Successful economic development needs regional land use leadership.
With job growth still slow and the real estate market struggling to recover, it is difficult to predict how and where future growth and development will occur. Dramatic changes related to demographics, the economy, and the environment are necessitating a major overhaul in what and where regions choose to build on their path to economic recovery.
Those regions with a clear plan for how they are going to grow—a plan that has broad-based support from the private, nonprofit, and public sectors—will have a key competitive advantage.
That is what a review of the annual ULI/PricewaterhouseCoopers Emerging Trends in Real Estate® cities indicates. Of the 50 U.S. cities/regions ranked in terms of investment and development prospects in the past eight Emerging Trends reports, 25 have regional land use plans and economic development strategies. These are the regions that have attracted people and jobs, which in turn have driven demand for offices, industrial space, retail space, and housing.
These regions also have a distinguishing characteristic: a coalition of politicians and residents, including ULI members, who are thinking ahead, mapping their future in terms of investing in economic assets, building supportive infrastructure, and adopting complementary land use policies and practices. These coalitions provide much needed support for local officials to work together on a regional basis to find common ground and plan for the quality of life and place that attracts new employers and residents to metropolitan areas.
“Communities able to make land use decisions in rapid, responsible, and strategic ways will attract investment,” says Maureen McAvey, ULI executive vice president, initiatives. “Those bogged down in small-unit bickering will simply be passed over.”
The challenge of multijurisdictional cooperation—and, therefore, the need for regional leadership— lies in the fact that land use decisions and capital improvement budgets remain the purview of local governments. Local officials are accustomed to looking out for their constituents, often failing to recognize that continuing to compete for jobs and resources with other municipalities within their region ultimately will weaken the entire region and accelerate their own local decline. “Personal leadership will be necessary, but the new yardstick will be the ability to create multijurisdictional, multidisciplinary, sustained teams that endure and adapt over time,” says McAvey.
ULI members have been on the leading edge of the effort to “think regionally, act locally,” providing leadership in ten of the 25 top cities identified by Emerging Trends. Two tools, regional visioning and multistakeholder alliances, have been useful. “We want our region to have a competitive advantage,” says John Walsh, former chair of ULI North Texas. “ULI North Texas has taken a lead on regionalism, starting with Reality Check in 2005 and serving as a major sponsor of Vision North Texas,” an alliance of public, private, and nonprofit entities that just concluded a five-year effort to identify a preferred scenario of regional growth. “Real estate development that follows the [Vision North Texas 2050] vision is critical if we want to leave a sustainable future for our children and grandchildren,” notes Walsh.
Reality Check is an innovative, educational visioning tool offered by ULI district councils to facilitate consensus among diverse stakeholders about how their region can accommodate future growth. Often these stakeholders brought together by a Reality Check exercise decide to create a formal alliance to continue and expand upon their efforts. Both regional visioning and multistakeholder alliances have provided excellent vehicles for ULI leadership. While some communities have yet to see definitive results, each has demonstrated the willingness to bring all stakeholders together to envision the future.
As reported in the 2010 ULI report “Moving the Needle: Regional Coalitions as Catalysts for Sustainable Development,” ULI leaders in regional visioning exercises and multistakeholder alliances have learned many lessons.
One lesson is that large-scale visioning exercises can reveal a broad base of support for elected officials to make local land use decisions that are in the best interests of the region’s long-term economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Initiatives like those in North Texas, the Phoenix region, and the North Carolina Triangle region have engaged 200 to 400 civic leaders in well-publicized Reality Check exercises and demonstrated broad-based support for elected officials who support regional action.
To date, ten district councils have used Reality Check exercises as a way to draw attention to the need for a regional plan. In each case, the exercise demonstrated that the region’s stakeholders—elected officials, business leaders, academicians, representatives of environmental organizations, or other civic leaders—share many values and goals. Ultimately, they all want to maintain and improve the region’s quality of life, jobs, and housing. And they are beginning to understand that sustainability is as much about creating more walkable, compact, mixed-use centers connected by multimodal transportation corridors as it is about preserving open space.
Another lesson is that alliances can establish and conduct regional forums and other types of gatherings at which local elected officials can come together to address regional issues associated with growth and development—and at which these leaders can figure out how to align their local land use policies with agreed-upon regional strategies.
Minnesota’s Regional Council of Mayors and central Florida’s Congress of Regional Leaders both provide “civic infrastructure” that enables local elected officials to examine regional solutions to housing, transportation, and environmental challenges. Both of these nongovernmental, voluntary associations of local elected officials have endorsed a set of basic principles, agreed on a set of regional issues to address, analyzed solutions from a regional perspective, and agreed to modify local ordinances and budgets to implement regional solutions. As Shelley Lauten of ULI Central Florida, president of Myregion.org, says, “There is no regional governance structure [for regional decision making] in place; the Congress [of Regional Leaders]provides central Florida with a new approach to regional problem solving.” Elected officials value these nonpartisan, multijurisdictional forums and rely on them as a way to educate themselves and their constituents about regional issues and solutions.
A third lesson is that alliances must represent a wide range of stakeholders in order to maintain their credibility with elected officials and others in the region. Yet keeping a coalition of diverse interests together and focused on common goals can be difficult.
Successful alliances suggest two pieces of advice. First, alliances must be sure to include the private sector. Any long-term regional plan requires buy-in from business leaders and the real estate development community, and they will be more likely to do so if they are involved from the start. Second, alliances must strive to hold diverse interests together by focusing on shared values and long-term objectives. One way to do this is to craft a program of work, roles, and responsibilities for each alliance member that makes the most of its unique capacities and capabilities. The Washington Smart Growth Alliance in Washington, D.C., and the Quality Growth Alliance in Seattle offer two excellent examples of how to find—and maintain—common ground. “Diplomacy is critical,” says ULI Seattle executive director Kelly Mann. “Building relationships between the individual members of partner organizations is extremely important.”
Also, alliances become even more effective players when they undertake robust analyses comparing the impact of existing conditions and alternative land use visions on agreed-upon sustainability goals. Many coalitions have accomplished this objective, at minimal cost, by including regional councils of government among their members. Vision North Texas and Moving AZ One have benefited from the research capabilities and modeling resources provided by theNorth Central Texas Council of Governments and the Maricopa Association of Governments, respectively.
Finally, follow-up is extremely important. Smart growth alliances (SGAs) must identify ways to keep the momentum going after a visioning exercise or other initial effort. Many regions will continue to grow indefinitely, and SGAs have the capability to keep a region focused on progress toward a long-term vision. Some, like Vision North Texas and Myregion.org, hold summits to keep stakeholders involved and publish reports like “North Texas 2050” and “How Shall We Grow? A Shared Vision for Central Florida,” which describe agreed-upon goals and identify the tools and techniques needed to achieve them. Other follow-up opportunities include:
- technical assistance;
- grants to support research and planning efforts; and
- dissemination of best practices.
“Our industry is so closely tied to jobs and economic development,” says Burrell Saunders, vice chair for mission advancement of ULI Hampton Roads, which is planning to hold a Reality Check program in 2012. “We need the vision for how to pull land use plans, infrastructure investments, and economic development strategies together and keep our region competitive in the global marketplace.” ULI members can provide the tools and leadership. The bottom line: consider it a red flag if great public and resident leadership is not actively engaged in setting the course for how your region is planning to grow. Other things being equal, bet on great leadership.
