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- Title
Power and Democracy in Local Public Participation Law.
- Authors
Glovin, Grant
- Abstract
Planning boards throughout the United States conduct public meetings to adjudicate land use applications. These boards, though understudied in legal scholarship, have a significant impact on local development, and thus on local and regional social equity, environmental impacts, and economic power. Meetings for land use planning are obstacles to building the housing necessary to mitigate the American housing crisis. Public participation laws allocate power. Participation mandates disempower elected local governments, while failing to live up to democratic ideals. The disempowerment is based on erroneous justifications, and takes away most municipal residents' voice. In an unusual turn for a state law about local governments, participation laws also disempower the state itself. They allow the privileged to thwart state and regional interests, along with local governments. This article studies two different legal structures to demonstrate how participation laws shift power. The Massachusetts system is similar to those throughout the United States: planning boards hold meetings to solicit comments on individual projects. In the English system of Neighbourhood Planning, community groups create their own legally binding land use plans. Both systems are built on an unwarranted, pernicious distrust of local government. And neither system adequately accounts for the disparity of power between local residents, who have the ability to participate, and others in the region, who do not have that opportunity despite the interconnectedness of housing throughout a region. However, the English system offers a potential model for democratic public participation in land use planning: With some changes, it would allow for state interests to be adequately represented in a participation scheme. The article also explores other ways that participation can account for state interests. To address the housing crisis, reformers must design a system that accounts for existing inequities while giving a voice to all whom land use planning affects. Analyzing power shows what such a system could look like.
- Subjects
DEMOCRACY; POWER (Social sciences); SOCIAL participation; SELF-efficacy; LOCAL government
- Publication
Urban Lawyer, 2021, Vol 51, Issue 1, p43
- ISSN
0042-0905
- Publication type
Article