, it accords with the history of real estate development in northern New Jersey, with the core being developed before World War II, the suburban belt between 1950 and 1990, and the rural–urban fringe after 1990. It also facilitates the comparison of the large-scale housing markets depicted in Figure 4. Data sources were the U.S. Census (http://censtats.census.gov/cgi-bin/)and http://www.wnjpin.net/OneStopCareerCenter/LaborMarketInformation/lmi18/hist/bpann94.htm, ac- cessed in 2008 and 2009. 9. Although it is important to note that upper class sprawl does nothing to provide affordable housing, it should also be noted that the earlier period of middle-class sprawl provided affordable housing only through processes of residential turnover in the urban core communities in which middle-class homeowners sold sometimes dilapidated structures to landlords who rented these units to the poor (CitationBurchell et al. 2005).