Urban Land Use Policy in an Era of Constraints

These are times of widespread interest in "land use." But as land use has gained currency, it has come to mean different things to different interest groups. To some, it has to do with national resource use—the use of land for agriculture, grazing, forestry, extraction, or wildlife sanctuaries. To others, it has to do with use of state resources—the seacoast, lake country, mountains, or other areas of critical environmental concern. And to still others, it refers to land development in the urban scene for industrial, business, residential, or other uses. There are both positive and negative associations with land use. To many, land use is a tangible reflection of economic vitality and strength; to others, it means problems or destructive tendencies in man's activities. One common denominator to these different perspectives is the interface between growth and finite resources—the need to come to terms with environmental overloads, energy resource shortages, and other resource problems that may adversely affect the economy and the well-being of millions of households. The seventies will undoubtedly be marked as a watershed, a time when Americans came to realize that many finite resources long taken for granted were after all limited, many of them nonrenewable or irreversibly damageable. In this essay, I shall be less concerned with this precarious balance as a problem than with governmental responses to this problem and how these impact on land use policies of local governments. Let me begin with the initiatives of the federal government and work downward to the local level