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The ancient concept of condominium ownership has been revived in this country as an answer to the increasing demand for adequate urban housing. The advantages of individual home ownership have had to be subordinated by many families in favor of the convenience of apartment rental. A partial answer to this problem has been found in the creation of cooperative apartments, but this device still leaves much to be desired.' It was not until Puerto Rico achieved its initial success with condominiums that the advantages of this form of home ownership fully came to the attention of this country. To encourage the use of condominiums as a form of middle-income family home ownership, Congress enacted the National Housing Act of 1961. Section 234 of the act provided authority for the Federal Housing Administration to insure mortgages on condominium projects in those states whose laws permit the condominium form of ownership. Accordingly, a flood of state legislation has followed in an effort to meet the requirements of section 234. In order to provide guidelines for this state legislation the FHA drafted a model statute which satisfies the requirements of section 234, and yet leaves room for modification to meet local conditions.

Achieving good water quality through output controls is difficult. The New Zealand Government recently proposed enforceable bottom lines to protect ecosystem health of 1 mg L⁻¹ dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) and 0.018 mg L⁻¹ dissolved reactive phosphorus (DRP), but has now delayed considering them. In examining whether these bottom lines could be met through mitigating DIN and DRP losses from existing land uses, we found that if all known strategies to mitigate N and P loss were implemented by 2035, the proportion of catchments exceeding these bottom lines would be predicted to be 4% for DIN and 9% for DRP. If bottom lines were enforced, land use would likely change, but to change successfully good advice and effective multilevel governance are required. Advice should expand and standardise elements of farm environment plans that spatially isolate critical source areas of N and P loss and apply cost-effective mitigations. Governance should focus on combining these plans with the national bottom lines and technical support to connect practices and land use at the farm scale to meeting water quality bottom line at the catchment scale.

AbstractAgricultural production has economic, environmental, social and cultural consequences beyond farm boundaries, but information about these impacts is not readily available to decision makers. This study applied the land use suitability concept by carrying out an assessment of a region that has the potential for intensification of agricultural production, but where eutrophication of river and estuary receiving environments due to nitrogen enrichment is a significant issue. The assessment evaluated three indicators for each farmable land parcel in the region: productive potential (the inherent productive and economic potential of the parcel), relative contribution (the potential for the parcel to contribute nitrogen to receiving environments compared to other land parcels), and pressure (the load of nitrogen delivered to receiving environments compared to the loads that ensure environmental objectives are achieved). The assessment indicated that land with high suitability for land-use intensification in Southland is limited because areas with high productive potential and low relative contribution rarely coincide with receiving environments with low pressure. Existing data, methods and models can be used to calculate the indicators under different choices for regional land-use intensity and receiving environment objectives. However, the spatial resolution and accuracy that is achievable may preclude using assessment outputs to make land use decisions at small spatial scales such as individual farms. The study highlighted that land use suitability is not an intrinsic property of a land parcel because it is dependent on choices about land use elsewhere in the landscape and the environmental objectives, and that land use suitability is inherently subjective because of decisions that concern how indicators are combined and weighted.

International studies point out that some freshwater policy objectives are not achieved. This study describes that this is in part caused by shortcomings that include: the lack of targeted monitoring schemes to measure impact; a too small range of specific technologies rather than a wider suite of integrated multiple technologies; a too tight focus on sub-sets of stakeholders instead of the involvement of the wider range of end users; and poor trust building and technology explanations to end users. As an example, the New Zealand government is addressing widespread concern over the deterioration of the national freshwater resource by supporting a diverse portfolio of land and riparian management actions. Efforts to assess the effectiveness of these interventions and establish an evidence-based framework for future policies are however limited by the existing regional-scale freshwater monitoring infrastructure. Such hydrometric networks were established largely to assess the broader-scale regional 'state' of the environment and are generally out-of-phase with freshwater improvement actions that are implemented more typically at edge-of-field, farm or sub-catchment scales. Recent and rapid evolution in sensor technologies have created new opportunities to deliver information tuned to the appropriate parameters and frequencies needed to evaluate improvement actions. Despite this, the necessary transformative change in freshwater monitoring has yet to gather pace. In this study we explore barriers and solutions with the objective to better understand what is needed for successful integration of innovative monitoring technologies in a transitional environmental policy setting, using recent New Zealand policy directives as a case study. We use expert surveys and scenario testing to explore barriers to adoption to more robust and comprehensive monitoring required to establish the success, or otherwise, of freshwater improvement actions. This process reveals that rather than further innovations in technology, change in ...