Effect of pedestrian-oriented design benefits to land value

Recent veto player work argues that majoritarian regimes such as the United Kingdom have better fiscal discipline and smaller welfare states than proportional regimes with more veto players. An analytic narrative of the failure of land value taxation in the United Kingdom between 1909 and 1914 shows, however, that it failed not because of previously advanced reasons, but because the number of veto players in British politics was sharply increased. This increase in veto player numbers prevented a tax increase. All seven of the conventional reasons for characterizing the United Kingdom as a low-n veto player regime failed to hold between 1906 and 1914. Observable implications discussed include the need to review the entire history of British politics in this period in the light of the temporary increase in veto players; and the ambiguous implications of number of veto players for fiscal discipline.

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Understanding the geography of affordable housing provided through land value capture: Evidence from England

Urban Studies ◽

10.1177/0042098021998893 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 004209802199889

Author(s):

Alexander Lord ◽

Chi-Wan Cheang ◽

Richard Dunning

Keyword(s):

Affordable Housing ◽

Theory And Practice ◽

Land Values ◽

Land Value ◽

Local Planning ◽

Development Activity ◽

Value Capture ◽

Dual Approach ◽

The Right ◽

Community Infrastructure

Governments the world over routinely undertake Land Value Capture (LVC) to recover some (or all) of the uplift in land values arising from the right to develop in order to fund infrastructure and public goods. Instruments to exact LVC are diverse but are usually implemented independently. However, since 2011 England has been experimenting with a dual approach to LVC, applying both a tariff-style levy to fund local infrastructure (the Community Infrastructure Levy) and negotiated obligations, used primarily to fund affordable housing (Section 106 agreements). In this article we employ a difference-in-differences (DID) method to identify the interaction of these two instruments available to local planning authorities. We explore the question of whether the Community Infrastructure Levy ‘crowds out’ affordable housing secured through Section 106 planning agreements. In so doing we show that the interaction of these two approaches is heterogeneous across local authorities of different types. This raises questions for understanding the economic geography of development activity and the theory and practice of Land Value Capture.

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