How do we know whether development pays for itself?

Local governments across the country have come under increasing fiscal strain in recent years, with several being forced to declare bankruptcy.  The problems range from pension programs and decaying infrastructure to falling revenues from industrial and sales taxes as manufacturing gets offshored and shopping happens online.  In Virginia, cities are further constrained by annexation laws that prevent them from expanding with their metropolitan area and gaining revenue from greenfield development or wealthier suburbs.

Meanwhile, the high mobility of Americans and increasing specialization of metro areas and cities have forced localities to behave like competitors in a market for residents and businesses, rather than as simple political entities administering a group of people.  This makes it more important than ever for localities to understand which investments and spatial configurations create value and which don’t.  The immediate problem is that we lack good ways of approaching the question.

Property value per acre is a good start on the revenue side.  Not only is it influenced by different types of public investments that people want to be near, it’s also heavily influenced by local land use law – namely, how many people are allowed to live on a piece of land.  The assessed value, which is mapped here, determines how much revenue the locality generates via property tax.  That’s important because many of the costs cities have to bear are determined primarily by the amount of land they have to cover (see chart below).  That means that if land is not generating enough tax value per acre, some municipal services will be subsidized by other neighborhoods.  Others will simply have to be less comprehensive.  For instance, fire department and emergency response times are much longer in low-density areas, simply because people are farther away from stations.

Per Capita Expenditures (vary primarily by number of peopled that must be served)		Per Area Expenditures (vary primarily by amount of area that must be serviced)
Schools Judicial systems Health Community Development		Fire Sewage Other utilities Stormwater Management Sidewalks Streetlights Roads Public Transportation School buses

Home Construction: Running to Stand Still

New home construction rose over 23 percent in Virginia between 2012 and 2013, according to building permit data collected by the Census Bureau and the Weldon Cooper Center. In suburban counties, the number of new homes built during the past year increased much more than in urban localities, but construction levels still remain a fraction of those seen during the early 2000s housing boom.

 Homes Built Annually in the Mid Atlantic

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Click on arrows at bottom of slideshow to scroll through years

Predicting Sprawl

The Weldon Cooper Center, under contract with the Virginia Employment Commission (VEC), developed and released in 2012 the most recent round of official state population projections for Virginia.  These projections, consistent with others commissioned or developed in the past by the VEC, focus primarily on trends in the number of people currently living in Virginia and expected to live in Virginia ten, twenty, and thirty years from now

It’s one thing to think about growth in terms of numbers of people, but another to think about it in spatial terms – as the growth of physical urbanized areas.  For a while now, I’ve been working on a GIS model that will do that.  I’ve posted it before on my own blog, but since then I’ve cleaned it up and made it follow our regional population projections more rigidly.

Today

Here’s a land cover raster (an image showing what primarily covers each 15Mx15M square of land) of Virginia in 2006.  All developed land is in red.  It’s a great image of the shape of our metro areas.

25 Years From Now

Here is a map of what that might look like in 2040 if:

Changes in Family Net Worth, 2001-2010

The recently released 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances data from the Federal Reserve Board has quantified what we knew to be true in the post-recession years: wealth levels have dropped, dramatically. The story of the average American family, however, like all averages, hides substantial variation in experiences. When we examine trends in net worth (total assets minus total debts) between 2001-2010 by family position in the income distribution, three different stories emerge.