The responses by William Fischel and Robert Nelson (“Master Plans and Rent Seeking” and “Neighborhood Collectives Instead of Central Planners,” Winter 2015–2016) to Roderick Hills Jr. and David Schleicher’s article (“Can ‘Planning’ Deregulate Land Use?” Fall 2015) inspire this further reflection:

The major deterrents to redevelopment in large cities are not the zoning restrictions per se, but the difficulty that fragmented ownership poses for land assembly. There is a tried-and-true device for the organization of Fischel’s “neighborhood collectives” for this purpose: land readjustment—the establishment, by super-majorities of landowners, of joint development plans from which dissenting owner-occupiers are excluded.

This device has been used in several dozen countries to unite the fragmented land holdings resulting from forced heirship in civil law countries. It has also been used in urban areas, first with the Lex Adickes in Frankfurt, Germany at the turn of the 20th century, and then on a much larger scale in the post-war redevelopment of cities in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. It has also been used in common law jurisdictions, including Madras and Gujarat, India, and Western Australia, and was used by George Washington in the land assembly for the nation’s capital.

A number of American scholars, including Harvard University’s William Doebele and Florida Atlantic University’s Frank Schmidman, have written on this subject. The continuing failures of government-sponsored urban renewal suggest that this mechanism, founded on private initiative, deserves another look.

For more on the subject, see my article, “Land Readjustment for America: A Proposal for a Statute,” Urban Lawyer, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter 2000).