Maintain, demolish, re-purpose: Policy design for vacant land management using decision models

• We develop a decision model to support planning for municipal shrinkage.
• Multi-objective model balances measures of effectiveness, efficiency and equity.
• Case study generates alternative strategies comprising traditional and novel investments.

Decline, measured in population growth rates, population levels, housing stock and economic activity, and associated increases in vacant land in urban areas, is a reality for cities and regions within the United States. However, planners increasingly see ‘decline’ as a development state to anticipate and a development strategy to consider. For example, a place may lose population while continuing to provide a high quality of life and social value. Vacant land is central to planning issues related to decline: some currently-occupied housing may likely become abandoned and demolished, yielding vacant lots, while some currently vacant lots may be inputs to alternative uses such as recreational space, urban farming or commercial uses. In this paper, we develop decision models that enable planners to generate a range of neighborhood-level development strategies that jointly optimize multiple objectives related to residential satisfaction, scale economies in development and equity. We apply these models to a case study of a small city. Model solutions may help planners understand how alternative model formulations are associated with spatial variation in active versus passive land uses, values of important output measures such as residential satisfaction, and the special role that vacant land plays in regional development policies that can be classified as smart growth or smart decline.