THE IMPACT OF EFFECTIVE LANDUSE ALLOCATION ON RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background to the Study
Land use are recognized as key drivers of environmental change (Shi et al, 2009) with significant implications for many international policy issues (Liu et al., 2010) and a central component in current strategies in managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes (Minale and Rao, 2011).
The causes, consequences and control of land use change have become issues of immense importance to the present-day world. The reasons for societal interest in land use and land use change are many. Land use both reflects and defines where economic activity takes place, and where and how communities develop (Goetz, Shortle and Bergstrom, 2005). Economic conditions, population, other land uses both public and private, and the size of the urban area continually change, subjecting the urban land market to forces of perpetual adjustment (Balchin, Bull and Kieve, 1995).As world population surges, there has been a general increase in the demand for land in cities around the globe. Of particular note is the demand for residential land. It has been emphasized that residential land use, among the several contending urban land uses, is the biggest consumer of land in urban centres (Alonso, 1960; Edwards, 2007; Kabba and Li, 2011; Uju and Iyanda, 2012; Adegoke, 2014). Under normal situations, increase in population elicits a proportionate increase in the demand for land for residential uses, and the occurrence of commercial, industrial, institutional and transportational land uses is spatially linked to residential development. Consequently, any changes in the general use of land affect residential property rental values.
The metropolis of Kaduna in Nigeria has gone through structural changes in its physical form, population, economic and social constituents over the last century largely owing to urban growth. This had engendered changes in land uses in the metropolis (Saleh et al., 2014a; Saleh et al., 2014b). The rapid urban growth and proliferation of human activities in Kaduna metropolis, Nigeria, is accompanied by different types of land uses and their conversion from one type to another most often in contravention of land use planning. Incompatible combinations of various types of land use are commonly found adjacent to each other. Intra-urban migration of residents within Kaduna metropolis has resulted in irregular changes in land uses against urban planning regulations and this in turn affects residential property rental values in diverse ways (Ajibuah, 2010), (Aliyu et al., 2013).
Research work carried out in the area of land use and property value in Nigeria has been quite considerable in recent times, although much of the research studies mainly focused on the determinants of land uses and determinants of property values separately. The crucial issue of properly defining the factors that bring about changes in land uses and meticulously analysing how such land use changes influence residential property rental values in a major Nigerian city has not been addressed. Additionally, most of the research studies on land use and property values in Nigeria were undertaken with the aid of analytical and technical tools that have been found to have some limitations that could affect the quality of results and deductions made from the analysis of data collected for such studies.
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