Property rights and landscape planning in the intermountain west: The Teton Valley case

Non-participation in landscape planning presents a formidable challenge to sustainable development. We hypothesize that even when people hold egative attitudes toward unplanned development, natural property rights values (favorable evaluations of property as an inviolable and pre-political ight) prevent them from acting on their concerns. We chose an intermountain west community as a case study to evaluate our hypothesis regarding atural property rights values. All groups were equally and strongly opposed to continuation of rapid unplanned growth, but those with natural roperty rights values were also adamantly opposed to land use planning. We used a multiple logistic regression model to evaluate the relationship etween support for landscape planning and a natural property rights values. An overall significance test of the regression equation indicated the ndependent variables were significantly predictive of the dependent variable (χ2 128, 8 d.f., p< 0.001) and had high (88.7%) predictive capacity. atural property rights value was the most important predictor variable, but income was also significant. Sustainable landscape planning requires ncoupling property rights from inviolable and pre-political natural rights. Our results suggest a conversation focused on themes associated with oss of local culture, hypocrisy of building practices, and market control over development could facilitate the aforementioned uncoupling and evelopment planning that promotes both security for land owners and public welfare. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.