Concerning Our Presence on the Planet

The urban and rural phyla of our built domain contain divisions
of shelter, movement, open space, and life support. The Shelter Division contains zoning areas of compatible activity and shelter intensity called gross building area per buildable acre. These areas produce revenue that is a function of the intensity and occupant activity present or planned for the area involved; but the importance of intensity has never been quantified beyond superficial height and setback regulations.

When revenue is divided by the acres occupied, the resulting public income per acre indicates its productivity, and productivity can be compared to a city’s expense per acre when its annual budget is divided by the taxable acres under its supervision. This means that a zoning map not only separates incompatible land use activity. It inadvertently defines the areas, activities, and intensities that contribute to its financial stability or instability; but these implications have escaped the equations, cooperation, digital analysis, and predictive ability required to evaluate “stability” beyond a balanced budget that may contain draconian service reductions.

Keep in mind that real estate tax revenue may be divided among a number of recipients. I have seen a city share as low as 9% with the remainder allocated to school, county, and library recipients. This makes the average revenue per acre for city operations extremely low even though the total dollar amount paid may seem high to a taxpayer. The percentage I’ve mentioned applied to a land-locked bedroom community with little off-setting income tax revenue and 5% non-residential land use. It had little ability to analyze its deteriorating financial situation in the physical detail required to make a difference, and was forced to grasp at project straws it called economic development.

Unfortunately, a city rarely knows the average revenue per acre that will be produced by the various activities and intensity combinations permitted within the zones on its map; and may not understand the mathematical definition of intensity that determines revenue predictions and quality of life standards. This means that many, if not most, cities attempt to correct budget imbalances with the annexation of land for new revenue to meet old expense when land is available; but remain unable to accurately anticipate the adequacy of this new revenue to meet increasing public expense per acre as its annexation ages. This uncertainty has often made annexation a Ponzi scheme that must consume ever greater amounts of land for new revenue that proves inadequate over time as the cost of its annexation maintenance and improvement increases. We are all familiar with the deterioration, sprawl and continuing consumption of an irreplaceable resource that occurs when budgets are inadequate and populations multiply. When new land is unavailable, a city’s lack of land use capacity, intensity, and yield information makes redevelopment a strategy based on hope with inadequate knowledge and persuasive power facing objection rooted in fear.

A city cannot balance and/or adjust its acreage and activity allocation to produce a desired financial yield per acre until it improves the tools, data, and knowledge it uses to make its case. The problem is magnified when time is taken into account. I have just pointed out that revenue from new development can appear to be a windfall until its maintenance expense per acre increases with age to exceed the revenue provided.

 have presented new tools, equations, and forecast models to predict the land development capacity, intensity, and yield of any urban land area in my book, The Equations of Urban Design, 2020; and have presented the database structures and relationships required to build knowledge concerning the revenue productivity of land use activity and intensity options in an essay contained in my book, Symbiotic Architecture, 2020. The essay is one from a collection in the bo
ok and is entitled, “The Least a Smart City Should Know”, 2018. I self-published the two books on Amazon.com where they can now be found.

The equations in the first book I’ve mentioned above represent a culmination of the work I began with the books, Land Development Calculations, editions 1 and 2, published by The McGraw-Hill Companies in 2001 and 2010. The database structures in the essay published in 2018 should be pursued by those wishing to accumulate the knowledge we will need to persuade others that we must learn to shelter growing populations on geographically limited land areas that are planned to protect both our quality and source of life. It will represent pure research; and it is my hope that the knowledge acquired will contribute to a new science of urban design on a planet where land and shelter is required to survive without excessive intensity that defeats the effort.