UCLA School of Law

Modern American land use regulation is characterized by a movement away from traditional command-and-control zoning toward the pervasive use of flexible, bilaterally negotiated approaches. Advocates of this agreement-based regulatory trend have not sufficiently considered the impact of applying such potentially ad hoc approaches on comprehensive planning and public norms of democratic decision-making, community engagement, and local and regional fairness. This Installment challenges this trend's legitimacy, arguing that though agreement-based land use regulation can be effective in achieving deliberative, balanced and efficient decisions, existing approaches actually hinder such decision-making and facilitate corruption by removing key aspects of land use decisions from the public sphere.