Beyond Takings and Givings: Saving Natural Areas, Farmland and Historic Landmarks with Transfer of Development Rights and Density Transfer Charges

The United States loses over four thousand acres of farmland and natural areas to development every day. Zoning is not a permanent solution. And few communities are able to use tax dollars for meaningful open space preservation.

However, a growing number of communities are using a market-based preservation technique called transfer of development rights, or TDR. With TDR, the owners of land that these communities want to save, called sending areas, are compensated for voluntarily restricting their development potential. The owners of land on which communities want to allow growth, called receiving areas, are allowed additional development potential, but only when they participate in the preservation of the sending areas.

"Beyond Takings and Givings" updates and expands the 1997 publication "Saved By Development", until now the most comprehensive book on TDR. "Beyond Takings and Givings" offers a progress report on most of the 112 TDR programs profiled in the 1997 book plus case studies of 30 additional programs. "Beyond Takings and Givings" provides a step-by-step guide to creating a TDR program and addresses the most commonly asked questions on this topic. What is TDR? How did TDR evolve? Where has TDR worked best? What are TDR's success factors? What are TDR's advantages and disadvantages? How does TDR compare with other implementation tools? Why doesn't everyone use TDR? And, for communities where adoption of a traditional TDR program seems doubtful, "Beyond Takings and Givings" explains density transfer charges, a tool that reduces the seemingly complex TDR mechanism to a single requirement.

In addition, "Beyond Takings and Givings" places TDR within the context of the ongoing property rights debate. Some property rights advocates believe that governments should compensate for regulations that reduce but do not eliminate property value, or "partial takings." In contrast, some community rights advocates argue that compensation is inappropriate because value reductions are offset by the value increases created by government actions and regulations, often without reimbursement, or "givings." TDR offers a practical alternative to this stalemate. It recaptures a portion of the extra value created by additional development at receiving sites and uses it to offset value reductions experienced by the owners of sending area land who voluntarily restrict the development potential of their properties.