Land use Regulatory Tools in Miami Metropolitan Areas: Planning Officials’ Perceptions to Control Urban Sprawl

This is an outline of my current research on land use regulatory tools in Miami Metropolitan Areas. I would like to connect with planning officials in South Florida counties, municipalities, Florida state planning agencies and professionals from private sector who are concerned with the production of urban form and regional planning. please contact me at [email protected]

Urban sprawl, fueled by powerful growth, is unlikely to be controlled by macro-scale regional plans or by comprehensive reforms of the local government map. Land use regulations are the effective tools that have the power to implement growth management agendas and channel metropolitan growth into more compact developments. Much attention has focused on state level adoption of growth management and planning mandates, but far less on local policies. Several important questions have not been addressed including planning officials’ perceptions to the factors that shape land use decisions, and intergovernmental collaborative efforts to reduce uncertainty in land regulation processes, the choices of policy instruments, and the role of political institutions. My research is investigating how local government regulation has responded to this trend.

In Florida, The new planning legislation, HB 2707 and SB 2156, represents a major retreat from the state’s 25-year commitment to comprehensive planning. It eliminates the state land planning agency and reduces its planning division to an arm of the governor’s economic development office. It drastically reduces the scope of state review of local plan amendments and eliminates or weakens some major statutory requirements for local comprehensive plans. It weakens the ability of the Department of the Community Affairs (DCA) and citizens to enforce the state’s planning laws, and it reduces the authority of local governments to protect the integrity of their plans through limitations on the approval of plan amendments (Tom Pelham, 2018).

In this planning reformation context, research shows that land use regulation at the local level in Miami Metropolitan Area (MMA) is not well focused on the implementation of smart growth principles. There is some indication that the land use decision process is highly fragmented with hundreds of governmental units, each focused on their own boundaries. The lack of guidance or a framework at the state level and lack of coordination among jurisdictions can also affect the growth management which is a key to reducing urban sprawl. Cities and counties in MMA have chosen to rely on annexation and impact fees, two of the most prevalent devices found in the regulations analyzed. This gives an indication that the initial approach to implementing smart growth in Florida is probably by way of open-land and agricultural preservation. Still, the prevalence of even these approaches is relatively low. 

Research Aim

Strong sentiment against the phenomenon known as “urban sprawl” has developed over the last few years in the United States. Many local governments and several states have adopted policies designed to deal with sprawl. The issue has even been placed on the national agenda, with the Clinton administration proposing to use federal money for the preservation of open space. At the root of this effort is a perception that the process of urban growth in the United States has gone awry.

This perception involves a number of interlocking discussions. Municipal governments, it is claimed, often fail to consider the structure of relationships that govern land use decisions (Kaplan R, Kaplan S and Austin M, 2008). It is often assumed that local governments are united in their pursuit of uncontrolled growth strategies or that the metropolitan area is composed solely of fragmented decision making processes that are characterized by competition rather than cooperation (Feiock R, 2004), this view also does not tell the whole story about the power relationships and the factors shaping decision making in MMA.

Several scholars have examined issues pertaining to growth management policies such as reasons for adopting such policies, types of policies adopted, their efficacy, and their effects on local and regional decision making. Some of those researchers have examined the effects of local growth management policies on sprawl, for example (Talen and Knaap 2003; Anthony 2004); however, little attention has been given to the direct effects of land use policies on urban sprawl. The research reported here is a step in this direction; it focuses on the prior questions of:

1)        How local planning officials perceive the efficacy of land use regulatory tools with respect to reducing urban sprawl?

2)        What factors account for local land use decisions?

3)        And, how the intergovernmental relationships affect the implementation of land use regulations?

In the face of the struggle between land use regulation and urban sprawl, planning officials’ often have complex and contradictory duties. Their perception to this struggle was found to be reflected through the variety of issues considered. These include the factors shaping decision making and the intergovernmental relationships that contribute to land use conflict. Planning officials’ may seek to serve political officers, legal mandates, professional visions, and the specific requests of citizens’ groups, all at the same time. They typically work in situations of uncertainty; great imbalances of power; and multiple, ambiguous, and conflicting political goals.

One specific area of planning officials’ perception has been the different aspects that contribute to local land use decisions. Issues such as perceptions of growth and nature of local government as well as the utilization of land use regulations have received judicial consideration. Moreover, implications of the power imbalances are evidenced by a diversity of rulings (Nancy Stroud, 2012). The impact of official involvement within this area will be examined in light of not only such concepts as the merit system but also with reference to comprehensive growth management agenda, which, in part, has been promoted by the federal government, state government, and Regional Agency (South Florida Planning Council). Eventually the results will demonstrate that land use regulations generally run counter to smart growth-related prescriptive policies. It was also found that fragmentation of jurisdictions adds complexity to cooperation and negotiation between them (Nancy Stroud, 2012; Tom Pelham, 2018). Consideration should be given to the strong sprawl promoting tendency of Florida’s annexation policies and the serious limitations of current impact fee legislation.

The larger objective of this research is to investigate planning officials’ perception in regard to the implementation of land use regulations and its contribution to growth management agenda, in particular, to reducing urban sprawl in the Miami Metropolitan Area.