Publications Tagged ‘green space’
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Article
How do New York City’s Recent Rezonings Align With its Goals for Park Accessibility?
In 2007, New York City adopted a long-term sustainability plan that announced a goal of ensuring that almost every New Yorker lives within a ten minute walk of a park of substantial size. At the same time, policymakers are rewriting the City’s land use map through an unprecedented series of neighborhood level rezonings that involve changing the use type and residential capacity of affected lots or groups of lots. Despite the confluence of these interventions, no research has analyzed how the rezonings interact with the City’s park infrastructure, and specifically, whether residential capacity changes in areas close to parks differ from those in areas further away. In this research, we employ a database of every tax lot in New York City to investigate how well the City-initiated rezonings correlate with the goal of providing New Yorkers with good access to the City’s parks. Our results indicate a mixed picture; while most ‘upzoned’ lots (lots where residential capacity was added) were near parks, we also find that the majority of ‘downzoned’ lots (lots where residential capacity was reduced) were also close to parks. The net impact of these rezonings was a modest increase in residential capacity for the City as a whole, but the increases were disproportionately focused in areas further from parks.
Simon T. McDonnell, Josiah Madar, and Vicki Been. Cities and the Environment Volume 3, Issue 1 . December 2010.
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White Papers
Building Environmentally Sustainable Communities: A Framework for Inclusivity
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has decided to include two key goals in all of its programs: encouraging sustainable communities and enhancing access to opportunity for lower-income people and people of color. This paper examines the relationship between these two goals through a literature review and an original empirical analysis of how these goals interact at the neighborhood and metropolitan area levels. We also offer policy recommendations for HUD.
Vicki Been, Mary Cunningham, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Adam Gordon, Joe Parilla, Margery Austin Turner, Sheryl Verlaine Whitney Aaron Yowell, and Ken Zimmerman. May 2010.
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Article
The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values
Cities across the United States that have considerable vacant land are debating whether to foster community gardens on that land, while cities with land shortages are debating when to replace gardens with other uses. Meanwhile, many cities are looking for new ways to finance green spaces. Little empirical evidence about the neighborhood impacts of community gardens is available, however, to inform the debate or to help cities design financing schemes. This paper estimates the impact of community gardens on neighborhood property values, using rich data for New York City and a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We find that gardens have significant positive effects, especially in the poorest neighborhoods. Higher quality gardens have the greatest positive impact.
Been, Vicki and Ioan Voicu. Real Estate Economics, Vol. 36, Issue 2, (Summer 2008) . June 2007.
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Chapter
Will International Agreements Trump Local Environmental Law?
This is a very recent movement, but one that has proceeded far enough to demonstrate the powerful role that local governments can play in the nation`s efforts to protect natural resources and to maintain environmental quality. The advent of local environmental law challenges practitioners and academics to describe this new field and explain its relationship to traditional concepts of environmental and land use law.
Been, Vicki. New Ground: The Advent of Local Environmental Law (Island Press) . February 2003.
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