I found early reports and analyses of The Comprehensive Transportation Funding and Reform Act of 2007 to be so confusing that I assigned journalist Peter Galuszka to summarize the land use components of the bill. The thrust of his story filed today: Very few people, not even developers or local government officials, fully appreciate how disruptive to the status quo the reforms will be.
“I don’t think they completely understand the dramatic change that is going to occur in the next 10 years in Virginia,” Del. Clay Athey, R-Front Royal, a key co-author of the law, told Peter.
The “laissez-faire” era of real estate development is over, Athey declares. Instead of executing well-planned projects, he says, developers have tended to go for the cheapest land — property that was up for auction after a foreclosure or estate sale — or locate projects in counties where the supervisors had a reputation as zoning pushovers. New tools — Urban Development Areas, Urban Transportation Service Districts, impact fees, devolution of responsibility for secondary roads — will force local government to do a better job of planning.
I agree with Athey’s overall assessment, although I would quibble with his choice of the word “laissez-faire,” which implies that real estate has been a free market subject to little or no government control. In fact, real estate markets have been shaped by a host of zoning laws, subdivision ordinances, environmental regulations, comprehensive plans and government-funded funding of transportation and infrastructure improvements. It would be more proper to say that the old “quasi-free market” era in real estate is over, to be replaced by a different quasi-free market era.
Whether applying new layers of power and regulations to land use will yield results superior to those of the past, I dare not venture to predict. Concentrating growth into development districts where infrastructure can be more efficiently provided does make sense to me. But there is no escaping human perversity and the law of unintended consequences. I have a gnawing fear that the reforms will not turn out quite like Athey hopes they will.
Regardless, change is upon us.