Chapter § 9.2 Looking Forward: Using Development Rights to Shape Future Communities

• Jurisdiction: Washington

§9.2 LOOKING FORWARD: USING DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS TO SHAPE FUTURE COMMUNITIES

The ability to identify, value, and purchase development rights can play an important role in bridging regulatory gaps. A program allowing for the transfer or purchase of development rights can help shape future communities by providing an economic tool to increase or decrease development in one location or transfer development rights to another as a way to respond to newly identified science and/or anticipated changes in a community. Development rights create a currency that may be purchased and retired, providing fairness to property owners who purchased land in a location that later assumes some important social purpose (such as with certain floodplains or riparian buffers to critical areas), when outright prohibition against future development or changes of use may be politically or legally impossible. Conservation easements, land trusts, and other vehicles involved in the purchase and retirement of development rights can achieve public objectives well beyond that achievable by zoning or permit action alone. Washington state's long-term plan to restore the health of Puget Sound and implement salmon recovery plans in response to endangered species listings is one such example of the government's employing various vehicles to achieve the environmental goal. See Volume 5, Chapter 17 (Puget Sound Partnership), of this deskbook.

In the context of developing and implementing these plans, governments may determine that large-scale programs are needed in a given location to achieve the desired results. In doing so, the term often used is "restoration" to some prior condition, but state and local governments are faced with a challenge in that they often cannot burden individual private property owners with the costs of "restoration." Local development tools are bound by the constitutional...