There are several challenges facing someone who wants to know if a city's revenue structure is fair and reasonable. There are few generally accepted standards to use as benchmarks of financial condition, and there is no generally accepted methodology to assess relative financial position. This article reviews literature on financial position and condition, and then develops a methodological approach that creates a cohort of similar cities for benchmarking financial position, and then forming a basis for assessing financial condition. Based on a study of the financial position of a medium-sized city, the article offers lessons for practitioners and scholars.

Planned industrial and commercial developments in the United States can be dated from the industrial districts developed in Chicago at the beginning of this century. This article traces the evolution of planned developments in the United States and examines some of the literature relating to planned developments and their role in local and regional economic development, including a look at the evolution of zoning and land use controls as applied to planned developments. Special attention is given to review of Luger and Goldstein's recent book, Technology in the Garden, allowing analysis of research parks as an evolutionary economic development institution. The available evidence leads to the conclusion that the most successful of recent planned developments have been mixed use developments that make use of agglomeration economies of several types of industries simultaneously, and diversify the economies and risk portfolios of the host regions.

Over the last twenty-five years local governments in the United States and Canada have increasingly used impact fees and other development exactions as methods of financing capital and infrastructure requirements mandated by residential growth. While several studies have examined the effects of impact fees on housing and land prices, rigorous empirical analysis of their effects on residential development is lacking. In this paper a sample of all municipalities in DuPage County, Illinois from 1977 through 1992 is used to examine the effects of impact fees on the rate of residential development. The empirical results show that impact fees reduce rates of residential development by more than 25 percent.

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