 So this is our panel number two, Zoning in Situ, Enforcement and Circumventions. For this panel, I'd like to invite Professor Wei Ping Wu to introduce the panelists and to lead the panel discussion. Thank you, Deepa. Again, welcome to GSAP, welcome to the Urban Planning Program. We had a fabulous morning, and we hope to deliver the same excitement in the afternoon. And so as Deepa said, we have four panelists who are going to be speaking about zoning in Situ, Enforcement and Circumventions. And I will just introduce the speakers really quickly, and then each of them will have 10 minutes. Then we'll all sit down here. I think we'll make a little bit of a change that will take questions directly. We'll have a more lively floor discussion. So the first speaker will be Sai Balakrishnan. Slaughtering your name, sorry. Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. And our second speaker will be Professor Paul Lakunis, Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs here at the School of International and Public Affairs, SIPA at Columbia. And our third speaker comes out of the way from Chicago, Rachel Webber, Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Urban Planning and Policy Department, as well as faculty fellow at the Great Cities Institute. And she's currently on SIPAC, I believe, at the University of Barcelona. And our fourth speaker will be Rafael Fischler. We heard you speaking last night. Associate Professor of Urban Planning and former director of the School of Urban Planning and Margiel in Montreal. So welcome. Thanks so much to GSAP for the invitation. It's really a privilege to be part of a panel that has a lineup of scholars whose works I've read and been deeply influenced by. So I'm going to talk about the politics of zoning and more broadly, land use regulations across the urban rural divide in India's mega regions. And I want to start with this map of the South Indian city of Bangalore. And Bangalore has seemingly nonsensical territorial boundaries. So the territorial boundary, Bangalore municipality is in orange. And the white is agricultural land. And you see that there are vast swaths of agricultural land within Bangalore city limits. And the biggest engine of economic growth, the information technology or the IT cluster called the electronic city, is located outside the city limits. And that's the protrusion that you see to the southeast. So this is the master plan of Bangalore, which essentially is a zoning plan. And you see that for all its detailed intricacies, the master plan is unable to govern the land use regulations of its largest urban economic cluster. Now, Bangalore is not unique in having these nonsensical territorial boundaries. These are maps of Delhi, Chennai, Chandigarh. And you see this pattern repeating itself of territorial boundaries that do not match urban economic activity, which then affects what city governments can do in regulating the land use of these firms. Now, some would argue that what we're seeing in Bangalore is tibu sorting, that private actors vote with their feet, and they locate in jurisdictions with a combination of public goods best suited to their preferences. Critical scholars like Iwa Ong would disagree. To Ong, the economic clusters outside the city represent zones of exception in a neoliberal age where the state creates variegated zones of sovereignty with rules and regulations that are most favorable to transnational corporations. And then there may be others like the LA School of Urbanism who draw a parallel between Bangalore and other forms of regional urbanism in other parts of the world, like LA, which like Bangalore is jurisdictionally fragmented to an extreme degree. Now, what tibu Ong and the LA School point us to, even though they come from very, very different political orientations, is that we cannot understand zoning or move broadly land use regulatory regimes by looking only at the territorial boundaries of a single jurisdiction of a single local government. Tibu sorting, zones of exception and the LA School of Urbanism are possible only because the same region has a patchwork of land use regulatory regimes. And what I want to demonstrate through the Bangalore case is who benefits from this regulatory patchwork. Now, these are images of electronic city, the IT Economic Hub. And electronic city is made up of some 300 firms, some of them the biggest, richest, and most influential IT firms in India. And the built environment is influenced by Western norms and brands, the industrial enclave of Silicon Valley, a gated community called Hyde Park and Domino's Pizza. Now, over the past decade, electronic city has been embroiled in jurisdictional turf wars. These 300 firms have formed their own business association, El Sita. The El Sita jurisdiction enjoys a higher FSI than the rest of Bangalore, but most importantly, El Sita charges a maintenance fee to the firms for solid waste, e-waste street lights, and other essential services that have traditionally been provided by local governments. Electronic city is also located within the jurisdictional boundaries of two rural local governments, or village panchayats, as they're called in India, and El Sita pays these rural local governments property taxes. Now, property taxes for rural local governments is significantly lower than for urban local governments, and so this fiscal arrangement works well for El Sita. Bangalore municipality, on the other hand, has been trying to include electronic city within its jurisdictional boundaries for the past 10 years. Now, Bangalore municipality is in dire fiscal crisis. If you look at the city budget from 2007 to the present, nearly 60% of the city budget still comes from state government grants, and property taxes make up less than 15% of the city budget. Now, if electronic city is included within Bangalore's municipal boundaries, property taxes from these 300 firms would increase the city's budget by nearly 20% of its current budget. El Sita is strongly opposed to this incorporation for fiscal reasons, and as of now, it remains outside the city limits. Now, El Sita may provide services within its boundaries, but for networked infrastructure like water, these resources still have to come from somewhere outside the boundary. And this is a map of Bangalore's formal water utility, which supplies water to the area within the Bangalore municipal boundaries. Now, the urban areas left out by the formal water utility are serviced by informal water providers. These bright, colorful water tankers are ubiquitous site in Bangalore, and these water tankers, unregulated and informal, have stepped in as a market response as the only source of water to the urban areas outside city limits. Now, where do these water tankers get their water from? This is a map of groundwater depletion in the Bangalore region, and there's a clear pattern that you see here. There's been a precipitous drop in groundwater in the urban area that's outside the city limits, that's not serviced by the formal water utility, and where the water tankers are most rampant. Now, to keep their businesses profitable, tankers rarely distribute water beyond a radius of a four kilometer radius to keep their transportation costs low, and there's a heavy concentration of water tankers in the urban periphery, and these water tanker companies are digging deeper and deeper to tap into ever-receding groundwater levels. But on the other hand, the groundwater table is quite high. It's higher than two meters within the city limit, and in fact, the water table has been rising within Bangalore's municipal boundary. This is because there's hardly any groundwater extraction here, and also quite perversely, there's leakage from the formal utility pipes, which is helping to recharge the groundwater, right? But the point here is, there's a grave environmental challenge here of a depleting public resource groundwater, and the cause of this depletion is not the informal, unregulated water tankers. It's the locational decision of formal sector firms, in this case, formal sector IT firms. And this gets me to the central point for this conference, that these firms are dodging zoning and more broadly, land use regulations. Now, if we look at the provenance of zoning laws here in New York, there is a dark side to zoning, which was evident in this morning's panel, right? New York's 1916 zoning plan was partly motivated by Fifth Avenue detail merchants who wanted to keep immigrant workers out of the commercial district. But there is also an extremely progressive side to zoning, where zoning, for the first time, allowed for state regulation of private capital. And what we see in Bangalore is an undermining of the state's regulatory authority over private development, where firms can shop for a location that gives them the benefits of urban agglomeration without paying for the full costs of these urban benefits. And of course, the ideal location for firms is this gray zone just outside city limits, whose land use is governed as rural, but for all practical purposes, for all practical and economic purposes, is an urban land market. Now, I want to make an analogy here, which requires a bit of the stretching of the imagination, but which I hope will help to clarify the new state market relationship that we're seeing in India's mega regions. And the analogy is to say that the IT firms are engaging in jurisdictional arbitrage. And the most extreme form of jurisdictional arbitrage is the rise of offshore companies, which have come into sharp public focus recently with the Panama Papers. Now, offshore companies make profits from the differences in the laws of different jurisdictions. A price differential arises because the same commodity or investment is regulated by different jurisdictional regimes. Bangalore's IT firms are also engaging in jurisdictional arbitrage. They're making use of different land use regulatory regimes for urban and rural jurisdictions to generate profits for themselves. And just as offshore companies raise the really big urgent governance question of how transnational corporations can be brought within the regulatory reach of the nation state, as urban planners, we face equally urgent challenges of how newly powerful firms like the IT firms in Bangalore can be brought within the regulatory authority or rather brought back within the regulatory authority of democratically elected local governments. Thank you. Well, I too would like to thank G-SAP and the organizers for this exceptional conference. By way of background, I'm a political scientist by training. My research is on corruption as it affects cities in the Americas. I've looked at corruption in leasing, property taxation, urban planning, and my presentation today is precisely on urban planning. It focuses on my work in my field research in Mexico City. On July of 2000, after seven decades of uninterrupted rule, the political party known as the PRI lost control of the presidency. This dramatic power shift was achieved to the ballot box and was largely motivated by the public's perception that the PRI was corrupt. At the time, while the era of single party dominance was coming to an end, many of us wondered whether corruption would also be eradicated or at the very least reduced. However, according to survey data and expert analysis, that has not been the case. What's worse, the same disappointing dynamic that exists at the national level is present at the local level. And the case of the Miguel Hidalgo District in Mexico City serves as an illuminating example of this problem. The Miguel Hidalgo Bureau is one of Mexico's most important urban centers. It houses the president's office, houses over 70 of the foreign embassies in the country. It generates 5% of the country's GDP. And it also is home to Orlanco. Orlanco is to Mexico City where Lincoln Park is to Chicago, Georgetown to DC, Notting Hill to London, Leblanc to Rio de Janeiro and Recoleta to Buenos Aires. In terms of its history, Orlanco first belonged to an Aztec princess by the name of Tequichpo. Before it became a colonial hacienda known as San Juan de Dios de los Morales. Then after many years in 1938, urban planners were encouraged by the city's growth to erect a housing development in that area. Toward the end of the 1950s, some houses were replaced with stores and office buildings. And it's at this point that the neighborhood began its slow drift away from being strictly residential. The shift was accelerated after the massive earthquake that struck Mexico City in 1985. And so began the struggle between slow growth coalitions of concerned neighbors and real estate developers aiming to capitalize on the demand for high-end housing. As tensions escalated in 1992, the city passed a specific building code for the neighborhood. The new set of regulations were meant to protect Orlanco from sudden and drastic zoning changes that encouraged property speculation, changes to the area's appearance, corruption and other hazards. However, according to Jorge Gamboa de Buen, Mexico City's foreign building secretary, the reason he sought to pass the building code was plainly to generate a development boom in Orlanco. Gamboa de Buen is both an expert on and a major player in Mexico City's real estate market. Currently, he is the general manager of Grupo Danos, a real estate firm. During our conversation, Gamboa de Buen said that he missed the age when the pre-dominated politics in Mexico for, quote, decision-making was centralized and simpler, end quote. He was also candid about the strategy he applied to pass Orlanco's building code. For instance, he explained how he made it a point to organize the public meetings with neighbor residents at night so that attendees would cut the proceeding short in light of having to work the next day. Gamboa de Buen also made a point to give residents attending those gatherings an opportunity to express themselves. The goal behind this tactic was not so much to listen what the neighbors had to say, but instead to give them, quote, cathartic relief, end quote. Next, Gamboa de Buen pit residents against each other by pointing out the manner in which their interests differed. He openly discussed the way he would treat specific neighbors to a meal or tickets to a show as means to win them over. Finally, some say Gamboa de Buen also leans heavily on those who oppose his plans. But returning to the case at hand, when Orlanco's building code was finally approved, those who wanted to protect the neighborhood from intense and disorderly growth were encouraged to see the falling line was included in the text. That's the first point. This agreement is motivated by the desire to achieve certain social benefits such as preventing the construction or expansion of buildings without adherence to specific rules that guarantee the proper urban planning. Orlanco's building code also contains regulations that govern the height of buildings on the new neighborhood street of Arquímedes. And this part gets a bit technical, so bear with me. The building code reads as follows. Quote, buildings on the lots greater than 500 square meters or 1600 square feet can go as high as 12 stories. Importantly, the article in the building code does not state what the height limit of Arquímedes that are smaller than 500 square meters. This lack of specificity I would argue is surprising considering that that same planning code is very precise for other streets a couple blocks away. So for example, the street of Rubén Darío, just one block away from Arquímedes has a specifically three story height limit for lots smaller than 500 square meters. Now to be fair, who's is to the height limits for buildings on Arquímedes are found elsewhere on the bylaws. Page 37 of the building code reads as follows. Quote, the maximum height of any construction is indicated in Borlanco zoning map. End quote. In the case of Arquímedes, the zoning map, which you can see top left, top of your left. The number, the zoning map shows several city blocks labeled with the number 36. This indicates that no matter the property size, buildings can potentially climb up to 36 meters or it's equivalent of 12 stories. This information however does not end the controversy. The limits set by the zoning map for the street of Arquímedes are unusually high for Borlanco. It is also true that the map itself is not wholly reliable as a legal standard. The height limits shown on the map often vary quite a bit from block to block. Moreover, I was able to detect at least one building that is in violation of the height limits set by this map. Thus Borlanco's building code and its accompanying zoning map are flawed instrument. Rather than encouraging orderly development, they fuel controversy. Thus the remaining question is whether elected and non-elected authorities decided with residents or with developers in the disputes that ensued. The answer is that starting in 2004, officials in Miguel Hidalgo granted developers the permission to erect 11 and 12 story apartment buildings on Arquímedes. They even granted these permits for lots smaller than the 500 square meters. And this led to the construction of nearly 20 buildings including the building now located on 19 Arquímedes Street. And this is an 11 story monument to anarchy that stands on 168 square meter lot. That's the building on the right. Notably, most of the building permits were issued during the Fernando Aboitis term as mayor of Miguel Hidalgo. Aboitis, who was then a member of one of the pre-long-term opposition parties and is now a Mexico City's city manager, justified the issuing of these construction permits by claiming that the new buildings would help repopulate Borlanco. However, there are those who question Aboitis' motives. Again, whether or not these new construction projects violate Hidalgo's restrictions is debatable. What is more certain is that they cause certain harm to the neighborhood. Homes built with a design that is wholly unique to Borlanco, this one here, were demolished. The new buildings, to make way for new buildings, the new buildings added traffic to what is already one of the most traffic-prone streets of that neighborhood. And certain public services was also strained, particularly water. The authorized buildings presented some additional problems. For instance, most of the buildings appear to have violated the building code by not including an ample driveway with at least three parking spots. At least one of the buildings violated the building code in so far as its apartment units are smaller than the legal height limit. So smaller than the limit. And furthermore, even by the zoning map standards, some of the buildings appear to exceed the legal height limit. Importantly, the scandal or the sale of apartment units was estimated to result in a $4.7 to $8 million profit per building for developers. Thus, the sizable returns for the real estate firms and the fact that authorizing the new buildings was both questionable and politically costly led some people to suspect it was corruption-able. A poll taken around this time found that 81% of residents in Miguel Hidalgo thought there was corruption. Two politicians from different political parties who were uniquely positioned to comment on this case reached the same conclusion. Luis Lajou, a senior politician from the PRI, and former senator and 2006 mayoral candidate for Miguel Hidalgo said, quote, Fernando Aboitis was actively corrupt, end quote. Similarly, Gabriel La Cuevas, who's shown here, the mayor of Miguel Hidalgo after Aboitis ended his term, stated the following. I believe Aboitis had a number of corrupt deals going on because if anything, I'm convinced that corruption doesn't lie. There's nothing more evident than a corrupt person. You can see it when one building's taller than the others around it. Love and money, you can't hide them. Corruption is frank, it's evident, end quote. Still, the courts ruled that the construction permits granted for the street of Arquinas were legal. With this, I conclude my review of a case that brings to light the following issues, four issues. Electoral democracy does not guarantee an accountable, responsive government. Mexico's local governments, starting with Miguel Hidalgo's, have a way to go before they achieve sustained democratic governance. Gaps and inconsistencies in the relevant building regulations generate controversy. These regulatory issues, if due to mistake, demonstrate negligence. But if due to design, demonstrate regulatory capture. The evidence that skilled authorities, skilled authorities, tend to interpret these gaps and inconsistencies in favor of real estate developers supports the hypothesis that regulatory captures at work. That these same authorities are then rewarded with improved job options in the private and public sectors is further evidence of capture. Thank you. Great, well thank you for inviting me back to Columbia. I'm very happy to be here. And I'm gonna base my brief comments on a book that I finished last year, which is called From Boom to Bubble, Colon, How Finance Built the New Chicago. And in the book, I tease out connections between city policies, like zoning, like property tax incentives, and what I call the financialization of urban property. And financialization is just a fancy way of talking about a process or processes by which property and capital markets become more integrated and interdependent. And it's something that's happened both in the United States as well as in the global south. And in the book, I look at what I call the millennial boom, which is roughly between 1998 and 2008 in Chicago. And I'm really focusing on commercial real estate. And I was doing my research and trying to kind of put my case in historical context. I discovered that property financialization is really not anything new, at least not in the United States. In the 1920s, which I see as a kind of parallel period to the 2000s, there was a drive to bring new capital into real estate investment. East Coast merchant banks and bond houses issued new derivatives, new securities that were backed by both commercial mortgages and building incomes that financed the construction of most, many of the new skyscrapers in New York City as well as in Chicago. The complex ownership structures of commercial property at this time led a commentator in Fortune magazine to say, but to write all a man needs to own a skyscraper is the money and the land. And he may be able to get along without the money. So before you can buy and sell a mortgage on a skyscraper, and I should say that the image to the left is one of these kinds of securities. The image on the right is one of these, or a bank run that took place in the aftermath of the commercial real estate boom of the 1920s. But before you can buy and sell a security or a mortgage on a skyscraper, you need to first convert landed improvements into a financial asset, into a tradable commodity that generates income on a regular basis. In other words, a process of assetization must precede financialization. Making real estate into a liquid commodity, into a liquid asset is no small feat given that buildings are opaque and spatially embedded assets. But they require both highly localized knowledge to understand as well as an extended amount of time to transact, much more than let's say a stock or a share in Coca-Cola. Even when a building is fully occupied, its value fluctuates depending upon what neighboring owners and what the local government does, what's going on with interest rates and bond yields. So all these things will keep the idea of value in play. Acidization requires legibility at a distance. That is, owners and investors, they don't know the building or its spatial context, and so they need some kind of security, some assurance about the thingness of the building, the material nature, the qualities of a particular building, including its value. They've got to distill a bunch of different qualities down into a single number. And when the chains of property ownership become more attenuated, fragmented and quick changing as they are in the case of securities and derivatives, there's even more onus placed on the assets themselves to be knowable and calculable at a distance. So this is where the state steps in. Governments provide some of the legitimacy, some of the legal institutional structure, the political juridical rules that help convert property into an asset. For example, it produces property rights through providing building permits. It protects contracts, and through its zoning function, the local state creates exclusivity in land use, determining what can be built and where, and in the process regulating supply, reducing competition, and bolstering what heterodox economists call monopoly rents that are associated with each building's unique location. Zoning provides a kind of everything in its place stability that minimizes the future risk of present day investments. Historically, there has been a connection between zoning, financialization, and overbuilding or construction. And overbuilding is a relative term that I spend a lot of time discussing as we're taking apart in the book. The explosion in zoning codes that took place in the teens in the 1920s, along with other kinds of interventions by the nascent regulatory state of the progressive era, things like formalizing tax assessment systems, indirectly helped increase the number and range of real estate investors beyond the usual suspects. Zoning ordinances like the 1916 one here in New York helped to standardize property so that it could be more readily financialized, and in doing so may have contributed to the construction booms and acquisition bubbles that followed. For example, Chicago's first zoning ordinance was in 1923, and it allowed for more usable floor space and therefore more substantial towers to be built above previous height limits. Here are two examples of those buildings. And almost immediately afterwards, after the zoning ordinance was passed, 140 office buildings were erected in Chicago's downtown. This was obviously a very exciting period for architecture in Chicago. Some of our most distinctive buildings were built at that time, but in many ways, like in the 2000s, the construction industry sort of got ahead of itself, and we know sadly how the story ends with a 10-year depression. Now, I'm intending to provoke here. I may be making a spurious correlation. You're saying 1916 zoning code, great depression, are these two things really connected? After all, there were asset bubbles in cities that hadn't yet passed their zoning codes. I guess I'm intending to provoke because I think that this may be an important and overlooked connection. It's clear that zoning did not suppress development, as many people argued that it would. I don't have as much to say about the, what happened in the 1920s, and I do about what happened in the 2000s, where I think there were some very clear connections between zoning and the sort of bubble, the boom bubble and bust that took place during this time period, and I just wanna share two examples from the 2000s. So when Mayor Richard M. Daly came to office in 1989, he publicly stated that he wanted to do a couple of things with the downtown. First, he wanted to diversify land juices, and he also wanted to sort of extend the boundaries of the loop outwards, past old railroad tracks, train servicing depots that had separated the downtown from, in many cases, some very low income residential neighborhoods. He didn't want a master plan. The last plan had been in 1983. He didn't want any kind of written proclamation of a future vision that might potentially tie his hands when responding to developer requests. He was, you know, he should have written that book, The Art of the Deal, not Donald Trump or even Trump didn't write it. He had a ghost writer write it, regardless, Daly sort of elevated deal making to an art form during his 20 plus year reign. And, you know, so yeah, he didn't wanna, he was, even though he regularly promoted planners into his sort of inner sanctum, he was actually quite opposed to planning. But like the New York State, the New York real estate board in the teens, it was really private industry professionals who clamored for some kind of spatial coordination. They wanted some certainty about the city's goals for the loop, given that the zoning board had been regularly approving use, parking, and minimum lot variances for new apartment buildings in the downtown commercial core, and also approving variances so that Class C office space could be converted to residential uses. Developers and owners of existing office towers were hesitant and developers who were interested in building new towers were hesitant about making investments in the loop given these competing land use claims. Grudgingly, Daly released the 2003 central area plan and advocated, which advocated for high density, mixed use and residential uses, lining the perimeter of the downtown and the retention of a commercial core. And then importantly, I think more importantly, the plan became the basis for the 2004 rewrite of the zoning ordinance. Ordinance that really hadn't been touched formally since 1957. Four new overlays protected the historic, now protected the historic core of office and retail uses, and then there was a buffer of mixed use buildings that were surrounded by residential areas. The revised code also minimized the lot sizes needed to erect residential uses. And the effect was pretty immediate. And in my interviews, I interviewed sort of 80 plus developers and real estate industry professionals and mostly people who involved in real estate finance to see sort of how they were reading these kinds of regulatory changes in the local office market. And they agreed that this was a big deal, that this was a sort of spark that encouraged the particularly higher, taller buildings, particularly skinny apartment buildings that started sprouting up all over the loop. In the five years, following the rewrite, we see sort of most of the new commercial stock being added. We also see a pretty radical uptick in the number of transactions and acquisitions. Buildings being bought and sold about 80% of the office stock in the downtown was transacted, was sold at least once during this period. And you can see in 2006 and 2007, the volume of sales really spiking as did sort of prices per square foot. This was also an important time for the sale of commercial mortgage backed securities, which is really the sort of financial instrument that I focus on in the book and sort of understanding the role of the sale of these new instruments in encouraging new development downtown. Meanwhile, the reason why I talk about overbuilding is because employment downtown was really languishing in relative terms, even before the worst of the busts. So it's not as if the new towers that were being built remained empty, like in the 1980s where you did have more of a phenomenon of what they called it see-through buildings, but what happened instead, and again in the book I go through it in more empirical detail, is we see a kind of great migration westward in the case of Chicago of tenants leaving older class A and class B office space and moving to these new class A buildings, but vacancy rates continuing to go up. So while these regulatory interventions are necessary to create the kind of certainty about asset values, future asset values that developers need and financial investors need, so are the practices that create exceptions, particularly for new assets. Receiving a density bonus or a variance to build a different use than surrounding ones can benefit certain risk taking investors, particularly those that get out ahead of their competition and exploit an opportunity that few may see. So selective project specific modifications to the zoning code can enhance the productivity of land, creating new value or what economists call rent gaps or differential rents, profits that are over the market rates of return. In Chicago, it's a little hard to read, this is a screenshot from the zoning code. You can see that Chicago's revised code, much like its older one, was only loosely enforced because of this long standing system of offering bonuses that gave downtown developers the right to build up and out in exchange for promises to create public amenities like pocket parks or atria or the preservation of a historic building. And we call these in Chicago PD's plan developments and they're triggered by the use or the size or the height of a proposed development. And what it does is basically allows the city to kind of go off script and to negotiate the terms of development on an ad hoc basis, granting density bonuses and use variances beyond the base allowances or requirements provided by the ordinance. Of the roughly 600 large scale projects that I studied that were developed as part of the boom during this 10 year period, approximately 100 received this PD overlay and that's one of the reasons why you can see so many in the West Loop. And of these 100 PD's, approximately 40 were from major new office projects where the city allowed for larger buildings than the code would have initially allowed for. Developers that I interviewed argued that they needed these kinds of zoning variances, not just to build a more innovative architectural, not just for sort of building reasons or they argued, they were very honest about that they were trying to pay back the cost of the land that they purchased which was very high cost obviously in the loop, but they also brought in the sort of fight the relationship between capital markets and property markets. They were trying to reduce the risk of non-payment for the debt that they had used to underwrite the project, debt that was in both cases, securitized or owned by some combination of third parties. Of the other 60 plan developments downtown, over half were for the conversion of class C and some class B buildings into residences of some sort. So hotels, dormitories, condos, very high end departments. Such conversions preserved the historic facades but allowed property owners to change the land use to extract these differential rents. New owners could make much more profit as a boutique hotel than they could sticking with the regs and renting out their property to non-profits or solo law practices or solo medical practices that were typically the tenants of these class C buildings. These adaptive reuse projects were lauded by planners but they also play a role, I argue, in the property financialization process in the city. One of the things that they do is to kill off some of the surplus commercial space that resulted from this construction boom, eliminating some of the competition and enhancing the value of some of the new stock that was going in on the West Loop. Removing some of the class B and class C buildings relieve some of the pressure on the flagging office market by creating a situation of contrived scarcity. Tighter markets could register greater appreciation and more quickly soak up available tenant demand. So in conclusion, I would just say that zoning rules and their exceptions play an important role in attracting capital to the built environment and in keeping the asset assembly line well oiled. The specific mix or balance between rules and exceptions, between practices that enable growth and those that enforce scarcity, are always changing and are historically and geographically contingent. As such, it's important and incumbent on us to regularly reevaluate and reassess these practices that structure urbanism to determine when they are mainly capitulating to the fast and abstracting logic of financial capitalism and that one that often sort of leads to destructive crashes as they did in the 1920s and the 2000s. And when these practices are actually helping to create the sustainable cities that may be slower but that better serve the needs of their residents. Thank you. Hello everyone. I thought I would try to reflect on 20 odd years of working on zoning history but also of being involved directly in zoning issues in Montreal as a member of the Planning and Design Review Commission and as a consultant on zoning issues. So I'd like to try and present to you how zoning works in Montreal very briefly and then to try and draw some lessons perhaps a bit like Gerald in more thematic ways. Zoning in Montreal is a fairly complicated issue because we have zoning at five territorial levels all the way to the province. The province of Quebec has taken upon itself to regulate the conversion of agricultural land. The unzoning of agricultural land for development and has established a fairly tight control on that. So it removed some zoning powers from municipalities with respect to agricultural land. The metropolitan community of Montreal like the province of Ontario has enacted a few years ago a minimum density requirements for suburban and urban municipalities, Montreal and its suburbs. And so it has also in a way started to constrain municipal ability to zone. The agglomeration on Montreal which is in fact the island of the city of Montreal that's the agglomeration because it is the city of Montreal in darker green and its remaining suburbs in lighter green has also established guidelines in the master plan which has a land use map and a map of densities. Finally, the city of Montreal has a master plan and zoning code which is to a large extent administered implemented at the level of the borough. The boroughs are all these components of the city of Montreal. And so most local zoning on a daily basis occurs at the borough level. Important projects and the framework are set at the city level and then the agglomeration, the metropolitan community and the province have a say on zoning also. And I think that answers some of, that speaks to some of the issues that were mentioned this morning by Gerald about how do we manage this municipal autonomy? And we do it in Quebec with respect to important things, agricultural land, forest lands, wetlands and so on. And we try to do it at the metropolitan level by making sure that we don't have too much sprawl and that we have a certain distribution of densities and that where suburban municipalities receive public transit, they have to go with certain densities also. The zoning context in Montreal is not so specific. It's quite the same across Canada, I would say, very high reliance on property taxes which means that development is good. Cities want development because they rely for 50, 60 or up to 70% of their income on property taxes. We've zoning follows market trends more than it leads them. I think the kind of back and forth that Rachel identified in case of Chicago is weaker in Montreal. We've had much more swings with pressure from the real estate development industry and then the zoners relax and accommodate growth, make possible growth. We have strong mayors in the sense people who have a very powerful authority at the center and who meddle in zoning questions. When there was a downturn in the economy and every project was a godsend, the mayor of Montreal would literally call planners into his office and say, you have to approve this project and find a way to approve it because otherwise we won't have it which of course is not true. I would say if you look at planning culture on the third line, officials who are poorly educated on cities and design I would say even mayors have a fairly poor understanding of the urban development process and of what they can ask from developers. They're very afraid that developers won't build and they're very tempted to give them what they want. Unfortunately, we have fairly weak planners, politically speaking, who have a very hard time standing up to elected officials who don't really know what they're talking about sometimes and to convince them that they can pressure developers a bit more. We have back to the second line then, generous builders and developers who have been extremely generous to the campaign financing of elected officials who of course have a lot of clout who are important citizens, they're major donors to civil society organizations such as Musia and so on. We have a wide range of developers, some of them with great public spiritedness, I must say, who themselves are extremely wary of anarchy in real estate development and we have developers who are extremely happy to use whatever freedom that they can find. We have a sort of municipal arts society heritage Montreal with other groups, green groups, they are active but they are not as strong as they need to be. And then finally, we have a strong influence of US practices, I've been asked to consult on bonus zoning, form based zoning and so on and to tell the planners in Montreal or in suburban municipalities whether or not that new thing in the US should be applied here and my typical response is no, not really, but maybe under certain circumstances. So this is a lot of information, I'll try and go over this fairly quickly. On the left, you can see theory in the middle history and then practice in Montreal. I'll focus on the third column and the third line, a row because that's really what we're talking about here. We do have an integration of zoning and planning in the sense that our master plans necessarily contain land use maps, density maps and height maps so that they really frame, the master plan really frames the zoning code. There is a very tight link there and that sometimes to approve projects, individual projects, we have to change the master plan because we're going to basically allow a building to have 12 stories instead of six which forces us to change the height maps in the master plan which is a nonsense. I think if you want to do it, just do it and ignore the master plan and say it's an exception but no, we try to do that. We've talked about this earlier today. We do more and more value capture, value sharing so we zone very much for the generation of property taxes and we zone for the generation of public benefits. What does that mean? Well, in practice it means that planners, when they see development pressure in an area, let's say in all the industrial area, they have two possible reactions and they've used both. One is to really up zone and basically anticipate developer's demand and in some cases actually talk to individual developers who hold a lot of land and say what would you like and basically to rezone to FAR of 12 or FAR of nine and say this is your playground, go and play now and that doesn't give them much leeway or the reaction in fact can be to down zone which means to force every developer who wants to do something to come and talk to us and in that come and talk to us attitude is something very interesting. Of course it opens the door to influence, peddling and corruption and so on and it really depends on the leadership from city hall and from the mayor what happens there. As I said the mayor was very, very eager to have development who doesn't understand what he can ask from developers. We've only had male mayors in Montreal. You have a system whereby developers can get away with quite a bit but I would say in the last 12 years or so planners have been a bit more empowered. The mayors have acknowledged their lack of understanding to a certain extent and asked the planners really what they thought should happen and deal making on zoning issues have therefore brought a bit more benefits. Historically speaking I think one of the important things we have to realize about zoning is that it was also instituted as a progressive era good government measure to remove discretion and graft and corruption in municipal governance. Sonya talked about that in her book. I talked about that in an article in JPR and that it is over time with new needs, with new desires that we've introduced discretionary control to meet the new scale of development that occurs with PUDs and things of the sort. And so for those of you who were there last night at the museum many the kind of the development people on the panel said as of right it's great. You set the rules, let us handle them as of right. Well the rules are not got given, right? The rules were part of the deal making and I think a lot of deal making occurs in the rule setting. For instance in Montreal we do not as of yet have mandatory inclusionary zoning. So what we do have is an inclusionary housing policy that says that the target for any development of 200 units or more is 15% social housing, community-based social housing and 50%, 15% affordable housing. Now you cannot impose that on a developer. The developers refuse to have an inclusionary zoning. So in that deal making about what kind of deal we can cut on affordable housing developers said no mandate, let's talk. And how do we talk by down zoning, by saying if you want a permit at all talk to us about affordable housing. And then it really depends on the climate whether the developer has a strong market and can give more and on the goodwill of the developer to a certain extent where some people will say I'm not interested, give me my permit, I'll do the least that I can. And some developers who play the game very honestly can say okay, let's see what we can do and let's talk. So beginning of summary, big issues in zoning as deal making. And here I look more at my work as a member of the Planning and Design Review Commission where we look at projects that receive major variances or are exceptional projects under not as of rights and special procedures and not rezoning and so on. One of the questions we have to ask ourselves when is a project exceptional in a positive sense that it warrants an exception? Where we say you know what you came, you developer and you architect came up with a good project, it pushes the envelope. It, yes it goes beyond rules, it doesn't agree with what is in the plan but it's a good project. So let's try and work with you to accommodate it and we will recommend to the officials whom we advise to grant you that permit. Obviously as in any planning and design review commission we're being asked how do you know when a project is good or not? And there you know, for people who are very afraid of having a design review commission and say oh it's totally subjective and you're going to have egos and so on. And you're right, if you don't trust your political culture, if you think that the design review commission is going to be captured by big egos who are going to be under the influence of officials or developers, just don't do it. If you think that you can have good leadership at the commission with people you can trust and that you know your officials will not interfere too much, they can always disregard the advice of the commission but at least you'll have a commission that functions well. I think you bring in a bunch of professionals in a room, they can generally agree about what is a good development, contextual, integrated. You don't necessarily need a formal list of things but I think you have to agree that there's a certain messiness and discretion and judgment in there but it's very doable. Finally, the big question that you always have in this deal making on zoning is the developer tells you I can't make a buck if you impose this and that on me and then the planner says that's not my concern. My concern is to protect the public interest but of course with inclusionary zoning, linkage fee programs and all these public benefits programs that we do in zoning, the basic question in nexus analysis and so on is what's a fair return on investment and how do we tailor these regulations in such a way that the threshold is not reached so that developers can make a good buck and still give us the public benefits. So my conclusion is that yes zoning goes together with planning but zoning is not planning, zoning is real estate regulation. It's a tool of implementation of planning perhaps but it's really real estate regulation. As we saw in session one, its primary object historically has been to create value or to protect value. Zoning is yes, had many people contribute to it but the development industry certainly to use your word of capture. It's obviously historically that that has been the case. It's about value, property values and so on. Here I want to point to not Montreal but to Los Angeles, the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, some of you may be aware of it that basically a NIMBY sentiment in Los Angeles is translated into a measure to say you cannot allow the city to continue this spot zone and allow these dense projects into our neighborhoods. If you're really serious about allowing more density you've got to plan for it. So wonderful theory of planning brought forward to say stop spot zoning, let's do real planning but obviously the understanding is when we come times to real planning we'll make sure that our neighborhoods stay very stable. In other words, how do we prevent development by having that discourse? Well, zoning is always local. Zoning is not planning. Zoning is about regulating development of specific project in specific locations. It's always a very particular object. When the area at stake is large we can call it planning because the rail yards are going to be rezoned and that calls for a local master plan. When it's one building we call it spot zoning but I would say that the difference between the two is in fact not one of principle or of theory, it's one of scale. Finally, as I argued in my ACSP paper, some of you were there, I think zoning really is a tool of conservation. It's a tool of protection and I think that when we are applying it to progressive ends in inclusionary zoning and public benefits and so on, it's really a second best. It's really a way of saying we're going to get what we can from developers because on the other hand we're starving the welfare state and on the other hand we are not politically powerful enough to have rent control anymore or to have public funds allocated to housing construction and so on. And so let's try and do what we can but really it's not a lot. Thank you very much. So the presentations really open up some terrific avenues for discussion and as you all heard in the morning that zoning both by its design and implementation can be quite exclusionary, right? And then in this panel, you've heard that in its enforcement and oftentimes circumventions, zoning really is about power relations, right? Who makes the deal? Who has the upper hands in this power relations? And I really would like to kind of ask our panelists and also the floor to think about a few questions to keep this discussion going. And that is, we saw in the presentations of Paul, Rachel and to some extent Raphael even in these very mature democracies where you have a process that's supposed to be transparent, right? We see a great deal of lack of the enforcement of that transparency or the power relations playing out in the sense that favoring some versus others. And the others tend to be those who are being excluded and those have less voices, right? So I think one question for you all really is about, as planners, we sometimes we say, this wasn't done right. This wasn't done properly. How do we see our own role in this process of actually creating inequalities? I mean, I think our profession and us as planners are in many ways, in some ways, in different cities are responsible for some of these outcomes that we saw this morning, right? So I want maybe for you to kind of help us reflect on that and how we might be able to move forward with a more value-based, perhaps, practice model that leads to my next point. So in science presentation, you also see then really almost alternative institutions, right, in a sense, and whether these alternative institutions perhaps can be really effective. And then with that, you know, Professor Caden in the morning was talking about whether we can get rid of use regulations because bulk and density in some ways regulate use, right? And I'm saying, could we look at maybe even cases where zoning becomes much less critical? You know, so if you look at the UK case, right, in which you have structural plans, you have development plans, the more detailed development plans that become the foundation of decision-making by planners. And so there is more discretion on the planner's side and then go even further, of course, China and some other places where the state is even stronger, there's no excuse in the sense that you step in. So what might be some of these alternative ways of achieving, I wouldn't say the same purposes of zoning, but very much similar purposes of zoning, right? As Rafael was saying, it's about regulating real estate development on that side of that development to, you know, sort of making sure the outcomes, you know, conform to some kind of ideal, right? Or may not even be ideal. And then Professor Katie in the morning was talking about Amanda Burton's vision is that we may not use zoning, we use design standards, or we use other discussions that planners may have. So I want to just open up and however you want to respond, I think all of you probably have something to say with my, I'm no expert at zoning and I'm learning a lot and I look forward to hearing from you. Stop. I think for me, the key player in this issue, as far as our panel is concerned, is really civil society. Planners have a certain amount of authority and perhaps some power and I can talk about that too, but I think the zoning regime that exists in the place, at least in the North, in democratic regimes, depends to a large extent on civil society and on pressure brought to bear on politicians. We've had major scandals of corruption in Montreal, not pure graft, but you know, party financing and things like that, and it's very, very clear that elected officials, when they feel that there's heat coming from the media and the population and groups, the greens, the urban ecology people, the MAS or, you know, they will be more cautious and they will backtrack. I think that's one key thing. Second, it's true that planners can only to a limited extent, but to a certain extent, also try and guide officials in adopting the right regulations. A planning, we've had very different planning directors in Montreal, some of them who were much stronger in terms of personality, telling officials to butt out of zoning questions and basically say, mind your own business, you set policy, once it's set, please let me implement it, don't look over my shoulder when I prove a project or not, although it's not exactly like that, and we've had much weaker planning directors who have let mayors and counselors, you know, step on them. So, but first civil society for me. I guess maybe because I studied downtown, I don't see as much of that sort of civil society. Activism, certainly Chicago is a city with a real sort of density of local organizations and they're active in the neighborhoods, but when it comes to the downtown, it's sort of like a, you know, it's such a, I mean, it's the core of the region, it's the engine of the economy, but the civil society organizations are mostly special service areas, which are the equivalent of like a bid, business improvement districts that are, you know, concerned about the public way, but just wanna make sure that the streets are being, you know, the snow is being plowed sufficiently and that there's nice sort of advertising for the, you know, the Christmas rebate program that's gonna take place. So they're not necessarily engaging in, you know, or saying we wanna be involved, let's say, in this very untransparent plan development process, which, you know, and I didn't make this case in my presentation, but yes, this is, I mean, there are some serious implications for the kind of, you know, the possibility of democratic action. I mean, these are really sort of off record, very hard to sort of, to storm those closed doors to figure out what all is being negotiated, what numbers have been put forth, and it really is just sort of a select few who are sort of sitting in those rooms that are at the table. And, you know, I feel very bad for those weak planners, the planners that, you know, my program is training because they do feel they have to capitulate to these more powerful forces, particularly when the developers are making campaign contributions to the alderman's reelection and to the mayor's reelection, and it's a little bit like a stack deck. But I do think one of the things that they could do is, you know, maybe certainly not, just, you know, not make it as easy when there's clearly so much demand, and as there is, you know, in a boom when there's so many building permits being requested, and there's so much development activity, and there's so many new projects, you know, the pipeline is just full of these new projects, it's clear that there's obviously a market interest that's profitable for developers, and to me, one of the biggest sort of, you know, head scratchers was, you know, sort of why local government at this time was choosing to sort of make it so easy. You know, why weren't they trying to extract more public benefits? You know, really a little pocket park. I think we could have done so much better than that, and it's interesting the mayor has the, our new mayor, not so new anymore, has now implemented a kind of linkage program where these, you know, when you're sort of paying for additional height, that money is going out to the neighborhood. So he's trying to kind of make the, because that's, there are all these other issues and implications for sort of spatial equity when we continue to sort of build up the downtown and increase density, sort of, if those restrictions were stronger, would some of that development move out into other areas that could use some new commercial development? Well, the mayors tried to sort of implement this kind of a linkage system going back in some ways to progressive administrations in the 1980s in Boston and in New York. But why, I think, so one thing planners can do is not make it so easy and clearly not to subsidize this new development, which is another thing that they were doing at the time. In addition just to offering very sort of lenient zoning regulations to provide additional sort of property tax abatements and incentives and subsidies to new development seems to me, you know, not a good use of public funds. One of the things, especially, and it is a planning question, right? Not just, so just clearly I wasn't talking just about zoning, but about land use regulations more broadly, but at what scale should planners be working if they want to effectively regulate land use and land markets? And in some, I mean, the Bangalore case, this jurisdictional fragmentation is hardly new, right? This is, in the 1950s, I think Robert Wood wrote that book, 1400 Governments, which was focused on New York. 1400 Governments make up the metropolitan area of New York, right? So what is, how then do you achieve any coordination across these fragmented jurisdictional boundaries? So this is a very long, it has a long history, this question of regional fragmentation and the effectiveness of planners just working within a single jurisdiction. But there is something new that we are seeing in the jurisdictional fragmentation of Bangalore and LA. And that is the rising strength of firms which are more footloose, right? And so, I mean, there's a planning question here of how spatially fixed local governments or regional institutions can regulate capital which is much more mobile. Because like for instance, in Bangalore, the periphery is one of course this IT hub. There's this entire IT cluster. But it's also garment industries. And the garment industries today are just not shopping for jurisdictions that are most favorable to them within India. But they're moving to Bangladesh, right? So these are really tricky questions for planners as to what is the role of planning then to regulate this highly mobile private capital. So briefly, I'd like to respond to the Professor Caden's point about transparency as applied more to my case on how I think that could have helped or would help moving forward. So first, Polenco's zoning map, at least when I was conducting that field research, it was not easily available. It was not on the internet. And so that's the first thing. It should be easily available. It should be accessible as well, easily understood. So I was looking at Rachel's map and wouldn't it be great to have something like that for such an important neighborhood? Next, I think there's a need to rebuild trust with the local government. So knowing the ownership of those buildings that were built, those 20 buildings that were built through this deal making would help to make sure that the mayor and former secretary of buildings of Mexico City did not benefit personally from the issuance of those permits. So that's another area where I think transparency could help rebuild that trust. I also think it would be important to recognize some of that harm that was caused by those developments, specifically with regards to water pressure. There is an increase in water shortage complaints, not so much because of the lack of water, but it seems to be because of water pressure differentials. Now, if you have these taller buildings, these will be these shorter buildings. Recognizing that problem and addressing it would be important. And just to be clear, I'm not taking a stance against a deal making. I do think there's important room for some level of discretion in deciding whether a permit's granted or not. But again, back to transparency, I think the rationale for the issuance of permits should be up for review. So we should probably open up to the floor, yeah. Okay, I was just thinking about it. There's a, let's see if you can follow that. I feel like it's just perfect. There's a fine line between deal making and corruption. All of it, all four. I wonder if we know where that line is or whether it's lost. I would love to get your opinions on that. Maybe we'll collect another question. Valerie had your hand up, yeah. So Dr. Weber and all of you, but particularly in the case of Chicago, discussed how stakeholders, specifically business elites and developers, have an interest in shape the content of the zoning code, right? And used it for a purpose and benefit from uncertainty. Now I was wondering in the cases that you all have studied, how have those same groups tried to shift the rules of the game or the structure of zoning itself, the way that decisions are made, who does it, you know, process in planning. And knowing what they've done, does that leave or open potentially some spaces for planners or those interested in getting involved in space and cities for values on the public value, to also potentially not just re-envision the content of zoning, you know, oh, we should do mixed use, but the process of how it occurs. Yeah, thank you. I think those two questions are quite related and let me add another aspect to that, is that, you know, Bernadette's question really has to do also, you know, does it become, you know, from an ad hoc deal-making to a more institutionalized practice, yeah? I guess I would say that in Chicago, deal-making is highly institutionalized. And I think, you know, it is because of this sort of long-standing reluctance to, yeah, sort of put it, put on, you know, put on paper and sort of codify anything that is likely to be sort of changed because of some exception, right? And I guess all of these terms are somewhat relative, where we don't know how exceptional buildings are that require their exception. You could always make a case that something's exceptional, right? We've never really had that land use here, or will this, in this case, we're using these new building technologies. And so, you know, we need to extend the size of the footprint, you know, or the lot size. It seems like, you know, basing exceptions on exceptionality, exceptionalism, is maybe just kind of a slippery slope because we don't really, when everything could be potentially an exception, just like everything is potentially, you know, sort of a deal, right? I'm very provoked by this idea of, you know, what sort of separates deal-making from corruption. I guess, you know, Paul may be in a better position to comment on just sort of the legality of that, right? I mean, I think if you violate some campaign finance rule, is it therefore corruption, or it's just sort of old school Chicago deal-making if you make a, you know, campaign contribution and you declare it, and you know, there's sort of rules you can follow and everybody can see that you did it, and we all just kind of come to accept it. And I also think that it's sort of spatially varies. I think sort of people's tolerance for certain kinds of behaviors really vary depending upon what city you're in and how much you've kind of like, you know, in Chicago, there's just this kind, I mean, and as an outsider, somebody from New York moving to Chicago, I'm sure a lot of the same things happens in New York, but there's a lot of this kind of very casual, you know, sort of eye-rolling and, you know, shoulder shrugging when we hear about, you know, one more, you know, sort of spot zoning project where the developer is some sort of an insider and nobody, there really isn't a whole lot of, you know, advocacy organizations who are kind of watching that store and in fact, you know, the few people who were journalists and many of them have lost their jobs is our local paper who was owned by Sam Zell who owns equity office properties, big real estate investor. I mean, it's just, you know, when you start sort of scratching the surface, you just see how hard it would be, how hard it is to sort of point out some of these exceptions and to make the case that this is actually sort of a corrupt situation or that corruption has become kind of normalized in certain contexts. I'd like to add that some amount of deal-making or discretionary decision-making is necessary in a good planning system, in a complex dynamic city. There's no doubt about that. On the other hand, we have to remember what William White said in chapter 16 of Citi, identify what you want and then require it. Try to put it down as a requirement and no games. This is important to us, therefore, the zoning requires. Now, that's not always easy to obtain. You can't always put what you want into rules that will be politically accepted. But to the extent that we can remove this question from some things, yes, I would agree. On the other hand, some of our zoning is just not right. It's just not good. It's inherited from the past. Things have changed, mistakes were made. There are many cases where we have to thank a developer for proposing a great project for an area where the zoning is just out of date. And what we try to do then is to hold that development and to tell the planners, can you please look at this whole area and rezone it properly and then consider that project? Now, political pressure is very strong. They say, no, no, authorize that project and we'll do the rest. But I think, you know, I don't want to seem like I love both sides, but I think yes, both sides do apply in this case. Require as much as you can, but then realize that you do have to make deals because sometimes the developers are right and you were wrong. You're the zoner, the planner. And also because in complex projects, you have to talk. If you do a PUD, you can't do a PUD as of right. You have to negotiate over site planning. You have to negotiate over inclusion and benefits. And I don't think that's corruption. So it is, I mean, of course discretion is needed for good planning. I don't think we can have any outcomes in the absence of discretion, but the question is how can discretion be made accountable? What are the institutional arrangements within which discretion is open to democratic, well, to oversight at least in some way. But there's also a political economy question here, right? As to whose discretion is legalized and whose discretion is branded corruption. So I wasn't quite looking at discretion, but I was looking at arbitrage. And these formal IT firms are arbitraging across the urban rural divide. Agrarian landowners who are located just outside Bangalore's municipal boundary are also arbitraging. These are really, really small landowners and it's not profitable for them to practice agriculture. The state government gives subsidized electricity for agricultural production. And so these landowners are using subsidized electricity, which is meant for agriculture to dig these deep bore wells to access groundwater for urban water delivery, right? So that's arbitrage. But these agrarian landowners, it's colloquially, it's very colloquial in Bangalore. They call the water mafia, right? So to me, this question, it is a political economy question as to whose dealmaking or whose arbitrage is seen as illegal and whose is legalized and is seen normalized as regular planning practice. And so returning back to the keynote this morning where we were presented with this triage of developers propose, neighbors oppose, and then you have officials who dispose. That disposing, when done to confront the neighbors, but for the greater good of the city, okay, great. Then the dealmaking was done in favor of the greater good from a utilitarian standpoint. But it's based then on the good, on making the case that there's a clear good. So that's one thing I would look at and defining where the dealmaking was wholesome. And the other thing I would look at is again, key to the definition, the typical definition of corruption is the abuse of public office for private gain. So I'd also look at the officials involved, making sure that they are free of conflicts of interest and free and cannot be in any way implicated or that it cannot be argued that they benefited personally from the decisions they made. Those are the two things I would look at while allowing for more dealmaking, which is necessary, seeing whether that dealmaking was corrupt or not. Yes, please. I just want to add a small point. I think it's very important to emphasize the question of transparency with Gerald and you talked about, just to give a small example, on the Planning and Design Review Commission, we insisted that City Council grant us the right to publish our recommendations online so that whatever decision council ultimately makes, they would know what advice they had received from the Planning and Design Review Commission. In the past, our recommendations were in the dark, now they're in the open. I'm not saying that it makes a world of difference, but it is one small incremental step to force an official to respond to a journalist who sees the recommendation of the committee was negative, why did you approve it? These are small things which I believe can improve the transparency of the process. Let's thank the panelists. I'm sure we can continue the discussion into the next panel. Dr. Elliott Sklar, next to me from Columbia, will be moderating this panel. Thank you. Okay, well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I am finding this an amazing set of talks and an incredible day. And we're gonna have one more incredible session. I know this, and what I will do now is let me introduce the speaker, say a few things about them, and then we'll let them go. We're gonna, Harriet R. Goning is going to speak first. She is the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Community Planning Development at U.S. HUD. And her mission is to help governments across the country build strong foundations for resilience in the face of climate change and stimulate a diverse and prosperous economy. Prior to being at HUD, she directed the District of Columbia Office of Planning where she focused on walkable, bikeable, and eminently livable cities. She served as director of the Governors Institute on Community Design, which was co-founded with former Maryland governor, Paris Glendenning, and she served Governor Glendenning as secretary of planning. And prior to that, she was a director of the Development Agency, Development Community Environment at the U.S. EPA. You may remember EPA from when it existed. I guess it's called pre-nostalgia. Anyway, Harriet's gonna talk a bit about what can be done. And after Harriet is one of the people that I admire for a lot of the work she's done, and I use inside her work is Vicky Bean, who is now the commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which is actually the nation's largest municipal housing agency. And what Mayor de Blasio is charged with is essentially pulling off a very bold initiative to either create or preserve 200,000 affordable housing units and apartments over the next 10 years. And prior to being at HPD, Vicky was at the Furman Center, NYU, and the Furman Center is one of the things I just admire for the kind of research they do and the kind of work they put out. I only wish we would do, that's my competitiveness. Something that's good, but it's wonderful. And instead of her scholarship and her low review articles have been very useful to me in a lot of my work. And she'll talk about zoning and fair housing. And then we've got Daniel Montanada from Brazil, from Sao Paulo is going to be here. He's an architect and a planner. And since January of 2013, he's been in charge of the Department of Land Use in the Municipal Secretary of Urban Development at City Hall in Sao Paulo. And during this period, he's contributed to the revision of the master plan that was introduced. And what we're gonna find out more about is kind of a much more socially progressive vision. The solidarity quota, which requires a percentage of the built area to be destined for social housing. He's worked on improving the implementation of what they call special zones of social interest. And I hope he'll talk more about that. And we'll talk more about some of the zoning work on lot size that's going on. He's going to talk about his recent experiences in the revision of the master plan and the zoning law in Sao Paulo. And then finally, Lauren Fisher, who is currently a PhD candidate here, is I would say one of my students and Dave King. And she's going to talk about essentially the question of value capture. She's been working on looking at issues of transport provision and land use regulation in US cities. The work she does focuses on financing and governance apparatuses. And she's been looking at mid-sized cities. One of the things I'm enjoying about this conference is we started with essentially the 100th anniversary of New York City zoning, but we're not talking to ourselves. We're talking about the much larger issue of this question of the public sector's role in regulating the urban built environment. And Lauren is going to take that the next step. And then we'll, after the presentations, we will have some questions. And then I will make some concluding comments and we'll call it a conference. So, let me carry it if you will. It starts. It depends, it's, I teach my students to answer every question by saying that first. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. I don't have any slides. I'm just gonna talk for a couple of minutes about the importance of inclusionary policies. As I know many of you are experiencing here in New York or wherever you might be from, in many, many cities across the globe, there's a real housing crisis, particularly when it comes to affordability. HUD has a more than $45 billion annual budget, but with our funding, we're essentially serving one of every four households that is income qualified for affordable housing, right? So, we used to, most of the people that had low income lived in what you might call naturally occurring, right? Market rate affordability. Land values were low where people lived and there wasn't a lot of demand and so they had affordability. And in a lot of our cities that market rate affordability is essentially disappearing. And yet the funding to subsidize housing has been slow to materialize. 85% of that $45 billion a year budget is spent to house people that we already house in America. So every year rents go up, the share that 85% grows every year. So there's less and less discretionary funding to do anything else. And whether those dollars of HUDs get meaningfully spent depends a heck of a lot on what local governments are doing. In some markets, the vouchers that we provide that give low income households ostensible mobility to choose where they want to live, to pick a low crime neighborhood, to pick a good school district, those vouchers can't be used in those communities either because there's an absolute dearth of multifamily housing or because the rent is so much higher than the value of the voucher. So that money goes unused or underutilized. I will say that both zoning, local land use practices, but even the development process itself has a really big bearing on whether or not you get much affordable housing. You probably know this, it's true across the globe, it's certainly true in America that the production of our gross domestic product, the actual vibrancy of the economy is hugely different across the country. And relatively few places provide the bulk of the nation's GDP. You could name them, we're in one of them, right? San Francisco is another one of those places, Los Angeles is one of those places. So the old model of economic mobility, which is kind of one of the longest standing myths about America, right? That we're a place, this country is a place where whatever, however lowly your birth through hard work and education, you can rise, right? You can improve your circumstances for yourself and your children and for, and for quite a while that was absolutely true, especially the first half of the last century. But that has really stopped being true. I know most of you have probably read Raj Chetty's research, and if you haven't, it's an absolute must read. It talks a lot about economic mobility and a new study has just been released yesterday, in fact. But what's happening is that people still want to go to those places where a wide range of jobs are being produced and where they have real opportunity ostensibly to be able to take a step up on the economic ladder. But because the jobs are being produced at a much higher rate than the housing is being produced, housing is astronomically expensive in these places, and people sometimes go there anyway, and they pay 40%, 50% of their income or more to try to find housing, and then there's an accident or someone in their family gets sick or that startup they went to be part of goes under, and now those families are homeless, right? They're in a much worse circumstance than they were before, and might be set back years in terms of their own asset building and accumulation. And in some places, some people don't even choose to go to those places anymore because they know, they've heard the stories about how hard it is to find housing, so these local policies end up having a huge effect on economic mobility across the country, and even whether this notion of the American dream is actually even still alive. I know we have some presenters from Canada. The American dream is totally alive in Canada. Canada has a lot more economic mobility than the United States does, but I think it's a problem that people aren't fully aware of. Another real difference, I've been at some international meetings lately, including Habitat 3, where the US negotiations with the rest of the world were quite difficult over some of these issues, especially when it came to the differences between national governments and subnational governments, because in the United States, we give so much control to states, and states in turn give that control to local governments. So community groups that you've already talked about, I think Gerald Caden began today's discussion with it, have enormous power in a lot of ways to stop anything from happening in their community, and in many of these places, let's call them the best places, the places with the lowest crime, the places with the greatest job access, the places with the best school systems, where people would really choose if they had a choice to want to be. Those places also have the most politically active, the people who contribute and regularly vote, the most politically active groups who local politicians tend to listen to, and what do they want? They want no changes in their neighborhood, none at all, and they never say it's because I don't want people who aren't like me to live here, they use euphemisms like, well those multi-family buildings would change the character of our community, that it wouldn't be compatible with the historic architecture of our neighborhoods. They have a lot of reasons why, and even if they're afraid of a loss of property value, they're really concerned about that, and even if you and I were offered to bond them against their property value loss, they would just move on to one of those other arguments, and so they exercise a lot of control, so as a result, in a lot of places, either no housing is getting built or certainly no affordable housing is getting built in the neighborhoods that might have the most capacity, and that have the greatest opportunity for people who really want the ability to rise. That's not true in every community, and there are places, and this is one of the things I've been able to observe at HUD, there are places that are taking a lot of steps, and in some ways, I wish I had more discretion at HUD to reward those places. I'd like to give them more of my money, right, because my money will go further in those places that have adopted inclusionary zoning policies, who have allowed things like accessory dwelling units, who have put a lot of their own money into affordable housing production, so they're not just relying on the federal government's money, but they're actually putting money in themselves because they understand, especially some of these places that do have a strong economy, that they need to offer a wide range of housing because they have a wide range of salaries being offered, wages being offered in their city, and to support a vibrant city, you need a wide range of workers, and they shouldn't have to come from 60 miles away to be able to work in your community. What's has been difficult about making these changes, so when I was the planning director, we changed our zoning code for the first time in 56 years, and it was, I think by the sixth year of a two-year zoning project, we got done, but it really, really took a long time, and what was so difficult, I think, for people is that even when they were swimming in the tide of change, they didn't realize it. They didn't see transportation choices changing. They didn't see the demographic changes. Even as they rattled around in a house, a single person in a house that previously had five people in it, they didn't equate that with the sudden anemia of their retail street, their neighborhood retail street, that now had a ton less customers because the effective population of that neighborhood had changed in a generation, right? So they would say to me, the planner, I want you to make my retail street vibrant, but I don't want to change anything, right? I don't want any more people living here because that would change the character of my community. They weren't interested in my reasons, right? But they did want that more vibrancy, and so they wanted, it turns out, a lot of other things. They wanted to age in place, right? They, even if they had retirement income, they were worried because housing prices kept rising and whether or not they'd be able to stay where they were. So we talked about accessory dwelling units as a way that they could supplement their income and maybe have younger people living approximate to them that would give them some security and maybe some assistance as they aged in place. For inclusionary policies, we really talked a lot to the employers in our community. I have to say developers didn't love it but they eventually went along with it because we offered such a high density bonus that we made them more or less whole. And we tried to satisfy neighborhood groups by first doing a survey of all the historic neighborhoods and looked to see if adding that density bonus would actually change the character irreparably of a community. So for some places that consisted mostly of two-story buildings, we determined in those historic districts, yeah, we couldn't add a big density bonus. But in most of the city we were able to do that. The district is a place that puts more than $100 million a year into affordable housing. And I would tell you, I'd be the first to tell you it's not nearly enough, right? All of these things are not nearly enough. But I think zoning has a lot to offer. Our last panel talked about Wally White and making sure that you regulate what you want. So some of these policies I think are the absolute bare minimum that cities need to do. And I didn't even really get to the notion of having the kind of zoning that would allow people of any income to live in any neighborhood that they want, maybe not, that isn't the kind of thing that happens overnight. But if you have a development pattern where there's been no affordable housing built in certain parts of your community ever, or in the last 20 years, then that's a zoning problem. It's probably not just a zoning problem, but it's also a zoning problem. And that's the kind of thing that I think planning and zoning really needs to address. I hope we get to have a chance to have a conversation as we go forward. I'd love to talk to a little bit more to you about things that are changing, not just the demographics, but lots of other things are changing in cities. So zoning has to both be adamant about what it wants, but also have enough flexibility so it can adapt to things that are surely gonna be changing over the next 20 years. Things like our rate of car utilization. And what do we do with how much of cities we now give over to car storage when that won't be necessary. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you so much and thank you, Elliot, for inviting me and for all of the participants in the conference. This is an exciting year in terms of the celebration of the 100 years of zoning. And it's certainly spurring a lot of great conversation on some of these very important topics. And I'm really honored to be part of it. So thank you. So I did wanna talk about what New York City is doing to address the kinds of challenge. Challenges that Harriet was talking about. So New York City faces an incredible affordable housing crisis that any of you who live in the city certainly are familiar with. But basically, I think the most sort of telling statistic is that if you put all of our affordable housing, our public housing, the subsidized housing that the city has built over the last four decades, our rent stabilized, our lowest cost rent stabilized apartments, and sort of naturally occurring low income housing. If you put all of that housing together, we have about 465,000 units of housing across the city that are affordable to people making 30, 40, 50% of area median income. So people, an individual making between 19 and about $25,000 or a family of three making between about 24 and about $40,000. Unfortunately, we have a million of those households. So we have 465,000 units that are affordable to them. And we have a million of the households. And that includes everything that we've been working so hard to build and to preserve and our public housing. So we have a really serious crisis. We've tried very hard to do the kinds of things that Harriet mentioned. We've put a lot of our own money into the problem over the decades. The mayor, when he came into office, announced what we call Housing New York, which was a commitment to either, to finance either new construction or preservation of 200,000 units of housing that would be income restricted, that would be affordable. Two and three quarters years in, I'm happy to report that we've done over 55,000 of those units. The problem though, that certainly that Harriet's talk highlighted is 37,000 of those are preserved, which mostly serve the people who are already in them, who are of course critically important to protect and to serve, but new construction, we've done about almost 18,000 units. Our target is to do 40% of the total as new construction, but that's really brings to the fore the problem that we face in our zoning. The incomes that we serve with that housing, we are very committed in the city to providing mixed income buildings and mixed income neighborhoods, which we believe are stronger, bring the kinds of resiliency, the kinds of diversity that are so important for neighborhoods. We have so far provided a little more than half of that for traditionally low income households that are served by, for example, tax credits and other things that are usually people, the families of three making around $40,000. We've done 28% of it for the very, very lowest income families, the people making from zero to 23,000 for a family of three, for example. And then we've done a little less than 20% for the moderate income workforce. And we try in every building to have a range of housing across that spectrum so that we get that diversity. Now that was made possible by a couple of major legislative changes that we worked very hard to secure. One of them is the mandatory inclusionary program that I'm gonna mention. A second really important one that tried to tackle a lot of those barriers that were mentioned is what we call zoning for quality and affordability, which was the first comprehensive update to our zoning code since 1961. It was unfortunately more than 500 pages of amendments to the existing 3,000 pages, but it made a lot of, I think, very important improvements to reduce those barriers to update things like parking or car storage and is already paying off in all kinds of ways. There's not a day that goes by that projects don't come to me. A senior project, for example, came in last week that had been able to move from providing 133 senior housing units to 168 in the same footprint, just because of the improvements that we had made in reducing parking requirements in changing some of the regulations that allowed them to build much more flexibly. And then we are engaged in comprehensive rezonings that do increase the density allowed in various neighborhoods across the city. So I wanna say just a word about that mandatory inclusionary housing program. It requires more of developers than any other major cities inclusionary policies across the United States. And the basic premise is anytime you see growth, you will see affordable housing. If you see a building going up where we have allowed more density, more capacity for growth, you're going to see affordable housing in that building. That's the basic premise. So if you want more retail in your neighborhood and we're rezoning it either as a private, an individual rezoning or a comprehensive rezoning, it's going to have affordable housing. One of the key features of the program, and I think this is really important going forward, is that we provided a lot of flexibility and a lot of what I would call optionality in the mandatory program. So when a piece of property or an entire neighborhood or part of an entire neighborhood is rezoned, the community gets to choose which of these options or which combination of these options, it wants to govern the affordable housing requirement in that neighborhood. And that allows for neighborhoods that are at different points of the economic cycle, that are different kinds of housing stock that have different degrees of already existing affordable housing. It allows them to do more tailoring to what the particular needs of that neighborhood are. So there are four options and you can choose among them or the first two have to be, one of the first two has to be in any rezoning, but basically they toggle. They either require more units to be affordable or they require the affordability to be deeper. So if you want deeper affordability, you have to ask for fewer units. If you want to have more units, they have to be a little bit higher income served. But again, it's always a range of incomes and there's a lot of flexibility in the incomes because we allow averaging. We're trying to hit the kinds of occupations, the kind of people who we're trying to serve across the community. And we've tried very hard in the mandatory inclusionary program to hit incomes that aren't hit by other programs. So typically, most housing across the United States is financed in some way, shape or form through low income housing tax credits. Low income housing tax credits zero in on basically families making 50% AMI, 60% AMI, 60% AMI is about 48, 49,000 for a family of three and most housing in the United States that is financed through tax credit housing targets those incomes. So in New York, if you were in that 50 to 60 ban, you stood a much higher chance of winning the lottery to get affordable housing than if you were in any other income ban and the income bans are very strict. If you're a dollar too little, a dollar too much, you're out of luck. So what we've tried to do is say no, every one of our programs is gonna fit together so that between zero and 30% AMI, 40% AMI, 60%, 70%, 80%, there's gonna be housing at each of those income bans to serve the variety of our population. It is already being applied. This is the first comprehensive neighborhood rezoning in which it was applied in East New York. This is a public site that we are building. It's providing affordable housing. It's providing a thousand foot school. It's providing a new park. It's completely ending up with a revamping of the transportation, of the transportation, not the transportation alternatives, but the streetscape, et cetera. And it's going to bring on that public site 100% affordable housing at a range of incomes. In a private rezoning, this is a private rezoning of a big parcel of land in the Bronx, where we are getting about 900 units of affordable housing. And by the way, anything that's required from the mandatory inclusionary program is permanently affordable. So we don't lose it in 30 years or 40 years. But each of these projects also brings other things that the neighborhood needs, the retail that Harriet mentioned. This project is one of my favorites because it's bringing a terrific new YMCA, or YWCA, I can't remember which, it's bringing a astronomy lab on top of one of the roofs that is the classroom for the Bronx High School of Science to study, yeah. And so it's bringing a variety of things. Okay, so lessons learned. It's not gonna be easy. We have the distinction of having every one of the 59 community boards in the city of New York vote against this, but we still got it passed. So it is not gonna be easy. It's really important to provide that flexibility and optionality that I mentioned. It's really important to have, we commissioned an objective analysis of what we could ask for, what was financially feasible, what served the needs of the communities. That independent group really went out to all of the neighborhoods and all of the different stakeholders and surveyed them. It's important to remember when people push for, well, let's have a higher requirement, but that 50% of nothing is nothing. And it turns out that 30% of 100 is more than 50% of zero, right? We have to go beyond the usual coalitions. And then the last thing that I want to say, which hopefully we'll spur some of the conversation later, is it's not over, even when it's over, because once we secured this, we then ran into all of these buzz saws in applying it. So happy to talk about those buzz saws and what they mean when we get to the panel. Okay, thank you so much. Good afternoon for all. First of all, I'd like to greet my friends of panel, and I'd like to thank the opportunity to stay here, be here in this debate, and especially thank to Bernadette for an invitation. So I will talk about inclusionary zoning in Sao Paulo, focus on the special zones of social interest, the words in Portuguese is Zez, in my presentation when I say Zez is about the special zoning. So first of all, it's important to know about the evolution of Zez in Brazil. It started in the 80s, in some municipalities was implemented in the 90s, and after was introduced in the city statehood only as an instrument. And after in 2009, in the law of the program My House, My Life, Minha Casa, Minha Vida in Portuguese, it was introduced the concept of special zones of social interest. In the municipality of Sao Paulo, it was started in 2002 in the master plan, and it was improved in the revision of the master plan into 2014 and after in this year in the revision of zoning law. The context of Sao Paulo to understand the context of planning, we have a concentration of formal jobs in the consolidated urban area. So the social vulnerability is spread in the periphery area. So there is a great challenge to deal with the opportunities of jobs and the vulnerability and also how to deal with the movement of the population from the periphery to central area every day. And so there are another problem of scale of housing needs. We are not talking about some thousand inhabitants, but almost four million inhabitants living in precarious situation in our country. So we are reviewing our municipal plan of housing. Housing, it's foreseen in the master plan, and there are, this is the number. Intervention in the territory is the necessity of slum-uprograding actions, programs of 8,800 households. 8,800 households, new housing units, the number is that and also the regulation of rental market. So the problem is the huge scale. How do inclusionary zoning for large scale of the problem? The comprehensive urban planning of Sao Paulo, I would like to highlight today, the zoning of Sao Paulo is linked to the master plan. This is the map of the master plan that defined the macro areas. It's important for an example, in the red one, is the only part of the city that is possible to implement urban operations. And the tools of SEPAC that was that was delivered in the morning in the first presentation. And also the access, the idea of put more people living are surrounding the net of subways and trains. And we proposed the set of zoning, set of zones in the zoning related to three main strategies. First of all is the zone of transformation, zones surrounding the transport infrastructure. Second is the zones of qualification. It is between transformation and preservation. And also there is a set of zones related to preservation. It's a cultural preservation, heritage preservation, social preservation, environmental preservation. And so we have, this is the image of the whole zoning law. And the zones, the special zones of social interest in the left side is in the, is a kind of zones of qualification. So now about inclusionary zoning in Sao Paulo. What is social housing for us? Social housing is an affordable housing with some building characteristics. For an example, the first one, social housing type one, the wages of the family is 2,000 reais. It's almost today $620. And we have other types of social housing that's mandatory to build to destiny in the special zones of social interest. And what type of zaze we have in Sao Paulo? We have five types of zaze, the special zones of social interest. The first one in the left side is the type one that it is a boundary in the slums area with irregular settlements and low income population. The goal of this zaze is to protect the right to housing. So it is mandatory to destiny 60% of each built area for social housing. And it's obligatory to implement with a plan of urbanization, a kind of a district plan with a participation of the community. And it is approved in a kind of a law, special law that defines special parameters of each boundary of each zone. The zaze two, three, four, and five are related to the reserve land and building for social housing. So the difference between the zones is the two zone, zaze type two is for vacant or underutilized areas. Zaze three is for underutilized and vacant buildings. And the four type is in the surrounding the reservoir area. And also the five type is very similar that type two, but the percentage of the destination of built area to social housing is 40% and not 60%. So as we can see in the map, there are most part of zaze type one because there are most slums and irregular settlements in the city. So this is the big challenge of housing policy. We started a discussion in Sao Paolo what we do after the urbanization, the title and the build of social housing. What's the day after of zaze type one? So we create the mixed zones of social interest is very similar, but it's not obligatory to this in a percentage of social housing of built area, but otherwise it's better to promote mixed uses. So this is the map. As you can see the red zones, we have the specials, the mixed zones of social interest. It was changed from zaze type one to this type. It's an evolution. And this table, we can see the difference between the current zoning law and the former zoning law. We improve it and increase the area of zaze. As you can see zaze type two, there are 80% more areas. So there is a possibility to face the housing, the housing problem in the city. There is another instrument, the solidarity quota. It's obligatory to this 10% of built area to social housing in enterprises with more than 20,000 square meters of built area, but there is an alternative to comply this mandatory built area. For example, you can comply in the same lot, in other lot or donation of other lot or donation of resources for the municipal fund of urban development. I would like to highlight some points, very important. First of all, zaze isolated doesn't work. So first of all, I would like to highlight the financing alternatives. We have subsidy at national level, we have subsidy at state level and at local level, but we also have the owner's grant of the building rights. As you can see, we have a floor area ratio of one. The difference between one and four, the maximum, you have to pay a counterpart for the municipality. The resources go to a fund and is applied in some facilities and also social housing, 30% for social housing. It's obligatory. In the last 10 years, we obtain it 1,500,000,000 reais. It's almost 500 million dollars for us is significant. is significant and there are more 4 billion obtained in urban operation. And other thing it's the linkage with municipal urban policy. We have an instrument so-called land compulsory, partially building and use. In the vacant areas, underutilized areas and unutilized areas is obligatory to build or to use. We notify, first of all, the property. He must develop a project. If he doesn't develop a project in one year, we increase the tax, the property tax. So we are implemented, as you can see, we implemented these instruments in areas, mainly in Zays, type 2, in empty areas. So we obtain it until now. We notify a significant thousand hundred buildings and it is almost 2 million square meters of built area, sorry, of lot area. It is important because it makes that the vacant areas in special zones, the property must have a social destiny for that. Many issues and challenges, first of all, what works in Zays? The lesson is shows that Zays one, it works, it works well because the effectiveness to protect the right to housing. So this type one was very successful in our experience. Second point, there is a problem because Zays type 2, 3, 4 and 5, the value of the land is so high, not so high like in the central area, but it's high to pay with subsidy. So there is a difficult to promote social housing in vacant and underutilized areas. That's the reason that we are exploring the linkage between Zays and other tools of planning. For an example, the mandatory land parceling and using and also the alternative finance funding of, for an example, land value capture. So we have many information to share but I think in the debate I can share more about you. Thank you. First of all, thank you so much for the invitation to speak today. I want to give a special note of thanks to Bernadette and Valerie and Deepa and Kathy who have done the difficult and often exhausting work of pulling this together and providing a great forum for us to discuss this. We have an amazing cohort of PhD students here at Columbia so it's wonderful to be able to kind of showcase our talents. So my talk today is going to differ slightly in that I'm going to bring in transportation to this discussion that I think has largely been about land regulation and our panel about housing. I see transportation, housing, land use regulation as all kind of needing to be linked in order to create equitable and sustainable cities. My talk today is going to focus or take information from a book chapter that I co-authored with Dr. Skalar last in the spring as well as my dissertation work. So the integration of land use and transportation has been an aim of urban policy for over two decades but achieving success has been problematic in many American cities as low density land use and automobile based development continues to dominate. The iterative relationship between land use and transit provides a chicken and an egg issue. Local governments are unwilling or politically unable to alter land regulations in favor of density or to get rid of parking without guarantee that they'll be viable transit service provided. Transit providers on the other hand who are usually not local but regionally based are unwilling to spend their limited resources to extend systems into area that don't have favorable land use regulations. Dan Chapman at UC Berkeley has argued that transit can be a trojan horse for changes in land use but this causal relationship to work successfully planning governance and financing institutions must be integrated. In current practice more and more cities in the middle of the country, yes there are cities in the middle of the country, are turning to the tool of value capture as a means for financing new transit services as well as encouraging alterations to land use regulations and I will say unfortunately the question of affordable housing has not come up in a lot of the cities that I'm looking at in the Midwest. There is very much as Harriet mentioned this idea that the market provides enough affordability that it's not something that needs to be addressed through policies or regulations. So since the mid 1980s funding for transit has been decentralizing, has been moving away from being provided by the federal government and been forced in more on states and localities. As you can see from chart one this kind of returns us to how we built transit at the turn of the 20th century when it was largely a private speculation enterprise. It linked very, very heavily to real estate. Transit nowadays as you can see down here relies more heavily on specialized taxes than does funding for highway and so that is having a big impact on the financial kind of stability of cities. So in this map you can see some of the cities I'm looking at my dissertation. These are cities that are building modern streetcar systems. The decentralization of transit funding over the past three decades has coincided with an increased recognition of the environmental and economic disadvantages that sprawling auto dependent development brings to urban regions. So although funds for transit are becoming increasingly scarce, the desire to build urban transit systems has increased considerably, particularly in mid-sized cities that abandoned their transit systems in favor of the automobile in the middle of the 20th century. Given the move toward decentralized funding and the increased financial pressures faced by local governments for a wide variety of public services, how are local governments funding their transit systems? Over the past 10 years there's been a turn toward value capture for transportation. Value capture in many of these cities is simply an application of pre-existing tools often used for economic development such as tax increment financing or special assessment districts that are used to capture the increased value of real estate that comes from public sector transport investments in order to fund those investments. Traditionally we've relied on two groups to fund transportation. The user pays which is through the fair revenue or everyone pays which are general taxes and grants but value captures targets a different group and that is this non-user beneficiary pays which is often property owners and real estate developers. The value capture mantra you can see follows this very nice schematic. One of the things I'm looking at is how well this schematic actually plays out in implementation. I appreciated Dr. Caden's article about implementation in his comments earlier. I completely agree that I think in planning schools we not just need to make zoning sexy but we need to make implementation sexy and not just in a bad way about corruption but talking about on the ground what are some of the institutional and financial constraints that prevent us from actually putting tools to action in a way that gets us the outcomes we want. So the value capture follows this idea of the benefits principle that the cost of a transportation investment to a contributor should be proportional to the benefits received and that's kind of the equity framework that a lot of promoters of value capture propose. Unfortunately in the actual implementation of value capture which is used to both revitalize land regulation and to fund transit there are several potential pitfalls. The nature of taxation schemes that is employed for value capture, generational equity concerns, questions of tax incidents and larger impacts on the planning process which is probably where I will spend the majority of my time talking about today. So value capture tends to prioritize or does prioritize horizontal equality which is treating equally by taxing non-user beneficiaries. As I mentioned it adheres to this benefits principle. Value capture schemes largely ignore issues of vertical equity whose driving principle is the notion that those who are able to pay higher taxes should contribute more to those who are not but that this should not be a determination in the citing or locational decisions of where we make public interventions. When the benefits principle becomes the dominant concern in citing and investment decisions as seems to be the case in a lot of the mid-sized Midwestern cities that I am studying, it can preclude the provision of services and investments in less wealthy areas of the city. Speaking to what Dr. Weber mentioned earlier about spatial equity concerns. In defense the local implementers of value capture that I talked to adhere to a trickle down theory of economic development that higher tax revenues created in one area of the city can be redistributed to areas that need it most. The historical record does not prove that this will actually happen. And of course the devil is in the details with value capture. Here is a chart from a conno at all on the different options that cities have for using value capture. The ones in red are the ones that are most often used because they are the easiest to implement. Unfortunately they also tend to have the most regressive impacts. Another issue with using land values to fund transportation issues comes with whether the question of whether land values are actually a stable source of funding over time. In the cities I'm looking at there aren't a lot of growth pressures. Some of them have kind of held their population studies for two to three decades. More of them have lost population over the last two to three decades. And so these policies are not necessarily being put into to sustain the growth trends that they're seeing but rather to encourage and stimulate growth in particular areas of the city. Value capture schemes differ by their geographic nature. You can see in one case of Kansas City, Missouri, the area in red is the area that is being taxed to fund the transit system. And in the Minneapolis case they're drawing the squares more kind of closely around the transit stations. If dedicated revenue streams from sales taxes or land-based financing schemes are used to support public sector debt, we raise issues of generational equity. Future taxpayers must pay down debts incurred by present ones. Generational equity concerns increase when the nature of the revenue stream becomes more speculative and the reliability of future returns is questionable. There's evidence that cities are not good at making realistic projections of land value. From 2000 to 2004, Kansas City, Missouri's TIF program produced only 23% of what it was expected to produce. Despite that, the city continues to use TIF very liberally to fund all types of new investments and encourage real estate. In addition, a lot of these cities are hiring consultants that see similar land use dynamics in cities like Portland and Seattle and apply them to cities like Detroit and Cincinnati and Kansas City when there's really not a whole lot of evidence that those real estate markets are similar. So one of the other things I think is important to think about when we talk about city building and land regulation are tax incidence issues. The use of TIF or property tax abatement or urban redevelopment grants in a lot of these cities overlap one another. So we have a concentration of these types of land value revenue raising tools in a single area of the city, which contributes to spatial equity issues, but also raises questions about what kind of taxes are people paying. In this instance of Kansas City, the value capture mechanism for the train is overlaid on existing property tax abatements. So in a sense, you have a lot of property owners who are paying for certain investments they want while not paying into the bigger pot for public services that is necessary to kind of sustain a city wide city wide sustainability. So my final slides are talking about how these value capture mechanisms are starting to change the planning process that we see in a lot of these cities. More specifically, the small geographical nature of value capture schemes, which is necessary to adhere to the benefits principle promoted by them means that transportation planning does not happen at the regional level. It's not even happening at a level that considers the city of a whole. A simplified schematic of the transportation planning process on top and my preliminary sketch of how a planning occurs in many of my streetcar value capture cities. The focus is moving squarely to what can we finance rather than being concerned with goals, policies and targets or what do we need given values X, Y and Z. Governing schemes utilized to plan and implement value capture schemes and transport investments are increasingly happening outside of city government. Non-profit organizations with varying levels of government affiliation are planning and operating streetcars in Kansas City, Detroit, Atlanta and Cincinnati. These projects have varying levels of public sector oversight, but rely heavily on the ability of the public sector to borrow on behalf of the projects and to take on the future costs of maintenance and operations. Real quick questions on who decides this planning from the ballot box is very common in value capture cities. A lot of Midwestern states have passed laws that make it mandatory to have referenda on any new taxes. What this does is encourage cities to draw districts that reduce the number of people that have to be involved in the planning process. So in the Kansas City case you can see that out of the 6,500 voters that could have voted, only 551 voters voted. So it's 8.5 percent of the eligible population and 0.2 percent of the city population that committed the city to a $140 million project. I know I'm going over time, but I'll just be real quick. There's also questions about whether the value capture districts that are being drawn are actually adhering to sustainability and public financing. Here you can see the originally proposed picture for the value capture district in gray and expanded Kansas City. And the neighborhood that is removed, the picture on the right hand side is one of the denser, more walkable and richest residential neighborhoods in Kansas City, who was against the streetcar. So there's questions as to whether localities are really using these financing tools in a sustainable manner, or whether the politics has kind of taken over and the impetus being just get something in the ground and get it built. So by expanding the types of funding available for transit and by encouraging land use and transportation integration, the regulatory tool of value capture clearly has some benefits. But as with many planning tools, the devil is in the details. While institutional capacity is cited repeatedly by best practices value capture literature, the actual implementation of value capture and how localities choose to fund and govern their value capture schemes may paradoxically contribute to reducing institutional capacity at a city level and particularly within the planning function. At a more abstract level, value capture tools for transit and real estate reflect a consumer model of urban governance and public finance. In this view, urban residents are seen as public goods consumer beneficiaries rather than citizens. The distinction is important as citizens people are entitled to benefits as a matter of course and not their ability to pay directly for the public benefit they are receiving. A conception of the public as consumer beneficiaries favors decentralized governance and funding mechanisms as well as hyper local planning processes. Although useful for implementing piecemeal solutions, such approaches undermine a holistic approach to city building and the sustainable and equitable outcomes that seeks to foster. Institutional reform may be guided by a revitalized planning mindset that is willing to challenge ideas about the appropriate role of the public sector and to assert clear values with regard to social and economic equity. Institutional arrangements reflect our values and priorities. We must look critically at the institutional structures that house the tools we use, whether they be TIFT, whether they be mandatory inclusionary housing, and do these existing institutions as planners really get us what we want, or do we need to focus more on the difficult work of institutional reform. Regional institutional structures with fiscal capacity to collect and redistribute land-based taxes must be complemented by a comprehensive regulatory strategy for economic development, affordable housing, and transit provision that also concerns the distribution of economic development incentives and taxation schemes. Fractured governing and financing schemes may be fruitful for implementing piecemeal solutions, but they're counterproductive for holistically planning equitable and sustainable cities. Thank you. Well, thank you all for these presentations. While Lauren was speaking, I was realizing very clearly that actually this is all about value capture. But whether we're talking about for transit or we're talking about leveraging the value of cities that are doing well to create housing, we're talking about value capture in all four cases. There are a couple of questions that occurred to me that I get the privilege of asking these questions. The first question is, I was thinking about while Harriet was speaking, the notion of the, and while Lauren was speaking, the notion of a affordability, housing is affordable where nobody wants to be and housing isn't affordable where people want to be. So one question is, how much, when we look at zoning, are we looking at cause or are we looking at the problem or is that, or is it easier to just latch onto that? And would, if we got rid of zoning, would we solve the problem? That's a very facetious question, but the notion being, to what extent is that the problem? I remember because I had worked on, when I was working on, on the UN Millennium Project on the slum issue, water was an issue and somebody finally said, you know, nobody ever moves to a city to get clean drinking water. People move to cities where they think they have opportunities. So the question is, how much are we looking at value capture and we look at cause and effect? Are we looking at what the problem is? Are we just looking at the fact that we no longer have a welfare state? And we're looking for solutions. I would just throw those bigger questions out at the panel. And as I, and I argue that what we are all talking about is, is how do we capture a piece of the, of the value created, the public good created and is that enough? There. I would say that another commonality in our presentations in general is that, maybe with the exception of Brazil, that, that certainly there's been a federal retreat from the funding of what might be considered public goods. And so many places are stepping up to provide those things, but they are doing it essentially on a competitive scarcity principle. So they are trying to create places that, that, that out compete other places in terms of capturing resources. Those resources are investment dollars and smart people, right? And with investment dollars and smart people come employment and economic activity, etc. And some cities have figured out that if they don't provide the, the benefits of the welfare state, if you will, in those, in those communities that, that they, what their, the, the, the, the golden goose, you know, won't, won't be around anymore because people simply will not be able to afford to be there. And for many of them, the realization has happened well in advance of their ability to do anything about it. So that would be San Francisco, which, you know, many of us call the ghost of Christmas future, right? For us, you know, they've been wildly successful on the economy and dreadfully unsuccessful on the housing. And, and, and for them they have the zoning that might allow it, but their development process has no by right development. Everything is discretionary. And the groups fight it and it's very, very difficult. I'm only kind of addressing part of your question, but I'm happy to turn to some of my colleagues. I would like to discuss that in Brazil today, who we have the federal program, my house, my life, the federal program by the, the houses from the entrepreneur. He proposed a project if it follows the rules of the program, the fund by the house. So as cheap as cheapest is the land, more feasible is the, the project. So the question is social housing, if you, if you produce social housing as the product of the project, it is not an impact for other situation. But if you, the practicing of affordable housing linked to other projects like the solidarity quota, there is an impact in the product of the real estate. So the problem for us is the, the building, the entrepreneurs are very interested in social housing, but as a special product with total subsidy. So most, most social housing built in Sao Paulo wasn't built in special zones of social interest. Why? Because there is a special rule for social housing that allow, allow to, to build social housing in every zone, including environmental protected areas, zones. So what, which lot is cheapest? The lot in this kind of zones. So this is the, this is the problem because we have to link the special zones with the production of social housing. So now in the new law is not allowed to build social housing in environmental, environmental protected areas. So we hope the other instruments can't decrease the price of the land because it's mandatory to, to build. You cannot build, you cannot use, but it's mandatory. You must have a destination of use in vacant lots. So this is, we try to do an, an opportunity to make it affordable, but in, as a mandatory politics. Follow up on that. I think one of the things that we learned on, in the inclusionary housing debate was how critical it was to tie the affordable housing to the market rate housing, right? And so in, in our voluntary program, which has many detractors, you could build the affordable housing on, in some cheaper land, not environmentally protected land, but cheaper land in other parts of the city. And that causes lots of problems. The, in the mandatory inclusionary program, you must build the, the affordable housing right where the market rate housing is. And that contributes to the mix of incomes that make sure that there is opportunity in every neighborhood for low income families to, to move. But it's critically important, but it is a serious tradeoff because you can often get two or three homes for the price of one, you know, if you build on the cheaper areas. And so that is a very deliberate and very controversial tradeoff that, that gets made. I'd just like to make a comment following up on what Harry has said. I think there is an interesting question and the, the, as the federal government continues to shrink and particularly as it might change its priorities over what will hopefully only be the next four years, if cities are really well positioned to act as welfare states. And I like your point of there being kind of this regional competition, but I in a lot of cities I'm looking at, there's also this intra regional competition. And so cities are competing heavily with their suburbs, which is where a lot of jobs are. They've made a bet in the cases I'm looking at that suburbs will not build transit and they're probably right that they won't. But still, you know, can cities act as a welfare state when they're so fractured at the regional level, which we know is kind of where economic processes really play out. Two, two quick responses to those comments from, from Vicki. The thing that I would tell you, and we haven't done it perfectly in the district, our inclusionary zoning has only been in effect since 2006. That argument exists always that you could get more housing if you build it, you know, next door or one ward over. And basically it all rolls downhill until suddenly all your affordable housing is concentrated in a single part of the city. For us, that's east of the river where we have, you know, huge racial and economic segregation. So I think even when you get a horrible headline, about million dollar affordable housing, you know, because on high value land and expensive, you know, high finished units, that's what it costs. You have to bear it, right? Because otherwise you're right. You get that argument is there in every single project until all the development is in places where poor people already live. And I would say that there are some exceptions. I don't know so much about in the Midwest, but two things are happening that have made both transit more interesting and regional cooperation more possible. Number one is the is the suburbanization of poverty. So a lot of jurisdictions who were never having to build any affordable housing, because in our country, it's an option, whether you take HUD money for that or not is up to you, right? And a lot of places opt not to do it, right? So it's an option in communities and a lot of places didn't see fit to do it. But now that poverty, now that it's becoming very expensive to live particularly in successful center cities, the poor people are moving as much as they do in Europe and in other places in the world to the periphery. And now suddenly people are interested and even from a workforce perspective, you know, I have workers who can't live in my jurisdiction anymore. I need to do something about this. Oh, you have expertise in the center city. Can we talk? Right? So that's one thing. The other thing is you talked about transportation costs being part of affordability. Absolutely. And, you know, I've got a great example, you know, from the recession. So in 2008, when I was planning director, I saw hundreds of cars begin to drop off the Department of Motor Vehicle Rolls. I thought people were fleeing the city. They were dialing down their transportation costs because they could. To weather the recession, two car households became one car households. One car households became zero car households. The city had almost no foreclosure or bankruptcy. And in the same jobs and housing market, the region is a single jobs and housing market. The prices dipped but never plunged. The the the receipts and the property values. There was a there definitely was a dip, but there was also a huge rebound right away. So the city ended up capturing a larger share post recession of population growth and of job growth. And so that was largely because of those transportation choices. And almost every jurisdiction in the Washington region now has transit projects on their planning. Right. They're like and even a pattern of development that would allow for future transit because they saw the benefit of having those transportation choices, you know, in a you know, in a very in a very dire economy. And and yes, jobs were always there in Washington, but the differences in that same market were really stark. We'll take the we'll take about two questions. I want to stay on on time. So you pick them. I'm neutral. So I have a question about this idea of like how affordable housing programs work differently. If you if it's like targeting renters or owners. So I guess like my question for Daniel and about Sao Paulo project, if it's more focused in rent, like affordable rentals or ownership, like the Mi Acasa Mi A Vida. And how do you see that in terms of encouraging economic mobility? And again, the same question, I guess for the whole panel in regards to New York City's affordable housing program. And I guess like just doesn't one thing that I was thinking is that the perpetuation of the project of the affordable housing units would actually encourage in a way inertia. Thank you. Let's take one more question. Let's get another question. OK, so I have a question as as we discuss the new hope of zoning for the future of our city, we seem to leave out in today's conversation water, which in each city and major global cities the impact of water. So we're thinking about a hundred years and it's in our futures of our cities. Can we discuss that zoning economy real estate need to think of the future of our cities through zoning that things greatly greatly affected by sea level rise as well as our environmental forces that has its own plan. Thank you for the question. The Brazilian experience of housing policy at national and local level are focused on the ownership of the property to the low income families. I think it is related to the culture of Brazilians. But there are a lot of enforcements of many municipalities to implement social rent. Today, for an example, and let me correct, it is allowed to build in environmental protected zones, but according to the environmental protected areas of federal law. So in urban operation, an example in urban operation Aguas Praiada, 30 percent of the resources obtained through the counterparts, financial counterparts of CEPACS was implemented in social housing. In the room beside here is presenting the project of Jardim Ejic, the most famous project. And it shows the social housing inside in good urbanized areas that was implemented an urban project. So in this situation, while the project is being implemented, we have a support for the families. It's a social rent, but during the project, instead, the house is finished. So we are trying to explore other kinds of social rent. Nowadays, we will test it in the central area with old buildings that is empty. We notify the owner and now we are trying to have a negotiation to have a social rent in these apartments for low income populations. So the idea of local housing policies is to open the opportunities and alternatives to not only apply, transfer the ownership for the families, but nowadays it is the cheapest solution. The ownership is still the cheapest solution for housing policy. The other question I will share with my friends. Let me just answer on behalf of in terms of New York City. New York City, as you know, is a city of renters. About 70% of our housing is rental housing. In the affordable housing plan, about 10% is home ownership. That's less than the city as a whole, but not less than for the income groups that we serve. I think that one of the challenges of providing home ownership opportunities, first of all, is the mortgage market. As you know, in the United States has been difficult over the last few years. But second of all, there are really serious equity issues that come up about how much of the value increase in the value of the home should go to the lucky winner of the lottery that got that home versus how much it should stay in through income restrictions that apply to their buyers. And that has been a very difficult battle in the city. And we have a lot of legacy home ownership programs where those battles are very much present. And until we work more of that out, I don't think that we'll be seeing a huge increase in the home ownership emphasis of the affordable housing program. I'll start us off on the water question. Obviously, in New York, we are very blessed by a very good water supply, but we are challenged by the water that surrounds us and the climate change that we're seeing and the propensity to storms that we're seeing, obviously. All of our housing that we finance, the affordable housing that we finance has to meet, first of all, the high-screen community standards, but also has to incorporate resiliency standards. And we have abandoned some projects because they can't be built resilient enough and we're retreating from those areas. In other areas, we are trying to make sure that resiliency is built into the project from the get-go. A couple of things. Home ownership is great. I think we've been a little fixated on it in our country as a virtue in and of itself. For certain people, it has absolutely been a pathway to wealth creation, but for many other groups who essentially have access only to part of the real estate market, not so much. And we subsidize home ownership in a profligate way. We spend about $150 billion a year on the home mortgage interest deduction and associated capital gains exclusions for just that category of investment for home ownership. And it skews enormously to the wealthiest people and also to very small geographies. If we really cared about home ownership, we would cap it at a much lower level because people who are buying million-dollar homes don't probably need the tax incentive in order to do that. So that $150 billion compares to the $45 billion that's all of HUD's budget. If you were to add the low-income housing tax credit, it's still nearly three to one toward that benefit. So one of the things that's happened post-recession is that people have seen more of a value in mobility and flexibility and renting is going up in most cities in America. Almost everything that's being built in Washington, D.C., and it's a lot of housing has been multifamily and most of that also rental. So I think we're seeing more of a balance in what's coming. But I think that we, in a very unhealthy way, create benefits that skew unfairly. I would also say that when you talk about water, I think immediately about two things. Stormwater and rising sea levels. So more and more extreme weather events are happening. We've had several 500-year events in this country this year, 38 presidential declared disasters, two 1,000-year events. And most of that has not been a named storm or hurricane. It's just been heavy rain, causing a lot of damage. And so one of the things that some zoning codes are doing in Seattle and D.C. and other places is actually requiring more impervious surface and more green space. So the green area ratio is part of the zoning code in at least those two cities and some others. But I will also raise another issue. That natural occurring affordability and that market rate affordability is often associated with land that floods, land that drains poorly, land that is next to a noxious use, land that's inherently more hazardous. And it's not just that one or two people live there. In some cases, that's where public housing is. That's where whole neighborhoods exist, historic neighborhoods perhaps, but that have always been minority or low income. And I think it's a real existential crisis. In some cases, what is gonna happen in those communities? Especially when it's not like there's a lot of land in lots of cities, especially cities that are growing and seeing success in the economy. It has the potential of becoming sort of a new red lining. If you say for environmental reasons, these neighborhoods can't exist here anymore, where can they go but to the periphery of the region unless you come up with some very clever ways to swap land and to make that happen. But for HUD, that is a crisis. That's something that we're already beginning to think about, but it's a great concern because of the vulnerability of the people that we serve. I think on the water issue as well, maybe a little bit less about the sources we're getting it from, but the infrastructure that we have in our cities is a considerable issue. Everyone I think knows the Flint, Michigan case. In a lot of the cities I'm studying, they're building street cars as they go to open up the ground to put in rails. Their water infrastructure is simply held together by the dirt that is packed around it. We're talking about 120, 130-year-old systems and there hasn't really been a desire to address that type of infrastructure investment, partially because it's not profitable to replace what we have as opposed to building new infrastructure to areas that we can tax more. So I think some of the efforts that have been happening at the federal level under the Obama administration with getting DOT, HUD and EPA to sort of think together are really fruitful and it would be great if we could see microcosms at that more at the regional level, talking about infrastructure, not just as roads but also as everything, housing included in water. Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna wrap it up. Let me thank the panel. It was great and I wanna thank all the speakers today. I think it was an incredibly stimulating day. Somebody came up to me and said, you know, you guys run much better symposium when you let the students do it. And I think that that's exactly true. I think the PhD students did an incredible job of finding speakers, pulling together the panels and the themes. And I'm just very, I'm very grateful for that. And I'm grateful to all the speakers for the time they put in today. I'm supposed to make a few closing remarks, which I never back away from. The obvious one was that there were two reasons for this. The obvious one was that this is the sanctuary of the New York City zoning resolution, which provided an opportunity. Around New York over the last year, there's been a lot of ways that's been marked and looked at. And last night's discussion at the New York Historical Society was one more. And there's a wonderful exhibit there on the 100 years of New York zoning that Eric Golden, one of our students put together. And it is worth seeing, it's in probably well put together exhibit. So this was our piece, but there was a second piece to this agenda. And the second piece was, I think as Valerie remarked this morning, the second piece of the agenda was to reinvigorate the study of zoning. And not just to reinvigorate the study of zoning within planning, as Gerald said, Gerald Caden said this morning, we wanna put zoning back into the curriculum in some very real way. But it's also the fact that as you can see from the discussion, there was a lot of planning scholarship that's very thoughtful, that's very on the mark. And I think it needs to be more funds. And let me explain why. Zoning, after all, it's a social institution. It's an institution of social control. It's a human-made contrivance through which essentially, as the economist Douglas Northwood said, it's the rules of the game. And what makes zoning, and I think in the session before being clear, the problem is we have the, they're the players and they're the rule makers. Very often they're the same people, which is what came up. And so it's not a very easy, easy subject. But I think, as I said, that the planning scholarship has been there. But despite how good the planning scholarship is, whenever I talk to anybody outside about zoning, it always seems to me that what they understand about zoning is essentially sort of a less say fair economic theory. They, as policy advice, the scholarship, when I hear it, it boils down to the simple nostrums that I characterize less almost as social science and more as a theology. It's a theology, it's almost out of the Hebrew Bible. It's a theology of an unseen providence called the market. And if, as with the God of the Hebrew Bible, if we heed the market's commandments, providence will allow light and goodness to shine on our city. If we fail because we have disregarded the markets benign wisdom through dalliance with satanic planning interventions, the market will turn on us and wreak havoc upon us. And it just feels to me like that's the narrative. And I would like to do a seed, we get to change it. Lost in all of that and narrowing in which markets are wise and planning regulation foolish are the many important insights as you've seen in everything today and that planning scholarship and planning practice have brought to the improvement of the urban condition. And we don't deal with it, particularly good. I'm gonna pick on one book only because in William Fishel's book, Zoning Rules, The Economics of Land Use, essentially he takes the whole history of zoning and he boils it down to what he quote, one relevant fact. He says, all the history that you read is irrelevant. The only relevant thing you have to understand is quote, a majority of urban Americans decided they needed zoning because of the development of motorized trucks and buses, delivered industry and apartment houses as unwelcome neighbors to single family areas, unquote. All the rest is secondary. And to some extent, I wanna pick a fight and I want the planning scholarship to take some of this on. And I hope that those of us involved in this conference that we're going to continue, we're gonna engage in this battle of ideas. Right now it's more important than ever, I think that we engage in it in what's gonna be coming down. Just a personal anecdote. And over Thanksgiving weekend, I had a lot of visitors from out of town and we went to see Athol Fugard's Master Harold and the Boys that was at the signature theater on 42nd Street. So we were walking west on past the Port Authority building and one of my out of town friends, an economist at the Congressional Budget Office in Washington, turned to me and points to some tenement, low rise tenement to the corner of Eighth Avenue in 42nd that you see those buildings. I said, yeah. He said, because those buildings preserve my daughter and her husband can't afford to live in New York. And that was bait. So I said, well let's look further down the block. You see that very tall building at the other end of the block? I said, I would venture to say that there's probably some bulk through transferable development rights that went from there to there. And then I said, but you see the street and the traffic was backed up on 42nd Street. And I said to him, I asked him if he thought, if he thought maybe there was any important connection between the bulk of the buildings, the density of people and uses and the carrying capacity of 42nd Street which was backed up. Or did he think letting real estate speculation in the name of supply carry the day? Before he answered, I suggested that perhaps he was reading too much Ed Glazer, Urban Economics. He said, yeah, he found Glazer convincing. And that was my point. My point is that planning scholars have a much more sophisticated, historic, institutional, and yes, political, economic understanding of the challenge. And we have much to offer. The intellectual challenge I see it is that we need to do a better job of theorizing land use regulation within the complex institutional and historic reality in which it sits. We're missing an action this debate. The urban land market bears little to no resemblance to a farmer's market in Naples. But that's often the reasoning that's used by analogy to argue that the rest is all very simple. And when we say, as we often do, and as Gerald said, that zoning must be embedded in planning, what we're really saying is that we need a competent and activist state as the actor. That's really what we're saying. So studying New York zoning, which is a very interesting history because it's a history of zoning without planning. I know that says well-considered plan. And as Gerald pointed out, it does say that. And I did go back and read the state statute and it never defines well-considered plan. And so what I found out was well-considered plan means they thought about it. They held hearings and they modified it. But nonetheless, the issue is zoning works in these very complex ways. And it seems to me we need to be able to go with that. Otherwise we're stuck with what becomes either a very technical discussion about details or the need to placate the gods of the market. And it lacks the larger vision about social commitment. The larger vision about a society that's for everybody, not just for a few people, the things that plans can contribute. So put slightly differently, all I'm saying is, how can an institution that was fashioned initially when I would loosely say the ideology was either progressive or social democratic and I'll be transformed in an era when we're talking about a conventional wisdom that's dominated by market driven austerity, privatization, neoliberalism, that's the challenge. The question, that question though, it seems like a good place for me to stop and say that this is a dialogue that we all have to continue with. And once again, to thank everybody for being here. Thank you.