Locally Unwanted Land Use
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In
land-use planning Land use planning or ''Land-use regulation'' is the process of regulating the use of land by a central authority. Usually, this is done to promote more desirable social and environmental outcomes as well as a more efficient use of resources. ...
, a locally unwanted land use (LULU) is a
land use Land use is an umbrella term to describe what happens on a parcel of land. It concerns the benefits derived from using the land, and also the land management actions that humans carry out there. The following categories are used for land use: fo ...
that creates externality costs on those living in close proximity. These costs include potential health hazards, poor aesthetics, or reduction in home values. LULUs often gravitate to disadvantaged areas such as slums, industrial neighborhoods and poor, minority, unincorporated or politically under-represented places that cannot fight them off. LULUs can include power plants, dumps (landfills),
prison A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center, is a facility where Prisoner, people are Imprisonment, imprisoned under the authority of the State (polity), state ...
s,
road A road is a thoroughfare used primarily for movement of traffic. Roads differ from streets, whose primary use is local access. They also differ from stroads, which combine the features of streets and roads. Most modern roads are paved. Th ...
s,
factories A factory, manufacturing plant or production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. Th ...
,
hospital A hospital is a healthcare institution providing patient treatment with specialized Medical Science, health science and auxiliary healthcare staff and medical equipment. The best-known type of hospital is the general hospital, which typically ...
s and many other developments. Planning seeks to distribute and reduce the harm of LULUs by
zoning In urban planning, zoning is a method in which a municipality or other tier of government divides land into land-use "zones", each of which has a set of regulations for new development that differs from other zones. Zones may be defined for ...
,
environmental law Environmental laws are laws that protect the environment. The term "environmental law" encompasses treaties, statutes, regulations, conventions, and policies designed to protect the natural environment and manage the impact of human activitie ...
s, community participation, buffer areas, clustering, dispersing and other such devices. Thus planning tries to protect property and environmental values by finding sites and operating procedures that minimize the LULU's effects.


Types

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Brothel A brothel, strumpet house, bordello, bawdy house, ranch, house of ill repute, house of ill fame, or whorehouse is a place where people engage in Human sexual activity, sexual activity with prostitutes. For legal or cultural reasons, establis ...
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Landfill A landfill is a site for the disposal of waste materials. It is the oldest and most common form of waste disposal, although the systematic burial of waste with daily, intermediate and final covers only began in the 1940s. In the past, waste was ...
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Road A road is a thoroughfare used primarily for movement of traffic. Roads differ from streets, whose primary use is local access. They also differ from stroads, which combine the features of streets and roads. Most modern roads are paved. Th ...
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Highway A highway is any public or private road or other public way on land. It includes not just major roads, but also other public roads and rights of way. In the United States, it is also used as an equivalent term to controlled-access highway, or ...
** Highway revolt ** Freeway removal *
Power station A power station, also referred to as a power plant and sometimes generating station or generating plant, is an industrial facility for the electricity generation, generation of electric power. Power stations are generally connected to an electr ...
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Prison A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center, is a facility where Prisoner, people are Imprisonment, imprisoned under the authority of the State (polity), state ...
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Halfway house A halfway house is a type of prison or institute intended to teach (or reteach) the necessary skills for people to re-integrate into society and better support and care for themselves. Halfway houses are typically either state sponsored for those ...
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Nuclear power Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by ...
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Sewage treatment Sewage treatment is a type of wastewater treatment which aims to remove contaminants from sewage to produce an effluent that is suitable to discharge to the surrounding environment or an intended reuse application, thereby preventing water p ...


Externalities

An
externality In economics, an externality is an Indirect costs, indirect cost (external cost) or indirect benefit (external benefit) to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party's (or parties') activity. Externalities can be conside ...
is something that happens as a result of a transaction that affects an uninvolved third party. LULU's present externalities in various ways, most notably those that inflict the senses: harsh smell, reduced aesthetics, noise pollution, and poor livability.


Inequality

It has been suggested that a correlation exists between the location of sites considered as locally unwanted land uses and the proximity to minority populations as a result of market dynamics. That is, externalities associated with LULUs (such as poor aesthetics, lack of desirable amenities, etc.) tend to discourage high-earning buyers from moving to the area, and thus perpetuate the cycle in which low income individuals have few choices except those which happen to be in areas with LULUs such as landfills and highways. This tends to lower home values. Further, the same market forces, especially those that may discriminate against minorities, could make it so that these areas happen to be populated predominantly by minorities. Throughout the United States, "three out of five African Americans and Latino Americans live in communities with abandoned toxic waste sites." This pattern is typically seen because of discrimination and racism throughout the infrastructure development process. It is becoming more and more common. What makes a LULU such as this unique is that they cause displacement, whereas a landfill, dump, roads, or prisons simply discourage home-buyers from entering the area and keep home prices low. High-end health food stores such as Whole Foods causes displacement by attracting high-earning home buyers into the area, causing rents and home prices to rise. This has been dubbed the "Whole Foods effect".


Gentrification


San Francisco

San Francisco, like many other large cities in the United States, has a high cost of living. Its proximity to
Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
lends itself to attracting high-income home buyers. As of 2013, 53% of low-income households throughout the entirety of the
Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose. The Association of Bay Area Governments ...
were undergoing
gentrification Gentrification is the process whereby the character of a neighborhood changes through the influx of more Wealth, affluent residents (the "gentry") and investment. There is no agreed-upon definition of gentrification. In public discourse, it has ...
pressures caused by transit investment and new developments.


Boston

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...
has been known historically for the high-cost of living that accompanies residence there, as well as being subject to various
urban renewal Urban renewal (sometimes called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address real or perceived urban decay. Urban renewal involves the clearing ...
projects during America's Urban Renewal era. These renewal projects often caused the displacement of Jewish and Italian immigrants as well as working class individuals in surrounding areas in its earliest years.


Superfund

Superfund Superfund is a United States federal environmental remediation program established by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA). The program is administered by the United States Environmental Pro ...
, or the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, was created to mitigate the cleanup and costs thereafter of hazardous waste sites. Superfund sites are often thought of when discussing LULUs.
Love Canal Love Canal was a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, United States, infamous as the location of a landfill that became the site of an environmental disaster discovered in 1977. Decades of dumping toxic chemicals killed residents and harm ...
was the first superfund site, established because of chemical waste that was being dumped into the canal by Hooker Electrical Company, later known as Hooker Chemical Company. The incident attracted widespread media attention and the neighborhoods surrounding Love Canal have since been destroyed. It has been suggested that some of these sites tend to be located in areas that have a high number of low-income, minority residents.


Native Americans

Of the 1,000+ Superfund sites in America, 25% of them (both capped and active) are situated directly on or near Native American reservations. Many of these sites can interfere with various rituals and affect cultural objects, and create further conflict between the Government and affected tribes. As discussed in a report from the All Indian Pueblo's Office of Environmental Protection, "the Superfund HRS azard Ranking Systemmodel does not account for Indian religious and ceremonial impacts from sites. Due to their importance in Pueblo life, culturally significant plants, animals, ceremonial surface water use, and sacred areas should be considered as critical impacts when evaluating the various pathways of exposure of the HRS.”


Environmental justice movement

The environmental justice movement began after the discovery of illegal dumping throughout 14
North Carolina North Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, South Carolina to the south, Georgia (U.S. stat ...
counties. 31,000 gallons of
polychlorinated biphenyl Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are organochlorine compounds with the formula Carbon, C12Hydrogen, H10−''x''Chloride, Cl''x''; they were once widely used in the manufacture of carbonless copy paper, as heat transfer fluids, and as dielectri ...
(PCB) was dumped by the Ward Transformers Company throughout these counties. The state government in North Carolina devised a landfill diversion plan for this waste after discovering the dumping, but the landfill was sited in Warren County, which had the greatest concentration of African American residents of all North Carolina's 100 counties, and was also one of the poorest, ranking 97th in GDP of the counties in North Carolina. The
conservation movement The conservation movement, also known as nature conservation, is a political, environmental, and social movement that seeks to manage and protect natural resources, including animal, fungus, and plant species as well as their habitat for the ...
was made popular by the emphasis on wildlife protection and
wilderness Wilderness or wildlands (usually in the plurale tantum, plural) are Earth, Earth's natural environments that have not been significantly modified by human impact on the environment, human activity, or any urbanization, nonurbanized land not u ...
preservation during the 20th century, but this presented cost barriers to poorer individuals whose concerns were not with wildlife and wilderness preservation. By virtue of the fact that this movement was not championed by poor people in its formative stages, it has caused these individuals to view the mainstream environmental movement as "elitist". This elitism is understood through three different forms, according to a study by Denton E. Morrison and Riley E. Dunlap: # ''Compositional'' – Environmentalists tend to be from the middle and upper classes, both socially and financially # ''Ideological'' – The reforms benefit the movement's supporters but impose costs on nonparticipants, i.e.: wildlife preservation benefits middle/upper class individuals because they have a greater utility derived from these things, poor people do not get as much utility # ''Impact'' – These reforms are "regressive" in their impact to society, meaning that disenfranchised individuals are disproportionally harmed by these changes made by the middle/upper class The
environmental justice Environmental justice is a social movement that addresses injustice that occurs when poor or marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has gene ...
movement emerged as a critique of mainstream environmentalism's elitism and racism. One of the greatest barriers to entry for poor individuals to join in the environmental justice movement is legal fees. In order to try to prevent the kinds of pollution like that of Warren County, there are a great number of legal fees involved which are often costly. To that end, many of the companies that produce pollution will encourage acceptance of this pollution by communities in order to avoid cleanup costs and costs associated with making certain industries more environmentally sustainable. That is, the cost of paying communities to accept pollution is often less than the (initial) costs of avoiding pollution all together. Therefore, it can be ascertained that poorer communities are likely to accept compensation for a certain level of pollution, and wealthier communities are willing to accept a smaller amount of pollution and demand a greater level of environmental quality. The difference is that one group is able to pay for environmental quality, and the other group is not.


See also

* Corruption in local government * Fenceline community *
Gentrification Gentrification is the process whereby the character of a neighborhood changes through the influx of more Wealth, affluent residents (the "gentry") and investment. There is no agreed-upon definition of gentrification. In public discourse, it has ...
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Land speculation In finance, speculation is the purchase of an asset (a commodity, goods, or real estate) with the hope that it will become more valuable in a brief amount of time. It can also refer to short sales in which the speculator hopes for a decline ...
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NIMBY NIMBY (, or nimby), an acronym for the phrase "Not In My Back Yard", is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed real estate development and infrastructure developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land us ...
* Pollution haven hypothesis *
Real estate appraisal Real estate appraisal, home appraisal, property valuation or land valuation is the process of assessing the value of real property (usually market value). The appraisal is conducted by a licensed appraiser. Real estate transactions often require ...
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Urban sprawl Urban sprawl (also known as suburban sprawl or urban encroachment) is defined as "the spreading of urban developments (such as houses and shopping centers) on undeveloped land near a city". Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted ...
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Zoning In urban planning, zoning is a method in which a municipality or other tier of government divides land into land-use "zones", each of which has a set of regulations for new development that differs from other zones. Zones may be defined for ...


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Locally unwanted land use Tort law Land use Environmental justice Love Canal