"Infill Development"
This section was pretty interesting to me. I have often been in a city and seen a neglected plot of land and thought, why doesn't anybody do something with that. Learning that one of these reasons is because the land is 'too toxic' is extremely alarming! I think the reasons for Infill development are pretty straight forward, at least to me. I think more attention needs to be placed on why it isn't a common practice.
Here are some pictures of infill development. Top are some affordable housing and bottom is a nice 'green' space. These are much better looking than this:
Rosland argues that issues related to land use are tied to all other types of sustainability issues, especially transportation. In effect, this is a very important topic that needs to be addressed in communities that are trying to move towards sustainability.
I think a lot of it has to do with liability barriers. The good news is, there are a lot of ways to reduce liabilities for developers of brownfield sites!
ReplyDeleteBut not all of those that you see are brownfields. Many are, but some are left vacant because of the tax codes (as we discussed in class). People rail that they don't want property taxes because, hell, they own the land! But without these taxes no one cares if their land sits vacant. We have a city near Phoenix without property taxes and they are absolutely littered with these types of plots.
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