The Washington Post is the first Virginia newspaper to explore the significance of the impact-fee amendments that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine inserted into the transportation bill likely to be approved tomorrow by the General Assembly.
The measures would allow local governments to raise money not only from developers requesting rezoning for their projects but by-right development where no rezoning is needed. At $20,000 per lot, the measure could provide up to $520 million for a county like Prince William, which has about 26,000 lots available for development.
The predictable issue is the fairness of financing road improvements on the backs of newcomers. The advantage for local politicians is that people who will buy houses some time in the future, by definition, haven’t bought them yet and, in many cases, may not even live in the locality in question. Non-residents don’t vote. Residents do.
But the home builders lobby argues, rightly, I think, that impact fees will drive up the cost of new housing. And, because new housing prices set the benchmark for old houses, impact fees will drive up the cost of housing stock generally. Of course, that, too, is likely to be a crowd pleaser among existing voters, most of whom are home owners. Not only will existing residents not pay for the transportation improvements, impact fees on new houses will make their houses more valuable in the bargain.
What we don’t know yet is the extent to which higher housing prices in fast-growth counties will encourage developers to leap-frog to farther-out jurisdictions that haven’t imposed impact fees. What will the consequences be as citizens wind up driving even further to work and clogging more miles of Interstate and arterials? At this point, that’s anybody’s guess.
The impact fees strike me as a blunt instrument. They treat all forms of development on the same basis. But some forms of development are more transportation-efficient than others. Mixed use development is preferable to traditional segregated land uses. Grid streets provide more connectivity than cul de sacs. Compact, pedestrian-friendly development along bus and rail lines provide a mass transit option that low-density development does not.
By varying the impact fees based on the anticipated transportation impact of the new development — charging less for transportation-efficient development and more for scattered, disconnected, low-density development — local governments could stimulate the building of more sustainable human settlement patterns. Combine variable impact fees with Urban Development Areas and the devolution of responsibility for secondary roads to local governments, and we could see major changes in the built landscape. In theory, at least. In actual practice, we have to brace ourselves for the law of unintended consequences as people act in all sorts of perverse and unpredictable ways.
In any case, Virginia politics is entering a new phase. After four or five years intense debate on the state level over transportation, the discussion will shift to local governments as they begin implement Urban Development Areas and decide whether or not to impose impact fees.
