Congress has passed legislation that directly and indirectly affects land use, w/o overt federal land sue planning or regulation.

• Housing and urban development
• Highway, mass transit
• Historic preservation
• Civil rights (fair housing, lending, etc.)

Floodplain management; National Flood Insurance Program: FP issues mostly dealt with by feds as "flood control" with structures like dams and levees, until 1960s/70s. Then a broader Flood Plain management system evolved with feds and states using various tools to reduce development and hazard losses in flood plains. The program includes (1) Maps floodplains, (2) coordinates provides floodplain management, (3) provides federally-supported insurance (private carriers avoid flood insurance because it loses money), and requires lending institutions with federal ties 9which is virtually all lending institutions) to require flood insurance for mortgages. The NFIP then imposes some mitigation rules, etc. even offers a buy-out if property is hit multiple times with larger percentage of loss (like "totaling" your car). It set minimum standards for local regulation of dev in floodplains, and some cities go beyond these minima.

Wetlands: starts mostly with Clean water Act (1972 and as amended); creating permit requirements for dredge and fill, called Section 404 (for the section and paragraph number sin the act). Enhanced with a presidential order requiring "no net loss" of nation’s wetlands, which means don’t fill them or if you must, recover or create same amount elsewhere. This led to a wetlands inventory and a squable over the definition of a wetland. Like a lot of othe rprograms where the feds want to avoid outright land use regulation, wetlands-related efforts include a mixture of approaches, including federal acquisition (often as wildlife areas, which are often wetlands); protection of wetlands already on public lands; requirements associated with grants (like urban block grants to states and cities) and other programs, espsecially agricultural support programs (e.g., if you get federal support, then you must farm in a way that does not reduce wetlands—the same is true for soil erosion).

Endangered Species Act (1973) This one is very controversial, and there’s lots of debate on how much it actually affects land use. Property rights advocates see it as one of the worst examples of infringement, but cases of enforced changes in private land use are hard to find, though there’s lots of rhetoric. Platt covers reasonably well the issue of how ESA affects lnd use: with the key point being determinaiton of whether "taking" a species included the idea of taking its habitat. The judicial answer was yes. Still a lot of what happens is species protection on public lands, so that they become the refugia. This is easier to accomplish than getting private land owners to protect species. ESA regulations also require Habitat Conservation Plans, which are fed/state cooperative efforts to bring about changes in land use and other activities (e.g., hunting) so as to protect listed species. Again, these do not often include outright land use regulation (which is local gov purview). Indeed, as Platt says, HCPs were developed a cooperative plans that, once in place, actually provide a platform for the Fish and Wildlife Service to allow "takes" of species or habitat as long as the whole plan holds together and promised the continuance of the species (biologist disagree on how good the many HCPs now in place are). The states might give local government incentives for habitat conservation, but rarely set land use regs. In Colo this often includes grants from lottery funds thru GOCO. The effect of ESA on land use would be a great term paper topic.