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"Since the demise of urban renewal in the early 1970s, the politics
of large-scale public investment in and around major American
cities has received little scholarly attention. In MEGA-PROJECTS,
Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff analyze the unprecedented wave of
large-scale (mega-) public investments that occurred in American
cities during the 1950s and 1960s; the social upheavals they
triggered, which derailed large numbers of projects during the late
1960s and early 1970s; and the political impulses that have shaped
a new generation of urban mega-projects in the decades since. They
also appraise the most important consequences of policy shifts over
this half-century and draw out common themes from the rich variety
of programmatic and project developments that they chronicle. The
authors integrate narratives of national as well as state and local
policymaking, and of mobilization by (mainly local) project
advocates, with a profound examination of how well leading theories
of urban politics explain the observed realities. The specific
cases they analyze include a wide mix of transportation and
downtown revitalization projects, drawn from numerous regions-most
notably Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago,
Atlanta, Dallas, Portland, and Seattle. While their original
research focuses on highway, airport, and rail transit programs and
projects, they draw as well on the work of others to analyze the
politics of public investment in urban renewal, downtown retailing,
convention centers, and professional sports facilities. In
comparing their findings with leading theories of urban and
American politics, Altshuler and Luberoff arrive at some surprising
findings about which perform best and also reveal some important
gaps in the literature as a whole. In a concluding chapter, they
examine the potential effects of new fiscal pressures, business
mobilization to relax environmental constraints, and security
concerns in the wake of September 11. And they make clear their own
views about how best to achieve a balance between developmental,
environmental, and democratic values in public investment
decisionmaking. Integrating fifty years of urban development
history with leading theories of urban and American politics,
MEGA-PROJECTS provides significant new insights into urban and
intergovernmental politics. "
Over the past two decades Americans have become increasingly
skeptical about the benefits of community growth and hostile to new
taxes--while continuing to demand improvements in local services.
One response to this tension has been a burgeoning movement to
raise public revenue by regulating growth. In this timely book, the
authors explain that most growing localities now require private
developers to finance public improvements as a condition for
receiving permits to build. These permit conditions, known as
"exactions," are most commonly used to ensure that infrastructure
capacity will be adequate to serve the occupants of new real estate
developments and to lessen the harmful effects of these
developments on other local citizens. Exactions are often used to
finance new roads, water and waste disposal facilities, and public
open space, but some communities have begun to require developer
financing for such services as day care, job training, low-cost
housing, and ride sharing. The authors see the dramatic growth of
exaction financing as an epochal shift in the character of American
land use regulation. A function once isolated from the local
government mainstream is now close to heart of fiscal and public
works decisionmaking. Politicians find exactions an extremely
valuable tactic for resolving land use conflict. Lawyers and
developers worry about how to establish appropriate limits on the
use of exaction, economists debate their equity and efficiency, and
planners consider their effect on urban reform. Regulation for
Revenue offers an integrated appraisal of exaction financing,
showing that exactions come in many forms and that they can be
meaningfully evaluated only by comparison with realistic
alternatives. These include growth restrictions, tolerance of
infrastructure overload, and increased tax and user charges.
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