User Rating:  / 0

The City of Billings is working on an infill policy – a policy that will encourage property owners and investors to better utilize vacant areas within the city limits. Without a doubt this is a most common sense idea and one has to wonder why the city ever held policies to the contrary. But, the fact is, they did.

Of its own accord the market place would have done what centralized planners are – ostensibly— now trying to achieve. The market would have done it, if it had been allowed to function. The market place always pushes for the highest and best use of any resource. Development of property is no different.

The market place abhors a vacancy far more so than do the centralized planners, who are now attempting to impose yet one more control on the market in order to reverse an urban sprawl that their previous ideas and policies helped to create.

If the cost of "sprawl" had always been part of the market, as it should have been, then it would have been minimized as economics would have dictated. If it is indeed true that the development of roads and utilities and other infrastructure is more expensive the further it is from the city's core, then why would developers opt to build outside the city, claiming it is less expensive, as they commonly have? Unless, arbitrary and capricious standards and taxes are burdening properties in the city's core. That is, of course, exactly the situation. 

When developers are not charged for the true cost of sprawl and over-charged for "re-cycling" downtown space, a city ends up with exactly the opposite of what planners say they want. It ends up with vacant store fronts, empty lots and development racing outwards in every direction — because the market is at work all the time, even when given a perverse set of directives.

And, be assured that special districts aimed at fixing the problem, without addressing the crux of the problem, are no solution. To over-tax properties for the purposes of confiscating the revenues and redirecting it for development preferred by the regulators, is designed to advance politically favored winners, over the less well-connected losers.

It still continues to ignore the market and is undoubtedly creating the next generation of problems. Such approaches further complicate the market, and discourages market driven private investment.

This is not to advocate for one set of regulations over another. One set of regulations is no more prescient than another, just as no centralized planner is any more omnipotent than another. It is to advocate for a system that allows private property owners to do as they choose and invest as they choose. It is to advocate allowing people to live as they choose, so long as they pay for those choices.

There is little doubt that continued manipulation of the market will be no more successful than it has been in the past, and THAT is what the city should carefully scrutinize before they rush pell-mell into repeating the same approach in a new policy.

To comment more specifically, in scrutinizing the draft infill policy:

The fact is you don't need centralized planners to compile an "inventory" of infill projects. You don't need to devise a master plan to deal with them. You don't need to write a "shared vision" (read "approved vision"). You don't need to "improve the overall sense of place(?)" Developers, property owners and investors don't need the help or guidance of the city officials, of neighborhood groups, or un-invested visionaries, to know how they want to invest their money or how they want to live.

And, the last thing we need is "public private partnerships" the likes of which is little more than crooney capitalism, which has nothing to do with true capitalism. If the private sector by itself isn't responding to some aspect of development, it is because it is not economically feasible. If something is economically unfeasible that is the same thing as saying consumers (citizens) don't want it enough to actually pay for its true cost. It is impractical and immoral to coerce the issue with taxpayer dollars, which "public private partnerships" are all about.

In considering changes in "permit review process" and fees, those changes should be to minimize or eliminate, both the amount of "processing" and "fees," so as to better clear the way for what the market wants rather than advance progressive agendas.

Rather than "Provide training or education on building codes, particularly for the renovation of existing buildings," the codes should be mitigated to allow maximum potential for redevelopment. And, rather than "directing" developers, they should be set free of restraints to pursue their own ideas and innovations.

"Form based codes" is a subjective means of enforcement, it gives greater power to the government and usurps private initiative and market driven outcomes.

Rather than imposing "form based codes" which leave property owners and developers in a constant state of uncertainty, they should have fewer codes, and those codes should not be decided at the arbitrary whim or authority of officials and planners. Nothing deters investment more so than uncertainty.

"Energy efficiency" should be understood to be achieved when ever something is "economically efficient."

And, programs to indoctrinate the public is not something that government, at any level should fund and pursue at taxpayer expense, no matter the agenda. If there is a good idea that some group wants to promote, there are ample means to do so through private, non profit groups and organizations which utilize their own funds rather than those of taxpayers. That is certainly how private property advocates must function. There is no justification to force taxpayers to fund propaganda for any agenda.