Effects of proportionate‐share impact fees

Abstract

When it comes to paying for the significant costs of growth, local governments throughout the United States are usually the first line of financing. Yet because of a variety of factors, existing tax, fee, and inter jurisdictional transfer revenues may not be sufficient. Many hundreds (if not thousands) of communities rely in part on proportionate‐share impact fees to provide facilities concurrent with the effects of growth.

Impact fees have numerous detractors, many of whom worry about their effect on affordable housing, economic development, and development patterns. A disparate literature has emerged addressing each of these concerns. This article synthesizes current knowledge about the market effects of proportionate‐share impact fees and finds that for the most part, they facilitate development in several important ways. Policy implications and guidance for future research are presented as well.     

IMPLEMENTING AN EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING PROGRAM FOR FOOD STAMP RECIPIENTS: DILEMMAS AND CHOICES

The food stamp legislation of December 1985 provided another opportunity to experiment with welfare to work reform, this time through employment and training programs for food stamp recipients. This new program can be seen both as an opportunity to move people toward self-sufficiency and as a bundle of programmatic contradictions which threaten that opportunity. Federal requirements for the program are described as are the dilemmas to which they give rise. These dilemmas concern program coverage of food stamp recipients, utility of the program components, the use of sparse funds, and the incorporation of such values as the harmonization of programs, administrative simplicity, and fairness to food stamp recipients.     

Reviews

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Federalism and Interest Group Cohesion: A Comparison of Two Peak Business Groups in Australia

The stock opinion among students of interest groups has, untilrecently, posited that groups in countries with a federal systemof government are less cohesive and more prone to disunity thaninterest groups in unitary states. This article addresses thisrelationship bet ween federalism and weak group cohesion inan attempt to explain the contrasting patterns of cohesion intwo peak Australian business groups, each a confederation instructure. The literature on federalism and group cohesion givesinsufficient attention to the divisive impact of three factors:party go vernment, size and wealth inequalities among a group'sconstituent units, and a group's decision and payoff rules.The literature also gives insufficient attention to the determinantsof group secession. It is the contention of the article thatconflicts over the fairness of a federated organization's rules,particularly when the large, wealthy units find themselves outvotedby the small, poor units, can be sufficient to provoke the aggrievedunits to secede.     

Policy Attitudes in Institutional Context: Rules,Uncertainty, and the Mass Politics of Public Investment

This article examines the link between citizens’ policy attitudes and the institutional context in which policies are carried out. The article develops a theory of opinion formation toward policies that impose costs on citizens in order to invest in broadly valued social goods. In this framework, problems of agency loss and time inconsistency leave citizens uncertain about whether promised policy benefits will be delivered. Citizen support for public investments thus depends on whether the institutional context makes elites’ policy promises credible. We consider hypotheses about how the institutional allocation of authority and the institutional rules governing implementation affect citizen support for public investment, and we find broad support for the framework in three survey experiments administered to representative samples of U.S. citizens. The results shed light on the link between political institutions and citizens’ attitudes, the capacities of voters for substantive political reasoning, and the political prospects for public investment.