Public and Private Development

GSD 5103/ KSG HUT-268PUBLIC AND PRIVATE DEVELOPMENTSyllabus for Spring 2005Professor Jerold S. KaydenI. DESCRIPTIONAn increasingly elaborate blend of public and private actions develops modern-day urban settlements. In previous decades, development roles and responsibilities were understood more plainly as discretely belonging to government or to private actors. Now, with different socio-economic concerns, increased resource constraints, and greater technical sophistication, among other reasons, public and private parties collaborate in producing much of our built environment. Government participates in private development activities through direct and indirect subsidies, land acquisition and disposition, provision of physical infrastructure, and rigorous regulatory review. It may even become a financial partner that shares in a private project\’s cash flow. Private developers often assume a \”public\” persona, agreeing to provide physical infrastructure, social benefits, and municipal services previously financed and delivered by local government. Developers today involve government planners and citizen groups within project planning and design in ways unthinkable not so long ago.The complicated intermingling of public and private roles and responsibilities demands ongoing recognition and reflection by urban planners, designers, and policy makers as they participate in creating the built environment. The shifting sands require invention and application of distinctive analytical frameworks and techniques, tailoring of legal and institutional arrangements, and shrewder calculation of political power. Public actors must grasp the financial realities of development and deal structures in order to negotiate successful public-private partnerships or impose reasonable regulatory burdens. Private actors must integrate into their thinking a wide spectrum of public goals and acquire navigational skills befitting an environment in which public claims to private profit may be expected to increase. All actors must better appreciate how this collaboration often reassigns entrepreneurial risk and public interest oversight, and how such reassignments may elicit unintended consequences for the social, economic, and physical evolution of cities.Through lectures, classroom discussion, individual and group exercises, and several case study guest presentations, this course examines the issues, analytical approaches, and implementation techniques of public and private development in American metropolitan areas. Part I: Analytic Approaches explores the financial, economic, legal, institutional, political, and other urban planning frameworks and methods necessary to understand, make decisions about, and implement public and private development. Part II: Public Provision of Subsidies examines the array of direct and indirect subsidies found in public and private development. Part III: Public Provision of Land and Infrastructure examines public provision of less transparent, non-cash assets of land and physical infrastructure to encourage and direct development. Part IV: Private Provision of Public Benefits examines provision by private developers of physical infrastructure, social benefits, and municipal services under rigorous regulatory review and special tax regimes.Specifically, the course starts by equipping students with the basic analytic capabilities necessary for thinking about public and private development from various points of view. Students acquire proficiency in real estate financial analysis and a customized cost-benefit analysis, as well as an understanding of relevant legal, institutional, and political considerations. Decision rules fashioned for the specific circumstances of public and private development are elaborated within the various analytical approaches. Analytic capabilities developed in the first part of the course are then applied to the following