Mar. 26: Positive externalities in land use law, immigration to help the economy, and a decentralized civil service
New Legal Research on Building Abundance
Highlights:
📃 Property Law: Legal incentives for landowners to create positive externalities
🗽 Immigration: Visas for high-skilled students and elder care workers
🏛 State Capacity: Decentralize the federal civil service
📃 Property Law
Legal incentives for landowners to create positive externalities
Property Law for Positive Externalities: Carving New Sticks for the Bundle—J.B. Ruhl & James Salzman (William & Mary Environmental Law & Policy Review)
Property law excels at stopping harmful land uses but has no tools to reward beneficial ones. A new Natural Capital Servitude and severable Natural Capital Estate—modeled on profits à prendre and mineral estates—would let landowners capture and transfer the value of flood control, water purification, and pollination, reducing chronic underinvestment in conservation and other positive-externality land uses.
💡 Political Strategy
The legal, policy, and political path to Abundance
The Path to Abundance: The Legal, Policy, and Political Challenges of an Abundance Agenda—Eric Biber (William & Mary Environmental Law & Policy Review)
Abundance reforms face real legal and political headwinds: most proposed fixes require tradeoffs with local control, environmental protection, and anti-corruption rules that voters actually support. The YIMBY movement’s success suggests the best path is low-salience, state-and-local coalition building that avoids nationalizing the issue—not broad public mobilization.
🏛 State Capacity
Decentralize the federal civil service
A Civil Service for the Mission—Margaret Mullins (Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator)Every president since Nixon has consolidated executive control over the civil service rather than fix the hiring, classification, and compensation mechanisms that actually govern federal capacity. Personnel authority should be decentralized to agencies, with a revived Civil Service Commission serving as a center of excellence and a default personnel system for agencies that lack capacity to build their own.
🗽 Immigration
Enable visas for immigrants to meet elder-care demand
Immigration Policies in Healthcare Work—Genesis Garay (Houston Journal of Health Law & Policy)
Visa caps and credential barriers leave hundreds of thousands of qualified immigrant workers out of the direct care workforce as elderly population demand surges. Expanding EB-3 limits, adding healthcare-specific visa categories, and creating TPS/DACA pathways to healthcare careers could relieve both the workforce shortage and Social Security funding stress.Positive economic effects from work visas for high-skilled immigrants
The Effect of Retaining High-Skilled International Graduates: Evidence from the STEM OPT Extension—Seoyoung Kwon, Jongkwan Lee & Joan Monràs (Barcelona School of Economics Working Paper)
Extending work authorization for international STEM graduates under the 2016 OPT expansion increased local high-skilled immigrant supply, stimulated firm creation, raised demand for native high-skilled workers, and boosted startup investment—particularly in metro areas with top universities.
🏗 Public Infrastructure
Racism caused the decline of public infrastructure investment
White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure—Cotten Seiler (book)
U.S. public infrastructure was built as racially exclusive state care for white citizens under the New Deal. When desegregation opened that infrastructure to all, white Americans abandoned the public compact in favor of austerity and privatization—producing the dilapidated infrastructure of today.
🌱 Environmental Policy
A total history of US environmental policy and its self-inflicted dysfunction
American Environmental History and Policy: A Troubled Journey to Reform—Frank T. Manheim (book)
The 1970s environmental revolution produced landmark pollution controls but also economic drag, business backlash, and the partisan polarization that has gridlocked environmental policy ever since. Drawing on original interviews with legislators and officials who drafted the era’s landmark statutes, and a comprehensive database of U.S. environmental laws from the founding to the present, this book compares the U.S. unfavorably to more functional EU regulatory approaches and proposes reform pathways.Wind and solar permitting in Massachusetts is taking longer
Permitting & Siting of Wind & Solar in Massachusetts: Process, Timelines, & Outcomes—Natalie Baillargeon, Juniper Katz, Lanbing Tao, Robi Nilson, Ben Hoen (Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy)
Local permitting for wind and solar in Massachusetts averages 250 days and has grown longer over time. Larger and ultimately cancelled projects face the longest delays. The first systematic dataset on locally-permitted clean energy project timelines, released as several states including Massachusetts are actively reforming permitting policy.
🏡 Housing
Restrictive zoning hurts declining cities too, not just expensive ones
Rezoning the Rust Belt—Brian Connolly & Noah Kazis (Washington University Law Review)
Restrictive zoning is harming the Rust Belt. In postindustrial Midwestern cities like Detroit, land-use regulations don’t cause housing shortages but still impose serious frictions on revitalization—documented through original data on permits, variances, and rezonings paired with developer interviews.NIMBY lawsuits are enabled by overly permissive standing rules
Standing Against Housing—Brian M. Miller (Maryland Law Review)
Permissive standing rules let neighbors block housing reforms with vague harm claims that would fail in any other context. Third-party zoning standing should be limited to nuisance-style property interference, filtering out subjective grievances better resolved through politics.Regulatory barriers to innovative construction methods in California
Potential Pathways to Scale Innovative Construction Methods in California—Stephanie Hawke, Julia Aguilar, Tyler Pullen (Terner Center Report)
California’s housing crisis persists despite land use reforms because high construction hard costs make projects financially unviable. Factory-based and other innovative construction methods could lower per-unit costs but face regulatory, financing, and labor barriers to scale—barriers the California legislature is actively studying through a Select Committee with a concrete legislative agenda.
💬 UCLA Law Symposium
UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment is hosting a Symposium on April 3rd titled “Can Abundance Be Sustainable? Merging Affordability and Climate Policy”
Attendees can register here.
Submit research: Know of recent or forthcoming scholarship on these topics? Send it to enablingacts@gmail.com or reply to this email.