Land and the City: The 9th Annual Land Policy Conference

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 15, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Leading scholars in housing, demographics, urban expansion, fiscal policy, and the environment will convene for Land and the City, the Lincoln Institute's 9th annual Land Policy Conference June 1-3, 2014 at The Charles Hotel in Cambridge.

At the same time, the book based on last year's conference, Education, Land, and Location, edited by Gregory K. Ingram and Daphne Kenyon, has been published. That volume explores the nexus of residential location and public schools, funding by local governments for education, equality of opportunity, and racial and socio-economic segregation.

Land and the City is set to begin with a pre-conference presentation by Kairos Shen, Director of Planning, Boston Redevelopment Authority. The conference's first session, "Urban Growth and Demography in the U.S.," chaired by William Fischel of Dartmouth College, will be led by Dowell Myers and Hyojung Lee of the University of Southern California; the discussant is Ann Forsyth, professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.

In "Planning for Urban Growth," chaired by Eugenie Birch, professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research, Shlomo Angel from New York University will share insights from his ongoing monitoring of global urban expansion. Angel, as a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute, is author of Planet of Cities and the Atlas of Urban Expansion, an online resource that is being updated and expanded for 2015. The discussant is Michael B. Teitz of University of California, Berkeley.      

Karl "Chip" Case of Wellesley College, co-founder of the Case-Shiller Index, will chair "U.S. Housing Policies and Outcomes," led by Dan Immergluck, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, considering the impact of foreclosures on neighborhoods. The discussant is Jim Follain, senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute, and co-author of the Lincoln Institute Policy Focus Report Preventing Housing Price Bubbles: Lessons from the 2006-2012 Bust. Laurie Goodman, Urban Institute, will follow with an assessment of ongoing housing finance reform, and the discussant is Bill Apgar, Harvard University.

In a focus on municipal finance, chaired by Henry Coleman, University of New Jersey, Rutgers, Steven Sheffrin and Grant Driessen, both of Tulane University, will look at the past and future of urban property taxes, joined by the discussant John M. Yinger of Syracuse University.  Adam Langley, research analyst at the Lincoln Institute, is set to share findings from recent updates to the Fiscally Standardized Cities online database, tracking trends in tax revenues and expenditures in 112 major cities nationwide. The discussant is Michael Pagano, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Martim Smolka, director of the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean at the Lincoln Institute, will chair a session on housing in the international context, with independent consultant Eduardo Rojas examining the Latin America experience from 1960 to 2010, and Stephen Malpezzi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison as the discussant. Joyce Y. Man, past director of the Lincoln Institute's China program and the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy, will present a paper on China's land and housing policies with David Geltner and Xin Zhang, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as discussants.

The question of adaptation to climate change will be addressed in a session chaired by Lincoln Institute senior fellow Armando Carbonell, chairman of the Department of Planning and Urban Form.

Amy K. Snover, University of Washington, and William D. Solecki, Hunter College of the City University of New York, will present, with Elisabeth Hamin, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Matthias Ruth, Northeastern University, as discussants.

Finally, the subject of socioeconomic stratification and housing, in a session chaired by Joan Youngman, chairman of the Department of Valuation and Taxation at the Lincoln Institute, will be examined by Evan McKenzie, University of Illinois at Chicago, and discussant Gerald Korngold, of New York Law School. A comparison of socio-economic segregation in schools in the US and Latin America, 1964-2012, will be presented by Anna K. Chmielewski of Michigan State University, with Tara Watson of  Williams College as the discussant.

This is the 9^th year of the Land Policy Conference. The papers and discussant commentaries are compiled in a conference volume published each spring. Education, Land, and Location, based on the proceedings of the 8^th annual Land Policy Conference in June of 2013, includes coverage of such topics as school choice, charter schools, and home schooling; the importance of cognitive skills for economic growth; the role of the property tax in school finance and alternative revenue sources; the structure of school districts; transportation to school; effects of school location; and housing policies that can unlink education and location.

Because most children throughout the world attend elementary and secondary schools near their homes, where they live has a major influence on where they go to school. In the United States, the relationship between residential location and education has been especially strong given the dominance of local funding and local control of K–12 education. School quality varies markedly across the more than 14,000 school districts in the United States and also within many of the country's large urban districts. Housing prices reflect school quality so that houses in better school districts or more advantaged neighborhoods of large districts sell at a premium. In other words, school quality is capitalized into the price of land.

Previous volumes in the Land Policy series have been:

Infrastructure and Land Policies (2013)
Value Capture and Land Policies (2012)
Climate Change and Land Policies (2011)
Municipal Revenues and Land Policies (2010)
Property Rights and Land Policies (2009)
Fiscal Decentralization and Land Policies (2008)
Land Policies and Their Outcomes (2007)

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is a leading resource for key issues concerning the use, regulation, and taxation of land. Providing high-quality education and research, the Lincoln Institute strives to improve public dialogue and decisions about land policy.

Contact: Anthony Flint 617-503-2116

SOURCE Lincoln Institute of Land Policy