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In San Diego, for example, the city under Republican Mayor Pete Wilson is using its zoning powers to restrict the amount of housing construction around the city's edges and to expand building in the downtown areas, where it is really needed.
Meanwhile, the state of Vermont under Democratic Governor Thomas P. Salmon is taking a different approach—using its taxing powers.
The problem in Vermont is that development and speculation are constantly pushing land values up. As values increase, so do property taxes —and many poor Vermont farmers cannot afford to stay on their land. To help keep them down on the farm, the legislature passed a law setting a heavy capital gains tax on short-term land sales, thus curbing speculation. Still another new law pegs the property taxes not to the market value of the land, but to the landowner's income. A family earning less than $4,000 a year henceforth will pay no more than 4% of its income in property taxes, for example, while a family earning over $16,000 will pay no more than 6%.
Certainly every community has to work out its own "process" to meet its own needs, and there is a wide variety of effective models all over the U.S. A sampling:
Ramapo, N.Y. When John F. McAlevey first ran for town supervisor of this New York City suburb in 1965, he campaigned on a platform of controlling growth. He had seen the local population triple since 1940. He also recognized that developers largely determined the patterns of growth, paying little heed to the integrity of the rolling landscape or to the tax consequences of their actions. McAlevey promised to save Ramapo from being submerged in a sea of little houses. He won that election and every one since.
McAlevey's first step was to draw up a master plan for the area and then a zoning ordinance based on that plan. To prepare further for future development, the township set six-year capital budgets for public works. By 1969, the whole package of coordinated controls went into effect. Now, before any project is approved, the developer must prove that it conforms to the master plan and will not overload municipal services, including sewers, roads, parks and playgrounds. If those services do not yet exist, the developer has either to wait until the township builds them on schedule, or else to provide them at his own cost.
Last year, ruling on a suit by landowners and developers who wanted to overthrow McAlevey's program, the New York State Court of Appeals upheld—and praised—Ramapo's scheme. Says McAlevey: "What we fought for was the right of a community through its elected officials to chart its own destiny."