Impervious Surface Trading as a Tool for Smart Growth



PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Introduction

Like many regions in the nation, New Jersey’s land management system has long struggled to effectively address sprawling patterns of development growth. In spite of a multitude of anti-sprawl measures, the rate of development has remained consistent at more than 15,000 acres per year during the last several decades (Hasse and Lathrop, 2008). The majority of the development that occured during this time was increasingly scattered, low density, inefficient, problematic and environmentally costly (Hasse and Lathrop, 2008). This sprawling development pattern is locking in a fragmented land use configuration that is wasteful of land resources and that necessitates excessive vehicle miles to be traveled (VMT), diminishing the prospects of reaching the state’s global warming reduction goals (Ewing et al., 2007). At the current rate of development, New Jersey will have reached build-out (Hasse and Lathrop, 2001) well before the state’s 2050 target date of 80 % carbon reduction from 1990 levels (NJDEP, 2010). The pattern of that future built-out landscape will be a major factor determining New Jersey’s ecological footprint, especially its carbon footprint as the VMTs necessary for day to day life and open land available for carbon sequestration will be locked in a disjunctive land use pattern set for generations to come.

The sprawl continues to occur in New Jersey in spite of the fact that the Garden State has innovated many land management strategies such as a state plan for smart growth (NJ Office of Smart Growth, 2009), the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan, and the recently enacted Highlands Management Plan. The state also has some of the most stringent Departments of Environmental Protection rules as well as one of the most successful farmland and open space preservation programs in the US. Furthermore, it has set national precedents for affordable housing planning policy. Yet even with all these programs in place, the majority of development occurring in the state over the past several decades has continued to follow a pattern of sprawl (Hasse and Lathrop, 2008; Ingram and Hong, 2009).

One planning tool that the state hopes to utilize in slowing this sprawling development trend is Transfer of Development Rights (TDR), which is a planning mechanism designed to shift land use patterns toward more compact smart growth while preserving open space. New Jersey has had several nationally notable examples of successful TDR programs, including a regional plan established in the NJ Pinelands and another municipal program used in Chesterfield Township, Burlington County (Pruetz and Standridge, 2009). In 2004 the state enacted the fist enabling legislation in the nation legalizing TDR throughout New Jersey. Unfortunately, the statewide legislation has thus far not lived up to its expectations as only a handful of municipalities have taken on the challenge of developing a TDR under the new program. The problems stem from the fact that designing a successful TDR is complicated, requires careful crafting, long time horizons and political skill. The home-rule nature of New Jersey’s land management system makes the prospects of locally-based and administered TDR very unlikely to be realized. Assembling the necessary planning and political ingredients for a successful TDR in each of the state’s 566 municipalities is unlikely to occur in a meaningful manner before the state runs out of buildable land in the next few decades.

New Jersey Future, the state’s top smart growth advocacy organization, recently convened a task force of nearly four dozen land management professionals from various governmental, non-governmental and academic organizations to evaluate the difficulties of TDR in order to gain insight into why the 2004 NJ State TDR act has not been more successful. The group solicited ideas from the planning and academic community to explore new avenues for making TDR successful in New Jersey. This grant proposal is intended to address that request by providing methods for modeling policy outcomes within a GIS environment. Specifically, the project aims at developing an alternate regional model for TDR that can side-step some of the inherent difficulties of traditional TDR. The team proposes a TDR based on impervious surface trading in order to disentangle problems of TDR based on zoning density as well as to better relate the program to goals of environmental management, smart growth and sustainability.

This project addresses the following two overarching research questions: 1) What will be the land use pattern and subsequent land resource impacts of New Jersey when it reaches buildout in the next several decades under current trend development? 2) Can an innovative regional TDR based on impervious surface trading within watershed management areas possibly make a significant impact on New Jersey’s pending buildout land use pattern?

Project Goals and Objectives

The first prong of the study will develop a buildout modeling tool that can be used to project land use patterns at buildout under various policy scenarios. Buildout analysis (Conway and Lathrop, 2005a and b; Theobald and Hobbs, 2002; Lathrop et al., 2003) will be used to model future building intensities, urban spatial patterns and the composition of land use when all of today’s available land has been committed to either urban development or open space preservation. The buildout analysis will generate indicators for providing insight into consequential impacts of sprawling development to important land resources.

The second prong of the study will develop and evaluate a new concept for land management that is a variation of TDR based on impervious surface. The project team will develop the conceptual framework for Impervious Cap and Trade (ICT) where impervious surface is regulated but allowed to be traded on a parcel by parcel basis within watershed management areas. The idea will be developed from draft concept to viable model by soliciting the input of key stakeholders and experts including the state’s TDR Task Forces. When the concept has been honed into a functional system, the team will assess the impact that ICT will have on future landscape patterns using the buildout tools. The analysis will allow a comparison of ICT versus trend scenarios in order to provide insight into the potential for such a program to alter future landscape outcomes, particularly regarding smart growth attainment and sustainability. To this end the project will focus around the following objectives:

1) To develop a statewide New Jersey land use/land cover buildout model that can be used to test alternate land management scenarios.

2) To evaluate the degree of sprawl, smart growth and sustainability indicated by the spatial pattern of buildout projected by the model

3) To develop a conceptual framework for a variation of TDR that is based on Impervious Surface Cap and trade (ICT) in order to move beyond the problems that have beset many traditional TDR models.

4) To model the potential effects of the resultant ICT system on New Jersey buildout scenarios, focusing specifically on its potential for achieving smarter growth, more open space preservation and by implication, a reduced carbon footprint as compared to trend development patterns.

5) To disseminate the results in a manner that provides meaningful and useful information to stakeholders in order to assist the prospects for advancing TDR in New Jersey and other states.

Objective 1 - Buildout Modeling

Urban growth modeling is a useful tool for projecting the long-term consequences of land management policy. Some of the common approaches to urban modeling include agent-based modeling and cellular automata modeling which focus on the temporal process of urbanization at a specific future date given interactions of multiple agents (Batty, 2005). Although this type of modeling is quite useful, the output is process and time dependent. In contrast, buildout analysis differs in that it focuses on the end product of policies (Theobald and Hobbs, 2002) regardless of the time it takes to reach buildout. While buildout modeling is in some ways less complex than other approaches to urban modeling, it can provide a less ambiguous avenue for policy comparisons. Since New Jersey’s small size and rapid urbanization rate makes it on track to buildout, the investigation team is taking a buildout analysis approach in order to comparing and contrasting the long-term effect of different policy scenarios.

Buildout analyses have generally been of interest to stakeholders dealing in issues of water quality and land planning. Subsequently, buildout analysis is often conducted at the watershed scale (Giannotti and Prisloe, 1998; Prisloe and Giannotti, 2000; Conway and Lathrop, 2005a and b). Buildout has also been a tool embraced on a municipal level for projecting planning policy scenarios on various economic and environmental variables (Kilpatrick and Wyckoff, 2002; Pfister et al., 2007). Less work has taken place examining buildout at the scale of an entire region or state. Since the goal of this project is to evaluate the long-term implications for New Jersey’s land management policy, it will be one of the first studies to tackle buildout at a statewide scale.

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|Figure 1. Preserved open space and remaining |

|available land. The remaining available lands |

|(light green) will become either preserved or |

|developed as New Jersey reaches buildout in the |

|coming decades. |

The buildout modeling proposed will use as a starting point a recently completed detailed analysis of land development patterns and open space loss for New Jersey conducted by the PI (Hasse and Lathrop, 2008). This previous work assimilated a variety of high quality geospatial data for the state including Land Use/Land Cover mapping. The New Jersey digital dataset is one of the most comprehensive and detailed land use datasets generated for an entire state and has been compiled for the years 1986, 1995 and 2002 (NJDEP, 2002). One of the products of the Hasse and Lathrop study was a “remaining available lands” map depicting the open land that could yet possibly be developed (Figure 1). The map was created by overlaying land use, current open space preservation and restricted land datasets. The total land estimated as preserved in New Jersey as of 2007 was 1,233,967 acres. The total estimated available land remaining was 1,271,872 acres. In the coming decades this available land will be either utilized for development or preserved as open space until the Garden State reaches buildout.The first project hypothesis (H1) is that a functional buildout model can be developed for New Jersey that can be used to provide insight into landscape implications over the long term for various policy scenarios. The development of the model will focus on the following questions: Q.1.1 Can buildout be adequately modeled with available geospatial data? Q.1.2 Since the land use dataset is from 2002 but the open space data is from 2007, can the development growth that occurred between 2002 and 2007 be feasibly digitized and used to calibrate a model for projecting urbanization to buildout?

Methods Objective 1:

The proposed buildout analysis will start with the remaining available land dataset developed in the PI’s previous analysis. Zoning maps will be collected for all areas of significant remaining available land. Since each municipal zone description is different, the zoning maps will be classified by use and densities into uniform categories and combined into a statewide map. Parcel maps have recently been compiled for nearly all NJ counties.

Since the most recent available land use/land cover dataset is based on 2002 orthoimagery, the data will be updated to the 2007 imagery by digitizing new development building units utilizing a building unit identification approach (Hasse and Lathrop, 2003b). This entails each building unit being represented by a point within a vector dataset. The PI is experimenting with a browser-based prototype for digitizing new development that allows users to place points on new building locations identifiable in the aerial imagery. All development previous to 2002 will be masked on the 2007 imagery allowing newly developed buildings to be identified and digitized with a point. This web-based “wiki” heads-up digitizing approach allows multiple users to simultaneously digitize the urban development layer in a rapid manner. As the database grows, points will be registered as draft when they are first digitized and subsequently reviewed for quality control before being designated as final. Multiple users can contribute to data development simultaneously, greatly increasing the speed at which data can be created. Undergraduate research assistants will do most of the digitizing, but we will experiment with using extra credit to obtain additional help from students enrolled in multiple GIS classes. Since the tool is browser-based using API mapping techniques, the wiki digitizing model can also be carried out concurrently by multiple other institutions. The wiki heads-up digitizing application is currently in Beta and has been successfully used to digitize 2002-2007 building units for Gloucester County and part of Camden County, requiring approximately 60 hours. Student researchers will digitize the 2002-2007 building points data in the first year.

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|Figure 2. New Jersey watershed management areas. (source: NJ DEP) |

The wiki produced building point layer produced for 2002 – 2007 will then be overlaid with various data sets including land use, property parcels, road ways, zoning, sewer service areas, wetlands and other constrained lands to calibrate the buildout model for the remaining available lands. Using the CommunityViz extension for ArcMap, undeveloped parcels will be populated with the projected number of building units expected to be built under current zoning.

We will conduct the buildout analysis at the Watershed Management Area scale(Figure 2), since this is the unit at which we propose the impervious surface regulation to be administered. We will begin with the Barnegat Bay watershed (WMA 13), as the testing ground since this watershed has already had substantial buildout studies conducted in the past, (Conway and Lathrop, 2005a and b) and thus we can benchmark our analysis. The buildout analysis will then focus on the Salem County area (WMA’s 17 & 18) in order to serve the Salem County TDR Task force. Buildout analysis will be completed for all 20 WMAs over the course of the project. This will provide the baseline of trend development patterns at buildout in New Jersey under current zoning.

Objective 2: Evaluation of Sprawl, Smart Growth and Sustainability Spatial Patterns at Buildout

The baseline buildout map will be evaluated for a number of sprawl/smart growth indicators. Sprawl, and (its more or less opposite) smart growth, are labels often used to describe urban spatial patterns. The definition of sprawl has been the subject of much debate in the academic discourse (Ewing, 1997; Gordon and Richardson, 1997, Burchell and Shad, 1999, Galster et al., 2001), but is generally used to describe low-density, dispersed development patterns that impose a number of problematic consequences. Sprawl is not a single phenomenon and can be different from place to place (Burchell et al., 1998) and has been grouped into at least three different families relating to urban sprawl, suburban sprawl and rural/exurban sprawl (Hasse, 2004; Theobald, 2004). The literature on identifying sprawl has focused on a number of spatial characteristics including: inefficient land consumption/ low population density (Black, 1996; Downs, 1998; Freeman, 2001; Galster et al, 2001; Hasse, 2004); fringe development (Besl, 2000; Downs, 1998; Galster et al, 2001; Katz and Bradley, 1999); lack of connectivity (Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 2001;Allen and Benfield, 2005; Hasse, 2004); leapfrogging/ scattered development (Clawson, 1962; Mills, 1981; Downs, 1998; Gordon and Richardson, 1997; Yeh and Li, 2001; Hasse, 2004); separation of uses (Brown et al, 1998; Downs, 1998; Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 2001; Ewing, 1994;1997; Galster et al, 2001; Hasse, 2004); lack of functional open space (Ewing, 1997;1994; Hasse, 2004); lack of non-auto transportation accessibility (Downs, 1998; Ewing, 1997;1994; Hasse, 2004). Smart growth is often characterized by the opposite spatial characteristics of those used to identify sprawl.

A number of spatial-based measurements designed to capture various sprawl signatures have evolved out of the characteristics of sprawl listed above. One of the seminal works of spatial measurements of sprawl at the metropolitan level was developed by Galster et al. (2001). Galster et al. define sprawl as “a pattern of land use in an urbanized area that exhibits low levels of some combination of eight distinct dimensions: density, continuity, concentration, compactness, centrality, nuclearity, diversity, and proximity.” The Galster study developed a number of spatial metrics with some similarities to landscape ecology metrics (Gustofson, 1998) by creating ½-mile and 1-mile grids of the census data polygons. Wolman et al. (2005) improved on Galster’s methods by integrating land use data from the United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) National Land Cover Database (NLCDB).

Along this line of sprawl analysis, the PI has developed a Land Resource Impact (LRI) indicator approach to sprawl analysis at the state level for comparing municipalities (Hasse and Lathrop 2003a). The study looked specifically at the loss of important land resources, namely prime farmland, wetlands, and forest core areas (buffered 100 meters interior to the forest edge) as well as impervious surface creation. The study also normalized the indicators by the population growth per municipality to derive a per capita impact of sprawling development patterns on important land resources.

More recent sprawl analysis work has begun to focus on sub-metropolitan measures of sprawl. Song and Knaap (2004) derived a set of neighborhood-scale measures of urban form, including street design and circulation systems, density, land use mix, accessibility, and pedestrian access. The PI (Hasse, 2004; Hasse, 2002) has created a set of twelve Geospatial Indices of Urban Sprawl (GIUS) designed specifically to provide information about what spatial characteristics are considered problematic or dysfunctional. The GIUS metrics are micro measures of sprawl that provide quantitative information for individual building units for three categories of sprawl characteristics: 1) land use patterns, 2) transportation patterns, and 3) environmental resource impact patterns.

Our second hypothesis (H2) is that if NJ follows current trends of development, the landscape will experience significant degradation in key sprawl landscape indicators. Our examination of the modeled buildout landscape developed in Objective 1 will specifically investigate the following questions: Q2.1 What will be the pattern of urbanized land in NJ at buildout? Q2.2 How sprawling will that pattern be using LRI and GIUS metrics? Q2.3 How much impervious surface will there be at buildout? Q2.4 How much will water quality degrade at buildout using impervious surface as an indicator? Q2.5 How much farmland and prime farmland will remain at buildout? Q2.6 How much forest land will remain at buildout? Q2.7 How fragmented will forest land be at buildout compared to the present? Q2.8 How much forest core will be left at buildout? Q2.9 How much wetlands will remain at buildout? Q2.10 How many vehicle miles traveled (VMT) will be generated by development patterns at buildout? The LRI and GIUS metrics will be employed to provide answers to these questions.

Methods Objective 2:

An analysis of the Land Resource Impact (LRI) indicators (Hasse and Lathrop, 2003a) will be conducted for the landscape buildout model developed in Objective 1. LRIs for New Jersey were recently updated through 2002 (Hasse and Lathrop, 2008). The LRI methodology employs land use change analysis detailed in Hasse and Lathrop 2008. Sprawl spatial metrics will also be employed following the PI’s Geospatial Indices of Urban Sprawl (GIUS) metrics for evaluating the micro-measure spatial pattern of development units for characteristics of sprawl (Hasse, 2004; Hasse, 2002). One of the measures being further refined by the PI is an indicator of the road accessibility of building units to the nearest set of community destinations. In a pilot study (Hasse and Kornbluh, 2004), road distance was calculated from each housing unit to the nearest eight indicator destinations including schools, emergency services, grocery stores, public transit stops, recreational parks, post offices and libraries. This summary distance provides an indicator of the vehicle miles generated by the location of the given household.

The sprawl methodology will first be generated for 2007 land use conditions. While the land use/land cover data available for New Jersey is one of the most accurate statewide land use databases available, the most recent available update is for the year 2002. In order to estimate the land use/land cover configuration resulting from development that has occurred since the 2002 data, the investigators will update the dataset by utilizing the 2002-2007 building unit points developed in the wiki. For the 2002-2007 period, the study will take the building unit point data generated by the wiki digitization described in Objective 1, buffer each unit based on the average size footprint of building units for the given zone evaluated from the data, and use this data layer to clip “holes” in the non-urban land use category layers of the 2002 data. This method will provide a good approximation of the pattern and configuration of 2007 urban and non-urban land use. Within the coming year the updated 2007 land use/land cover dataset is expected to be released. This will be used to compare, calibrate and adjust the land use update methodology allowing the team to make adjustments for the buildout modeling. A similar building unit approach will be utilized for projecting the land use patterns at buildout under existing zoning. Land Resource Impact (LRI) indicators and Geospatial Indicators of Urban Sprawl (GIUS) will then be generated for the estimated 2007 land use pattern and the projected buildout land use pattern

Objective 3: Developing a Conceptual Framework for Impervious Surface-Based Transfer of Development Rights

Transfer of development rights (TDR) is a land management technique designed to cluster development and protect open space while allowing rural land owners a means to realize equity through selling development rights to areas where increased growth is desired (Pruetz, 1997). Since TDR was first conceived in the 1970’s there have been dozens of examples of TDR programs set up throughout the nation. In New Jersey, Burlington County has had enabling legislation for TDR since 1989 (Gottsegen & Gallagher, 1992) and the New Jersey Pinelands has also had an established TDR since 1981. In 2004 the New Jersey legislature enacted the State Transfer of Development Rights Act, making the state the first in the nation to authorize statewide comprehensive TDR enabling legislation. The State TDR Act provided municipalities with the ability to participate in both potential intramunicipal and intermunicipal development transfers. This bill also formalized the planning process required to enact TDR and mandated a list of planning documents required prior to adopting a TDR ordinance (State TDR Act N.J.S.A. 40:55D-13.7 et. seq.).

The record on TDR success has been mixed. Some TDR’s have been shown to be more effective at preserving substantial amounts of land and to be less fragmentary than other land preservation strategies such as purchase of development rights (PDR) and zoning-based clustering (Brabec and Smith, 2002). When it works, TDR leverages a market-based approach to open space preservation in either a voluntary or mandatory scheme in which rights are purchased in a sending area in order to allow increased density in a receiving area (Johnston and Madison, 1997). However, even though TDR has been around for decades, there are a relatively few that have achieved substantial success (Danner, 1997; Levinson, 1997; Kaplowitz et al., 2008). In practice many TDR programs have struggled with a number of issues related to design and regulation. Zoning densities in both the sending and receiving zones are often ineffectively set to provide adequate incentives for rights to be purchased. Units wind up being built at the base density rather than going through a complicated development rights transfer. Implementing a TDR can also be difficult for locals to embrace because it can be perceived as having questionable public benefit, diminishing equity and interfering in the market (Johnston and Madison, 1997). After more than 30 years and only a few dozen examples of success, the majority have generally not been effective in preserving significant tracks of land (Pruetz and Standridge, 2009). TDR is simply too complicated, too expensive and perceived as too arbitrary since it is based on alterable local zoning.

The investigators see impervious surface as a potentially more effective means of regionalizing TDR in order to side step many weaknesses. Impervious surface is relatively easy to measure and is highly correlated with many environmental impacts associated to urbanization. Impervious surface is universally the same rather than being based on arbitrarily assigned zoning density and thus can be more politically acceptable and justifiable to regulate because it is in the clear public interest. Impervious surface is utilized by several TDR’s, most notably the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA). The TRPA is a bi-state agency with representatives from both Nevada and California which share the lake. In an effort to minimize the environmental impacts to water quality of uncontrolled development, the TRPA designed a TDR based on impervious coverage depending on the environmental sensitivity of the parcel (TRPA, 2009). Although the TRPA program has its critics, the degradation of the lake water quality has been halted since the implementation of impervious surface TDR program over twenty years ago (Imperial and Kauneckis, 2003).

TDRs in other states are also beginning to experiment with impervious coverage in varying capacities. For example, Pennsylvania has a number of municipal TDR programs that incorporate some dimension of impervious surface including: Honey Brook Twp., Chester Co., Manheim Twp., Lancaster Co., Warrington Twp., Bucks Co., Warwick Twp., Lancaster Co., and Limerick Township, Montgomery County (Snook et al., 2009). Other state examples of TDR that incorporate impervious surface include Queens Anne County, Maryland and Austin, Texas (Farmland Information Center, 2008).

Our third hypothesis (H3) is that a variation of TDR based on a system of trading impervious surface credits coupled with other smart-growth and environmental incentives could be more effective at accomplishing the smart growth and sustainability goals of the state than traditional municipal administered TDR. We will specifically examine the following questions in developing the framework: Q3.1 Can a system of Impervious Cap and Trade (ICT) hold promise to move beyond a number of the limitations of TDR as a mechanism for better regional coordination of planning decisions without usurping home-rule? Q.3.2 Can the program be designed to leverage the private market forces of new development to result in significant tracts of open space preservation? Q.3.3 Can an ICT better foster development patterns that achieve the principles of smart growth Q.3.4 Can ICT foster redevelopment of existing built-up areas and minimize development of greenfields? Q.3.5 Can ICT be designed to encourage sustainable green building designs?

Methods Objective 3:

The PI’s will develop the concept of impervious surface TDR. It will begin with a draft white paper, (summarized below), outlining the basic idea that will be distributed for review and feedback to a number of land management stakeholders including the New Jersey TDR Task Force, the New Jersey Office of Smart Growth, the NJDEP, the Delaware Regional Planning Commission and the Salem County TDR Task Force. The paper will be developed in a collaborative platform via Google Docs which allows a single document to be built by collaborative contributors. We will simultaneously develop a web-based discussion to critique and adjust the concept, soliciting expertise in land use law, impervious surface, environmental management and transfer of development rights, among others. As the idea is developed, we will conduct at least one seminar (in-person or via cyber-seminar) to further progress the concept from the initial conceptual stage to a comprehensive paper to be published in a leading peer review journal.

ICT Draft Concept Summary. The concept weaves together the ideas of Transfer of Development Rights (TDR), impervious surface regulation for environmental protection, the New Jersey State Plan, and the LEED-ND smart growth and sustainability rating systems into state-wide overlay land management regulation. The draft concept begins by capping impervious surface for all property parcels and then allowing free-market trade of that impervious surface to areas where it is most demanded for development. Such an Impervious Cap and Trade (ICT) system would ensure the protection of significant amounts of New Jersey’s remaining open space while promoting more compact development. In addition to the base ICT function, we add substantial bonus provisions for: 1) urban redevelopment, 2) following the NJ State Plan, and 3) achieving smart growth and sustainability standards as recognized by the LEED-ND rating system.

To illustrate the draft concept, we begin with a fictitious rural area (Figure 3) that is experiencing mounting development pressures. This demonstration area represents the circumstances of most remaining rural areas in the state. If development were to follow the underlying zoning, the demonstration area will buildout in the typical low-density, scattered pattern that consumes large tracts of open space, will be single use and automobile dependent (Figure 4). The spread of suburban track development into the former rural lands leaves the older town to experience economic decay and disinvestment.

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|Figure 3. A rural area beginning to experience increasing |Figure 4. The demonstration area at buildout under the current |

|development pressure. An older town is located in the northwestern|zoning. Residential development tracks are scattered, low density |

|quadrant bisected by a highway with some commercial strip shopping |and land consumptive. Highway strip commercial is spread |

|centers. The area is typical of many rural areas. |throughout the area and only accessible via automobile. |

The Impervious Cap and Trade (ICT) concept begins by the creation of a state-wide regulation on the amount of impervious surface that any property parcel can create by right. We turn to the literature for our suggested threshold of 10% of buildable land since this value has emerged as a rule of thumb for demonstrable water quality impact at the watershed level (Arnold and Gibbons, 1996; Brabec et al., 2002). This 10% coverage of buildable land limitation is shared equally by all parcels since if all parcels exceeded this amount, water quality in the entire watershed would pass the impacted threshold.

Under the ICT system, all properties would carry the right to create up to the capped amount of impervious surface (Figure 5). If a property owner proposed a project that would create more impervious surface than their 10% limit, they would have to acquire additional impervious surface “credits” through purchases and/or bonuses (described below). Such impervious credit purchases would be negotiated through private market transactions facilitated and augmented by an impervious credit bank. The initial goal of ICT is to limit the total amount of impervious surface within watershed management areas at buildout to levels that maintain environmental integrity and open space goals while allowing the market to determine where that impervious surface is most valuable for development.

As an example, a ten acre parcel (Figure 6, parcel A) with a threshold limit of 10% impervious cover could create no more impervious surface “by right” than one acre. If the parcel was to be developed into a shopping center that required eight acres of impervious coverage, the developer would have to purchase seven additional acres of impervious surface credits from a willing seller (Figure 6, parcel B) to add to the one acre he is allowed to create by right. A 70 acre land owner wishing to preserve her land can realize the equity in her property by selling 10% of her buildable lot (seven acres) as impervious surface credits to the developer and in doing so her land would be preserved. The farm parcel would be deed restricted from further development and the developer would be permitted to build his shopping center.

Development still occurs, but in the process significant tracks of open space are preserved thus keeping the total impervious footprint for the whole region below the 10% cap at future buildout. Under ICT substantial amounts of open space would be preserved automatically by the drive for new development without expending any public funds. On average in NJ, urban land is developed at 25% impervious surface. With a 10% threshold, an average acre of new development will result in the preservation of 1 ½ acres of open space since a development would have its 10% by right and need to buy 15% more thus saving a parcel 1 ½ the size of the developed lot. The impervious surface can be bought and sold from parcel to parcel throughout the entire Watershed Management Area, but the cap of 10% total impervious surface is never exceeded for the whole region, even at buildout.

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|Figure 5. Under impervious surface trading each parcel is |Figure 6. If a parcel wishes to create more impervious surface than their|

|allowed to create their "fair share" of impervious surface by |capped amount, they are permitted to purchase the impervious surface from |

|right, 10% of their buildable lot. |a willing seller on the open market. |

Additional Bonus Incentives for Smart Growth and Sustainability. Impervious cap and trade as described above would accomplish the goals of protecting water quality and preserving open space. However, the growth that would occur may not necessarily exemplify smart growth nor accomplish measures of sustainability. In order to create incentives for urban revitalization, smart growth and sustainability, ICT would include three additional key policy bonuses for: 1) urban exemption, 2) State Plan compliance, and 3) achievement of LEED-ND sustainability certification.

1) Urban Exemptions: First, all previously existing developed areas would legally need to be grandfathered for their impervious footprint at the date of program vestment. Furthermore, land within designated “distressed urban cores” or designated redevelopment zones, including vacant infill lots, would also be exempted from impervious surface restrictions (Figure 7). Existing zoning and storm water requirements would remain in place but the 10% impervious cap would not be required. Grandfathering existing impervious surface and exempting urban cores provides a considerable incentive for redevelopment of previously developed lands over development of greenfields.

2) State Plan Compliance: The second bonus provision would grant incentives for demonstrating compliance with the NJ State Plan (Figure 8). The State Plan divides New Jersey into five State Planning Areas (PAs), with PAs 1 and 2 designated for growth and PAs 3, 4, and 5 designated for limited growth or conservation (NJ Office of Smart Growth, 2009). However, the plan has had limited success in guiding development since it has no jurisdiction over local planning control. ICT could incentivize the plan. The impervious threshold in the rural and environmentally sensitive planning areas (PAs 3, 4 and 5) would be reduced for on-site development to ½ the overall threshold (or 5%). However, a parcel could realize their full 10% impervious right if they sell their impervious surface credits to a parcel in the smart growth zones (PAs 1, 2, or within a designated center of the state plan). Development can still occur in the rural zones, but there is a substantial incentive to transfer the impervious surface credits from the rural planning areas to the smart growth planning areas. In essence the State Plan becomes the basis for sending and receiving zones.

3) LEED-ND Certification: The third incentive provision would provide bonuses to proposed development that achieves certification under the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) rating system (USGBC, 2009). LEED-ND is the most widely recognized national standard for evaluating sustainable smart growth neighborhood designs (Garde, 2009; Retzlaff, 2008). LEED-ND is a smart growth, green building and sustainability rating system developed as a collaboration of the US Green Building Council (USGBC), the Congress for New Urbanism and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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|Figure 7. In order to encourage redevelopment, existing impervious |Figure 8. The impervious cap in rural planning areas will be |

|surface would be grandfathered and special urban core areas would |reduced to 5%. However, a parcel can realize their full 10% |

|be exempt from the ICT regulation. |impervious surface allotment by selling their credits to a smart |

| |growth planning area of the State Plan. |

The LEED-ND bonus is desirable since the development that occurs within the smart growth planning areas (as depicted in Figure 8) may still not achieve the design characteristics of smart growth nor meaningful measures of sustainability. The amount of bonus would be linked to the level of certification. The state bonuses would come from the impervious surface credit bank, which could purchase impervious surface credits through the NJ Garden State Preservation Trust. The costs of bonuses to the public would be offset by the substantial environmental benefits gained through urban revitalization, compliance with the State Plan, and achievement of smart growth and sustainability, such as reduction in vehicle miles traveled and improved water and air quality, among other documented smart growth benefits (McCann and Ewing, 2003; Ewing, et al., 2002).

An Impervious Cap and Trade (ICT) system has the potential to substantially improve the land management process in the following ways: 1) limiting total impervious surface in remaining open lands to justifiable limits, 2) encouraging the redevelopment of urbanized areas by exempting redevelopment of already existing impervious surface from the new restriction, 3) allowing market mechanisms to pay for open space preservation and thus keeping pace with increasing land values, 4) rewarding development and redevelopment proposals that demonstrate substantive smart growth goals of the NJ State Plan and sustainability performance as evaluated by LEED-ND, 5) allowing flexibility and market changes to occur while still maintaining thresholds of environmental standards and objectives, and 6) allowing a substantial amount of local control to remain in the process. The state could also bank impervious surface credits by purchasing them from critical parcels that needed to be preserved, but for which there was not a willing buyer at the time of sale at considerable public cost saving compared to outright purchase.

The above outline sketches some basic parameters of a possible impervious-based TDR. It represents the starting point for conceptual more detailed development of an alternate TDR that can better function on a regional basis and address a number of the limitations of local-scale TDR. The project team will develop a white paper about ICT as described above and then solicit feedback and input from key TDR stakeholders including the NJ TDR Task Force and the Salem County TDR Task Force. The review process will critique and strengthen the ICT draft concept, perhaps leading to multiple variations. There may be several models that emerge out of review by the TDR stakeholders including non-impervious models. The project team will be prepared to model several possible TDR variations that may emerge from the collaborative dialog in addition to the proposed ICT framework.

Objective 4: Scenario Testing

Objective 4 is to model the impervious-based TDR and test the effect that it might have on development patterns as compared with trend development. Our fourth hypothesis (H4) is that ICT will result in a significantly more benign footprint at buildout than trend development. Research questions Q 4.1- 4.10 will follow the same questions as Q 2.1 – 2.10 only utilizing the ICT buildout landscape. The final research question is: Q 4.11 What are the differences between each LRI and GIUS indicators for buildout of trend versus buildout under ICT and other possible TDR scenarios?

Methods Objective 4:

We will repeat the buildout modeling developed in Objective 1 and sprawl analysis conducted in Objective 2 for the fully developed ICT framework developed in Objective 3. The analysis will be conducted for each of NJ’s 20 Watershed Management Areas (WMAs) utilizing the same methodology as in Objective 1, but we will utilize the ICT overlay as the input parameter to the model. If multiple concept variations come out of the collaborative ICT development process, the investigators will use the buildout modeling for comparing variations of TDR to see which approach may be most effective for achieving land management goals. The project will utilize WMA 13 as a pilot area since it has already had buildout analysis conducted (Conway and Lathrop, 2005) which we will use as a benchmark. The study will then evaluate southern New Jersey (WMAs 14 through 20) in order to provide findings to the Salem County TDR Task Force. The third phase of the study will evaluate northern New Jersey (WMAs 1 through 12).

Finally, a full integration of all buildout analyses will be conducted. There will be a comparison analysis matrix for the results of all 20 Watershed Management Areas and a buildout summation for the entire state. The results of the buildout analysis will be made available to the general public through web-based mapping tools developed on the project web page.

Objective 5: Disseminating Results to TDR Stakeholders

The team’s final objective is to create effective mediums for disseminating the results of the research to TDR stakeholders, the research community, municipalities and the general public. To this end the researchers will produce the standard professional deliverables of conference presentations and peer-reviewed journal articles along with a workshop and web tools. All will acknowledge the funding agency.

• Professional Dissemination: The team expects the project to result in 4 to 8 papers and 4 to 8 professional presentations in high-level journals and conferences.

• Project Website: The project technical reports, findings and data will also be archived and publically available through a project website. This will include a primer on TDR and the ICT impervious surface version of TDR that evolves out of the analysis.

• New Jersey Buildout Visualizer/ Sprawl Calculator: The project team will design and build an interactive web mapping tool that will allow visualization of the research results for various buildout scenarios developed in the analysis. Users can zoom in to a particular municipality or geographic area of interest and see the development pattern for current land use and compare it with any of the generated buildout scenarios. The tool will also display the associated sprawl indicator values for the geographic region of interest. The Buildout Visualizer/Sprawl Calculator web tool will be geared toward land management stakeholders, municipal officials as well as the general public.

• TDR stakeholders workshop: in year three the grant will support a workshop to reconvene the NJ State TDR Task Force. This will allow the state’s key TDR stakeholders to get updated on the state of the Impervious Cap and Trade research as well as an opportunity for the TDR community to see where TDR has come in three years as well as to map out directions for the future. The workshop will be facilitated once again by the non-profit New Jersey Future who spearheaded the initial convening of the Task Force.

Project Implementation

The Rowan Geospatial Research Laboratory: All the technical work will be conducted in the newly renovated Rowan Geospatial Research Laboratory (Geolab). The Geolab entails both a GIScience training and a research facility. The Geolab environment fosters a rich interaction of teaching and research activities where faculty conduct research and students engage in course projects, while undergraduate research assistants work on particular projects of their faculty mentors. The Geolab combines state of the art equipment, software and GIS expertise to support the GIScience research and teaching activities.

Experience and Capabilities of the Investigators: The investigators form an interdisciplinary team comprised of a geography professor (PI) who is an expert on identifying spatial patterns of sprawl, a GIS programming specialist (co-PI), a senior planner from the NJ Office of Smart Growth, and a planner from the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission who has expertise on TDR. The project team also includes cohorts of student Geo-Clinic researchers from the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Program. While Rowan is primarily an undergraduate college, the University has a record of student-assisted research projects produced to the level more typically found in graduate programs.

Dr. John Hasse (PI) is an associate professor of geography who has an established research record utilizing geospatial technologies to analyze land use change and urban development patterns. He has seven refereed journal articles that focus on identifying and characterizing urban sprawl/smart growth from the micro to the regional scale. He has conducted research on land use change patterns and impacts in the state of New Jersey and applied research for transit-oriented development potential. Dr. Hasse has been a member of the correspondence committee for the US Green Building Council LEED-ND rating system, contributing extensive commentary and recommendations, and is managing the Borough of Glassboro’s application to be one of the pilot projects for the LEED-ND rating system. Dr. Hasse has been involved with projects funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the US Department of Agriculture.

John Reiser (co-PI) is the GIS specialist for the Rowan Department of Geography. He has in-depth experience programming GIS and web-based mapping applications related to land use planning and environmental management. His work includes sole development of the New Jersey State Atlas online GIS map application server (). Reiser will be conducting the GIS model programming as well as overseeing the Geo-Clinic teams and supervising their contribution to the GIS aspects of the project. He will be leading the development of the project web page and associated web mapping tools for the Buildout Visualizer/Smart Growth Calculator.

Karl Hartkopf (other professional contributor, non-paid) is the director of planning at the NJ Office of Smart Growth where he is responsible for all aspects of assistive planning for counties and municipalities. He assisted in design of the Smart Growth Locator as well as assisted in the data collection, writing and editing of the 2001 State Development and Redevelopment Plan of New Jersey. He is a member of the NJ TDR Task Force and currently an officer for the New Jersey chapter of American Planning Association. He will be providing smart growth expertise to the development of the TDR conceptual framework and providing input for the development of web-based mapping tools to come out of the project

Evangeline Linkous (other professional contributor, non-paid) is a Planning Analyst at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, in the Division of Smart Growth. She serves as Project Manager for a major transit-oriented development project in the Greater Philadelphia area, directs a number of sustainability and smart growth initiatives, and is co-authoring a study on barriers to municipal adoption of transfer of development rights programs in New Jersey. She is a Ph.D. candidate and the working title for her dissertation is “Using Transfer of Development Rights to Manage Growth: The Adoption and Performance of Transfer of Development Rights Programs in Florida.” She will contribute her TDR expertise to the conceptual development and evaluation of the ICT model.

Undergraduate researchers – the project will employ teams of 2-4 undergraduate researchers per semester through the Geo-Clinic. The students will gain valuable research experience in developing the literature reviews, gathering and preparing the extensive GIS datasets and conducting the buildout modeling for each of the state’s 20 WMAs. Researchers will be paid generally during winter and summer breaks but are not paid when they receive clinic credit during the academic semester.

The full project team will meet together in person at least twice a year whether as part of the larger TDR task force meetings or as separate workshops to collaborate on steering the project. The team will also regularly communicate electronically. The concept development will happen in virtual space and the physical GIS modeling will occur at the Geospatial Research Laboratory at the Rowan Department of Geography under the direction of the PI and co-PI.

Integration of Research and Education: The investigators of this project are strongly committed to integration of research and education. Commensurate with the grant application, the PI is proposing a new sequence of two project-based learning courses within the geography department named “Geo-Clinic/Studio.” These courses are modeled on the highly successful Engineering Clinics offered within the Rowan College of Engineering. Rowan Clinics are a series of project-based courses that conduct multidisciplinary research activities through Integrated Research and Learning Communities (IRLC). In the IRLC model, students of all levels, freshman through graduate (vertical integration), are involved to collaborate on various research activities. An attempt is also made – to the extent enrollment demographics allow – to balance the communities with respect to gender, racial and ethnic backgrounds (horizontal integration). For each semester of clinic work, students are given responsibilities commensurate with their intellectual and academic skills including literature search and routine data collection, basic data analysis, preparation of reports, and conducting experiments under the project team. The project team will integrate the student teams in most aspects of the project including dissemination efforts through conference and journal publications providing them research experience typically gained in a graduate level program. Significant tasks of the project that will employ the Geo-Clinic researchers are indicated with an asterisk in the project timeline.

In addition to the beneficial experience provided to undergraduate researchers working directly on the project, the PI and Co-PI will also incorporate the progress of this research into lectures within their coursework. The topic will be very relevant to a number of Dr. Hasse’s courses, including Land Use and Resource Management, Environmental/Sustainable Planning and NJ Applied Planning Practice as well as Mr. Reiser’s courses, Intro to Mappping and GIS, GIS II, GIS III and GIS Topics & Applications.

Intellectual Merit

This project promises several important advancements in the fields of Geography and Land Management. First, it will advance buildout analysis research by being one of the first studies that conducts a statewide-scale buildout analysis. Secondly, it will also advance the research avenue of sprawl metrics, since it will be one of the first studies to calculate micro-measure level indicators of urban sprawl for an entire state. As such, it will provide state land management stakeholders insight into the implications of current land management policy and possible policy changes. Thirdly, this project breaks new ground in developing a framework a variation of TDR based on impervious surface trading and integrating these tools with smart growth and sustainable building incentives. The ICT concept has the potential to provide a major new avenue for land management policy and thus it is an example of applied research that has direct significance for informing policy decisions and changing outcomes of activities.

The project represents a logical progression of the PI’s prior work in sprawl metrics and landscape analysis. With this research, the PI in collaboration with a team of land management professionals will be leveraging his theoretical landscape approach to analysis into applied land management tools.

The research holds promise to make a major contribution to the land management field since TDR as a land planning mechanism has the potential to be quite transformative of development patterns if only the tool could be crafted to work more effectively. Basing the TDR on impervious surface could be the paradigm-shifting initiative that can make TDR become more widely embraced and thus more effective.

Broader Impacts

Expected Significance: This project intends to make progress on a number of fronts that are useful for developing geographic knowledge as well as potentially effecting public policy regarding land management and its relationship to environmental impacts such as climate change. The investigators believe the findings of this project will advance knowledge in: 1) modeling land use buildout for an entire state, 2) developing new approaches to data development for buildout analysis, 3) testing the viability and potential impact of a new TDR concept based on impervious surface trading, 4) progressing research on a point-based approach to urban modeling, 5) developing a novel means of “wiki” digitizing development growth, 6) interdisciplinary integration of applied landscape geospatial modeling with planning policy, and 7) development of web-based tools for dissemination of landscape analysis.

The project team will forge collaborative relationships between the host academic institution of Rowan University, the state government through the Office of Smart Growth, and the DVRPC, Philadelphia’s metropolitan planning organization. In addition, since the research will be informed by and provide information to the NJ TDR Task Force which includes over 40 representatives from governmental, non-governmental, academic and private firms, the study will be of direct interest to a broad range of land management stakeholders. As such, the research will produce academic results of interest to researchers and policy makers as well as tools that will inform policy makers of the socioeconomic/environmental impacts of proposed land management strategies. Successful development of ICT may contribute to New Jersey better accomplishing smart growth and attaining carbon reduction goals. The project will advance the capabilities and collaborative partnerships of the Rowan Geospatial Research Laboratory with a broad array of land management stakeholders.

Long-term Goals of the PI: The PI has been studying New Jersey land use change and development patterns for over ten years. The funding requested by this grant proposal will provide a significant advancement in the direction and scope of PI’s research agenda. The knowledge gained in this study will become a platform for future research endeavors including creating a carbon footprint analysis of various buildout scenarios, and temporal land development modeling that advances the buildout modeling employed in this study. Such a temporal model will be able to explore critical thresholds in landscape changes such as thresholds for habitat fragmentation, thresholds for agricultural viability, and thresholds for transit viability given various development patterns among others. The buildout model can also be incorporated into an ecosystem services cost analysis of various buildout scenarios as well as an econometric model. Such temporal, ecosystem services and econometric analyses of buildout coupled with refined carbon footprint indicators hold ripe potential for significant future scientific contribution that can emerge should the proposed research receive funding.

Relation to Present State of Knowledge and Other Work in Progress: Buildout modeling and TDR are two topic areas that have much potential for further advancement. The proposed project builds on the well-developed history of New Jersey as test-bed for research related to sprawl and the associated socioeconomic/environmental impacts and policies to foster smart growth. The proposed project is timely for the state in that it has recently convened a Task Force for making TDR more viable. It is also timely for the state’s recently released action plan for responding to the threat of global warming. This project will directly contribute to New Jersey’s state of knowledge for developing prudent and scientifically sound actions for land management that minimizes environment impacts while fostering sustainable community designs. The knowledge gained through this research will be of interest to state, national and global audiences.

Preservation, documentation, and sharing of data: The databases developed in this project will be archived on the Geospatial Research Laboratory data bank server. The data will also be offered to the New Jersey Geographic Information Network for dissemination for interested users. All metadata for GIS data and all procedures employed in the research will be documented and made available as a technical report via a project web page.

Infrastructure enhancement for research and/or education: This project will be conducted in the Rowan Department of Geography’s Geospatial Research Laboratory (Geolab). The grant will support and enhance the level of research being conducted in the Geolab, provide a major project that integrates research and education through the Geo-Clinic/Studio described above. Two GIS workstations, data, equipment, and software will be purchased and developed through funding of this project. This will allow the Geolab to continue to develop a comprehensive state-wide data library for future research and educational projects.

Potential benefits of the proposed activity to society at large: This applied project directly addresses a number of diverse but interrelated issues critical to society at large, including sprawl, buildout, environmental quality, smart growth planning and sustainability. The development of a more viable TDR model based on impervious surface could offer a major contribution to the land management community and transferable to many other locations outside of New Jersey. The integrative, geographic, big-picture approach that this project takes to explore the relationship between land development and sustainability is not only of vital interest to New Jersey residents but to the national and international community as well. The study will lay the groundwork for a number of avenues of future research surrounding buildout analysis, including more precise ecological modeling of land use change and better modeling methods for linking sprawling spatial patterns to carbon emissions to be developed in subsequent studies.

Results of Prior Support

The project team has had no previous NSF-supported projects.

Project Timeline

(* indicates significant contribution by undergraduate Geo-Clinic research teams)

|Period |Summer |Fall |Spring |

|Year 1 |- Literature review on TDR* |- Collaborative refinement of ICT white paper|- Publish Journal Article on ICT |

|7/10-6/11 |- Interviews with TDR stakeholders |by TDR Task Force. |conceptual framework |

| |- Write draft ICT concept paper |- Prepare ICT paper for peer review journal |- Present AAG |

| |- Initial development of project web page |- Literature review for buildout modeling* |- Develop buildout analysis for WMA 13* |

| | |- Data acquisition and development for WMA | |

| | |13* | |

|Year 2 |- ICT Scenario Testing for WMA 13* |- Present WMA 13 results of ICT buildout |- Publish Journal Article about WMA 13 |

|7/11-6/12 |- Prepare journal article about buildout |analysis to: |ICT results |

| |modeling |TDR community |- Present AAG |

| |- Initiate work on web-based buildout |Middle States AAG |- Present APA |

| |visualize |NJ APA |- Conduct buildout analysis for South |

| | |- Incorporate feedback to recalibrate ICT |NJ* |

| | |model |- Conduct ICT analysis for South NJ* |

| | |- Gather a prepare data for South Jersey | |

| | |–(WMAs 14, -2020)* | |

|Year 3 |- Present Results of South Jersey ICT |- Conduct buildout analysis North NJ* |- Integrate statewide results* |

|7/12-6/13 |analysis to: |- Conduct ICT analysis for North NJ* |- Workshop – TDR Task Force |

| |Salem Co TDR Task Force |- Complete work on web-based buildout tool |- Present final analysis to: |

| |- Gain feedback | |NJ TDR stakeholders |

| |- Recalibrate model* | |- Publish Journal Article articles about|

| |- Gather and prepare data for North Jersey* | |statewide results |

| |(WMAs 1 - 12) | |- Present AAG |

| | | |- Present APA |

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