Where does floating TDR land? An analysis of location attributes in real estate development in Taiwan

Abstract

This article examines how the attributes of an urban location contribute to private property developers’ use of transfer of development rights (TDR) in Taiwan. We use “floating TDR” to describe a deliberate design feature of the Taiwanese program—the lack of legal requirement for planning designation of the receiving areas. The result is that planners have little control over where TDR takes place in the city even though TDR density bonus has been widely used in real estate development. A logistic regression model finds that TDR projects gravitate toward locations of certain attributes: growing neighborhoods, neighborhoods with higher household income, parcels with a slower increase in land price, and locations at a further distance from public facilities such as urban parks and mass transit stations. Real estate projects of a greater development volume and a smaller site area are also more likely to use TDR density bonus. This article concludes by reaffirming the important role of planning in the design and use of TDR as a market-enabling tool.