1.11. Fundamentos de transferencia de calor
1.11.2. Convección
W
hile there is a growing body of empirical studies that investigate the impact of planning policies on housing market outcomes, parallel development of the evidence base for the industrial and business sector has yet to occur. In this paper we explicitly examine the relationship between planning intervention and building investment on sites for industrial and business development. We use two unique datasets: the first contains information on individual building permits and the second dataset consists of a range of indicators that capture different dimensions of planning intervention. As such, the aim is to address two further limitations of existing research, namely insufficient attention for the micro level of supply and inadequate consideration of the potentially varied impact of different planning interventions on land and property markets.Our empirical analysis provides some evidence of the perceived negative effects of planning restrictions on investment in new commercial buildings. New construction activity is affected by the amount of land which is available for industrial and business development on a site, although this influence appears rather weak. This result is broadly consistent with the findings in a more aggregated UK analysis, in which Henneberry et al. (2005) show that the supply of business space decreases when the local planning regime becomes tighter. Our findings are also consistent with the results of Bramley and Kirk (2005) from an analysis at the level of postcode districts, who find that the amount of land available for industrial and business development has a positive but marginal impact on actual land take-up. Our results also support their proposition that new construction activity is not predominantly land-supply driven, but mainly influenced by locational and quality attributes of the site. This largely confirms the widespread impression in the Netherlands of a situation of excess supply of industrial and business land relative to take-up. Local authorities, keen to promote local economic development, seem to have taken sufficient action to ensure that land availability is not a major constraint to new development.
The overall amount of land which is available in the local market area, as measured in terms of the number of years supply, does not appear to be influencing refurbishment and redevelopment activity. It thus seems that low levels of (greenfield) land supply will not assist in reversing the processes of decay of older industrial areas. It should be noted that this does not necessarily mean that such a relationship does not exist; it may also reflect that land supplies are generally more than adequate, although our preferred measure of overall land availability shows considerable variation across different regions.
5 PLANNING INTERVENTION AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
The findings suggest that proactive, targeted planning interventions have a more profound and positive impact on investment. Policy-induced improvements to the physical environment will stimulate investment in both new construction and refurbishment. Jackson and Watkins (2007) come to similar conclusions on the basis of their examination of the impact of proactive planning policies on the performance of the retail property market. Our results differ from those of Lester (2014), who finds that the incidence and timing of TIF-funded physical improvements does not have a significant effect on overall commercial building permit activity. There are several explanations for these contradictory findings. One is that reliance on aggregated data of building investment masks variations in the impact on different types of investment. We observe the strongest and most significant effects in the separate estimations for investment in refurbishment and new construction. Another explanation is that physical regeneration projects have a differential impact by the purposes of the projects and the type of the area that is targeted. Whereas Lester does not discriminate between different types of regeneration projects or urban areas, this paper considers initiatives that fund physical regeneration projects in industrial and business areas, which have a clear focus on local economic development.
The findings have implications for planning policies for industrial and business development, notably those that seek to promote investment on rundown and deprived business sites. It has been argued that for regeneration policies to be successful an appropriate mixture is needed that combines restrictions on the release of land on greenfield sites with targeted, more proactive planning policies, designed to improve the physical environment in certain areas. Our results, however, suggest that at least in the Netherlands policy makers should primarily consider funding physical improvement projects as a means to encourage private investment on rundown sites for industrial and business uses.
Although the empirical findings do yield some interesting insights into the impact of planning intervention, there remains considerable scope for future research. In particular, further work should seek to establish a longer time series of data as our analysis only covers the period 2004-2008. In addition, this study does not cover all industrial sites in the Netherlands, although our data come from a fairly representative sample of Dutch municipalities that reflect a range of supply and demand conditions. Similar work should be undertaken for other urban areas and property markets. Finally, we have not formally addressed the issue of endogeneity with regard to our indicators that measure planning intervention. The decision to regenerate an industrial site will be non-random and related to the characteristics of the site (as shown
by Ploegmakers & Beckers, 2015). Although we include a rich set of variables that might affect both the level of building investment and the incidence of regeneration activity, it is therefore likely that our results underestimate the positive effects of regeneration initiatives because these policies will generally target underperforming sites. It has been suggested that restrictions imposed by planning policies may also be endogenously determined. This has been particularly argued for more clearly endogenous variables like the average approval time and refusal rates (Malpezzi, 1996; Bramley & Watkins, 2014; Hilber & Vermeulen, forthcoming), but this may also hold true for the amount of land that is released by the planning system.