The United States is struggling to control its sprawling land use patterns and to develop a unifying strategy of smart growth. Today there is greater popular understanding of this matter, and it is now known that land use law and practice directly address the problems associated with sprawl.
The Environmental Law Institute® has just published a new book on this subject entitled Well Grounded, Using Local Land Use Authority to Achieve Smart Growth. Written by John R. Nolon, Charles A. Frueauff Professor of Law and Director of the Land Use Law Center at Pace University School of Law, the book explores the growing interest in land use law and practice that has been stimulated by the public’s increasing disfavor with urban sprawl and its support of smart growth initiatives.
“It is a little known fact that local governments in most states hold the answer to the riddle of sprawl,” says author Nolon. “Municipal governments have been delegated significant power to control the use of private land. Through land use regulation, they dictate the pace, location, and shape of land development.”
The book places land use practice into the national perspective of sprawl and smart growth, by fully describing one of the nation’s most complete state land use regimes — the New York system. The New York system is highly textured, employing land use devices at the state, county, and local government levels, and it is typical of the approaches and techniques increasingly used in most of the other fifty states.
Land use practice is put into its historical perspective by an easy-to-read description of its evolution from 1916, when New York City adopted the nation’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance, to the present. The book covers the latest developments, including Palazzollo v. Rhode Island, the important regulatory taking case just decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The book’s glossary defines technical terms and each chapter provides basic definitions of all topics before delving into more complicated applications of them. Well Grounded is a comprehensive, easy-to-use, and practical reference for land use officials and professionals, academics, and citizens in all states.
Adds Nolon, “professionals from all walks of life are beginning to understand that it is necessary to learn what local governments around the country have been doing to control and mitigate the many negative impacts of sprawl,”
Copies of Well Grounded, Using Local Land Use Authority to Achieve Smart Growth can be ordered by calling (800) 433-5120 or by sending an email to orders@eli.org. To order this publication online, or for more information about this and other ELI publications, visit our website at http://www.eli.org.