Last Friday, Jim Bacon posted an item on Albemarle County’s proposed transfer of “development” rights program that generated several interesting responses. In the third comment Larry Gross asked what we thought of TDRs. We are getting behinder and behinder but have not written on this topic recently and were trying to find time for a short post. Then along comes C. P. Zilliacus.
Zilliacus nailed the topic. Montgomery County, MD, the nation-states most widely heralded example of TDRs, is a strategic flop.
The TDR sending area has become a McMansion / Hobby Farm zone. This low density urban area has raised the cost of housing in the Maryland portion of the National Capital Subregion. It has also made it harder to get from jobs in the Core of the Subregion to scattered aggomerations of dwellings that approach affordability in Frederick, Washington and Carroll Counties and in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
The TDR receiving areas are no different than other badly conceived urban agglomerations.
Unless there is a sound regional strategy to create settlement patterns in balance with mobility facilities and is a strategy that recognizes the need for a Clear Edge between the Urbanside and the Countryside, the result is unsustainable.
As noted in The Shape of the Future, TDRs (and the other tactics in the generic class we call Transfers of Property Rights or TPRs) are just tools. In the hands of the current governance structure and with a vacuum of rational regional resource allocation, TPRs are blunt instruments that cause more damage than good.
That is true for most of the “land use control” tools as noted in “The Role of Municipal Planning in Creating Dysfunctional Human Settlement Patterns” at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com.
EMR
