The Political-Economy of Local Land-Use Policy: Place-Making and the Relative Power of Business, Civil Society, and Government

ABSTRACT

This study takes a new look at place development, analyzing the power of local business actors as compared to civic society and government in localities across the United States. We address the contested question of who controls place-making with a focus on growth control land-use policies. Theoretically, we draw from sociology’s growth machine framework to provide a comparative account of business actors and to speak to puzzling findings from this literature that policies ostensibly designed to stymie growth across places often promote it. Our study is based on more than 1,700 localities. We find that while business actors call the shots on economic development policy, they appear essentially apathetic about land-use policy. This suggests that land-use policies may be carefully designed to accommodate growth machine business interests. Local governments set the course for land-use as well as economic development policy, but civil society actors have relatively little influence.

KEYWORDS:

• Political economy
• land-use policy
• economic development policy
• growth machine
• civil society
• local governments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our primary interest is the influence of growth machine business actors on local policy. Likewise, other recent studies have centered on the impact of local business actors in order to provide a partial theoretical test of the growth machine framework (Kimelberg 2011; authors’ self-citations, [a]). As these analysts note, although local business comprises the core entity of the growth machine, it does not encompass the full range of actors, power relationships, or combination of growth coalitions found in any one community. The contribution of our study is to examine the influence of growth-machine business actors on land-use policies across the U.S., which to our knowledge no recent large-scale study has explored.

2. In a quantitative study conducted over thirty years ago, Logan and Zhou (1990) did consider the influence of business on local growth controls but used an indirect measure of local business. They ultimately dropped the measure from their multivariate models as it was not found to be statistically significant.

3. Gramling and Freudenburg (2013) point out that the growth machine framework was formulated to be applicable widely across places whether urban or rural, but in fact, the vast majority of studies focus on urban areas only.

4. Our focus is on GM business actors and their impact relative to civil society and local government. We do not maintain that the GM perspective offers a full account of factors impacting land-use policy. Other political economy frameworks on local development exist, most notably, urban regime theory (Stone 2003). Nonetheless, the urban regime tradition likewise affirms that where the GM regime is dominant, policies tend to favor growth (DiGaetano and Klemanski 1991; Logan and Crowder 2002).

5. Truchil (2018) notes that land-use policies tend to be supported even by community members less favorable toward government regulation. These policies are a double-edged sword. They can be a form of NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) policy making and supported when residents want to exclude social groups that they believe may reduce housing values.

6. Connecticut and Rhode Island do not have counties that function as governmental units.

7. The International City-County Management Association (ICMA) uses this methodology to collect national data on U.S. local governments and achieves about a 30% response rate.

8. For example, whether business actors’ influence increased over time and whether this is associated with a corresponding decrease in the use of land-use policies cannot be ascertained.

9. These items refer to business incentives provided by county governments themselves. Studies from urban sociology’s quantitative tradition (Clark 2000) analyze business-growth incentives and other policies of local governments across different states (and sometimes nations). While any one policy may vary by locally-specific details, the nominal policy is used across places. Researchers recognize that state governments may influence local policy: the customary manner of addressing this issue is to incorporate a measure that controls for the state in which the government is located through using fixed or random effects statistical models (Lobao, Adua, and Hooks 2014; Logan and Crowder 2002). In the case of “locally-designated enterprise zones” above, county governments administer and negotiate the terms of tax incentives that typically provide real and property tax exemptions for new or expanding businesses. For examples of studies that analyze business incentive policies using policy counts across different states and localities, see Jenkins, Leicht, and Wendt (2006), Lobao, Adua, and Hooks (2014), Reese and Rosenfeld (2002), (authors’ self-citations, [a]). These studies use the same or similar items in order to measure business incentives as does our study.

10. As noted, we follow other studies that are likewise limited to GM business actors (Kimelberg 2011; authors’ self-citations, [a]). Non-business members of the GM may include universities, labor unions, local politicians, newspaper publishers, and other groups (Logan and Molotch 1987). No nationally representative data exist on the degree to which the latter actors participate directly in U.S. localities’ economic development efforts.

11. Metropolitan areas include counties containing high density urban places with populations of 50,000 or more. This designation also includes outlying counties that are socially and economically tied to the central counties, as measured by commuting patterns. Remaining counties are classified as non-metropolitan; non-metro counties that are not adjacent to metropolitan counties are the most remote rural counties. This classification is available at: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-continuum-codes/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [1259424]; The National Institute for Food and Agriculture [2007-35401-17733].

Notes on contributors

Lazarus Adua

Dr. Lazarus Adua is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Utah. His research focuses on the human dimensions of energy (energy inequality and the relative impacts of efficiency improvement and lifestyles on the environment), the structural drivers of global environmental change, and local governments’ social, developmental, and environmentally significant policies. Dr. Adua also conducts research on the environmental consequences of political-ideological views.

Linda Lobao

Dr. Linda Lobao is Professor at the Ohio State University in Rural Sociology, Sociology, and Geography.  Her research focuses on spatial inequality and the impact of state and market changes on socioeconomic well-being across localities.  In her recent research, she has been examining local governments across the United States, the range of policies they implement, and how the local state influences the welfare of populations.