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During the period immediately after World War II, planning in North America and Europe followed highly centralized, top-down, command-and-control approaches that were based on the rational-comprehensive model of planning, which implies an all-knowing, all-powerful government. Part and parcel of this approach was the government’s control of development land and its value. Beginning in the 1970s, as the precepts of an all-knowing, interventionist state clashed with the reality of uncontrollable global forces driven by multinationals and international finance, it became clear that planning had become a market-driven process, a “servant of the market”, and that inflexible, detailed plans would not work in most real-life situations. Consequently, such plans were either ignored or overridden. This crisis of planning spurred a search for alternatives based on public-private partnerships, negotiation, and flexibility including ways to transfer increased land values to the public trough the development process. This approach is generally known as Land Value Recapture (LVR). This paper presents an example of LVR in the US, a rather unique example in the US. It concludes by suggesting that the belief that the increase in land values is not the result of the landowner’s activities, and are therefore “unearned” and should be recaptured for the public benefit, is not part of the American planning culture. LVR, then, might have a hard time supplanting other market-based regulatory strategies that are voluntary for developers and less restrictive of property rights for the landowner.
