Protecting people and property: the influence of land-use planners on flood hazard mitigation in New Urbanist developments

Abstract

Research suggests that characteristics of local government land-use planners help determine the priority that local communities place on flood hazard mitigation. However, research has not examined the significance of land-use planners' values and role orientations for flood hazard mitigation. Multiple regression analysis is used to examine the influence that land-use planners' values and role orientations have on flood hazard mitigation in a national sample of New Urbanist development projects. Findings indicate that land-use planners' values and role orientations have significant implications for flood hazard mitigation in these projects. The paper recommends that local governments adopt a land-use planning approach to flood hazard mitigation that relies on land-use planners to help direct development away from hazardous portions of development sites.

Keywords:

• land-use planning
• natural hazard mitigation
• planners' values
• planners' roles
• New Urbanism
• public participation

Acknowledgements

The findings reported in this paper are supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant # CMS-0407720). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

1. There might be reason to expect our measures of values and role orientations to be correlated. However, bivariate correlations involving values and each of the role orientation variables are not statistically significant. Therefore, it is concluded that values and role orientations are essentially independent of one another.

2. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. Available from: http://www.noaa.gov/floods.html, http://www.nws.noaa.gov/oh/hic/flood_stats/recent_individual_deaths.shtml [Accessed August 2007].

3. The site plan review process refers to the process in which land-use planners review proposed development site plans (submitted by developers) to ensure compliance with legal regulations. During this process, planners may have room for discretion in deciding which regulations apply and how they should be enforced, and there is typically room for negotiation between planners and developers, with each side possibly making concessions and trade-offs in order to secure more favourable outcomes.

4. While New Urbanist projects may provide a convenient context for this study, it is also recognised that this context may serve to limit the degree to which the findings can be generalised to all development projects. Future research should examine whether the findings here hold for non-New Urbanist projects as well.

5. 100-year floodplain areas include those areas that have a 1% chance of being flooded each year (Faber 1996, p. 8).

6. New Urbanist projects were identified from lists of projects provided by The New Urban News.

7. In most cases this planner was the same person who determined that the project was located at least partially within the floodplain. In some cases, this was a different planner.

8. The advisor role orientation is based on a single survey item because the factor analysis results show that this item is the only item to load on the associated factor.

9. The effects of other community variables (e.g. population, population growth rates and community wealth) were tested on mitigation, and it was found that they did not contribute to explaining variation in the dependent variables.

10. The floodplain exposure variable deserves particular attention because of its strong influence on the dependent variables. Exposure was initially measured as the percentage of the development site located within the floodplain. However, initial analyses involving exposure and the location of land uses relative to the floodplain indicated that one or more failures and/or successes were completed determined when exposure was measured as a percentage. As a result, it was not possible to test the effects of other variables on land-use locations, when controlling for the percentage of the development site located in the floodplain. To remedy this problem, exposure is measured as a dichotomous variable instead.

11. Odds ratios (ORs) are interpreted differently from regression coefficients produced in ordinary least squares regression. An OR of 1.50, for example, should be interpreted to mean that a one-unit increase in the associated independent variable increases the odds of the land use dependent variable being located completely outside the floodplain by 50%. Conversely, an OR of 0.50 means that a one-unit increase in the associated independent variable decreases the odds of the land use dependent variable being located outside the floodplain by 50%. ORs greater than 1.00 indicate a positive relationship between the independent variable and the land use dependent variable; ORs between zero and 1.00 indicate a negative relationship; ORs equal to 1.00 indicate no relationship.

12. This approach assumes that the non-floodplain portion of the site is large enough to accommodate proposed development. In cases where the non-floodplain portion of the site is too small to accommodate all proposed development, this assumption does not hold.