Huub Ploegmakers

Evaluating urban regeneration: An assessment of the effectiveness of physical regeneration initiatives on run-down industrial sites in the Netherlands

Despite the widespread use of physical improvements as a strategy to regenerate deprived and run-down urban areas, there is only limited evidence on the precise impact of these kinds of regeneration activities. A number of conceptual and methodological problems that impinge on all evaluations of regeneration policies have constrained the required evidence base. This paper evaluates the impact of publicly funded physical improvements of run-down industrial sites in the Netherlands and seeks to address several of these challenges; namely, selecting appropriate comparison areas, attributing change to specific interventions, access to small-scale, longitudinal data and selecting outcomes congruent with policy goals and rationales. Pooled data from various sources provide us with information on regeneration initiatives and other site characteristics for more than half of all sites in the country. Propensity score matching enables us to systematically compare economic outcomes related to regeneration policy goals between sites that have been subjected to regeneration and those that have not. The results of this study suggest that physical regeneration of industrial sites has a negligible effect on economic outcomes that are related to the most commonly articulated policy goals: the increase of employment, of firm numbers, of property values and of the intensity of land use on these sites. These findings add to a small but growing body of work that investigates the economic impact of regeneration programmes that fund physical investments on commercial and industrial areas.

Understanding industrial land supply: how Dutch municipalities make decisions about supplying serviced building land

The supply side of real estate markets has remained relatively neglected compared to the body of work that studies the demand side. Consequently, little is known about the way that suppliers actually make decisions about the quantity of land and property to be made available for sale at any one time. This paper investigates how one particular type of suppliers, public developers of serviced industrial building land in the Netherlands, assess market conditions, and the way these analyses influence decisions to make more serviced building land available. This paper presents evidence from interviews amongst municipal developers and finds that profit considerations are not the main motive behind their decisions to develop industrial land. Municipalities are involved in land development primarily because they want to be able to steer local economic development. Furthermore, they also pay attention to ‘nonprice’ signals of market conditions – sales levels in particular – when deciding to make more land available for sale. However, we should be cautious with interpreting these results since this study only addresses public agencies, which might operate with ‘soft budget constraints’ and might have alternative preference functions than commercial developers.

Countering decline of industrial sites: Do local economic development policies target the neediest places?

Local economic development is a much used tool for the regeneration of urban areas. Although the designation and effectiveness of local economic development policies has been studied extensively in existing literature, the question as to whether these policies are aimed at the areas that are most in need of these policies remains relatively understudied. This question has been answered using the case of industrial sites in the Netherlands. This particular type of urban area in the Netherlands has experienced problems with rapid urban area decline and has therefore been targeted by various area-based regeneration initiatives for many years. The economic performance is the main justification for the designation of industrial sites that are in greater need of regeneration. However, another pertinent and unanswered question is: are the industrial sites targeted for regeneration really the ones that underperform economically? (Multinomial) logistic regression analysis is used to answer this question. Differences in economic performance, measured by the growth in employment figures, the number of companies and property values, between industrial sites that are targeted for regeneration in two different rounds of regeneration initiatives and non-targeted sites are studied. The analysis shows that the differences in economic performance are negligible between these groups. It indicates that other criteria, such as political and strategic decision making influence policymakers’ decisions to target industrial sites for regeneration, thus making it at least doubtful that public money for the regeneration of industrial sites is being spent on what it is meant for.

The impact of planning intervention on business development: Evidence from the Netherlands:

There has been a growing research interest in measuring the impact of planning and land-use regulations on housing market outcomes, but parallel development of the evidence base for the business sector has yet to occur. This article examines the impact of planning intervention on the amount of building investment taking place at sites allocated for industrial and business development. Measures that capture different dimensions of planning intervention are incorporated into models of industrial building investment. The models are estimated using a novel micro dataset on permit activity that covers a sample of industrial and business sites in the Netherlands. The results provide evidence of some of the expected negative effects of the regulatory role of planning intervention, but also show that proactive, targeted planning policies exert a significant and positive influence on investment activity. Specifically, policy-induced improvements to the physical environment will stimulate both new construction and refurbishment activity.

Determinants of industrial land prices in The Netherlands: a behavioural approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the specification of hedonic pricing models can be improved by using insights generated from qualitative research. In doing so, it seeks to address one of the main problems in the specification of hedonic models, namely that theory yields little guidance in the selection of the characteristics that should be included on the right-hand side. Design/methodology/approach – Building on the behavioural tradition in real estate research, this paper introduces a research approach that integrates insights from qualitative analysis in an econometric model of land values. The empirical segment explores the way in which asking prices of building plots for industrial purposes are determined in The Netherlands. It draws from interviews with municipal land developers, who dominate supply in this market. The information secured during these interviews relates to the characteristics considered important and the kind of information used in the valuation process. Based on these qualitative data, an econometric model is developed and estimated. Findings – The estimation results confirm qualitative evidence that the typical developer considers only a limited number of features of the land in the valuation process and that the primary source of information in setting asking prices relates to the prices charged in neighbouring municipalities. Originality/value – This paper represents a novel attempt to examine the determination of land and property values by merging qualitative and quantitative, econometric analyses.

The impact of planning on business development

This paper explores the relationship between planning policies and the performance of the industrial property market. There has been a growing research interest in measuring the impact of planning and land-use regulations on property market outcomes. Nevertheless, at least three main limitations have been highlighted in the literature that constrain the development of a stronger evidence base. These are insufficient attention for the impact of planning at the micro-level of supply, a relative lack of studies that assess the impact of planning on other than housing markets (i.e. office, retail, and industrial property markets) and inadequate consideration of the potentially varied impacts of different types of planning intervention. This research attempts to improve on these limitations by adding results from two novel datasets. The first contains information on individual building permits for a sample of Dutch municipalities who have given us access to their data. The data cover the period from 2004 to 2008. This permits an analysis of investment activity at the micro-level, looking at building investment at the level of individual sites allocated for industrial uses. The second dataset consists of a range of indicators that capture different dimensions of planning intervention. These indicators reflect the main policy actions and initiatives deployed by (local) governments in the Netherlands in order to influence business development. A model has been developed to estimate the effect of these planning indicators on investment activity in industrial buildings. The results provide some evidence of the negative effects on new construction often associated with planning induced restrictions on the amount of available land. However, it appears that more proactive (regeneration) policies, designed to improve the physical environment of particular sites, have a more profound and positive impact on investment in both refurbishment and new construction.