reference library

The second half of the twentieth century saw large-scale suburbanization in the United States, with the median share of residents who work in the same county where they live falling…
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Within the 65-and-over age group, most recent income gains have gone to the highest earners, and the number of households with housing cost burdens has reached an all-time high. Ensuring…
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As regions across the United States are experiencing high and rising house prices, inclusionary zoning is increasing in popularity as a tool to increase the availability of affordable housing for…
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American technological creativity is geographically concentrated in areas that are generally distant from the country’s most persistent pockets of joblessness. Could a more even spatial distribution of innovation reduce American…
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Scholars have long argued that gentrification may displace long-term homeowners by causing their property taxes to increase, and policy makers, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have cited this argument as…
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Urban economics and branches of mainstream economics – what we call the “housing as opportunity” school of thought – have been arguing that shortages of affordable housing in dense agglomerations…
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The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the country since 2000, and many observers fear it is displacing low-income populations from their homes and communities. We offer new…
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Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study which types of landlords bear the burden of decreased rental…
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Using detailed location-specific criminal incident-level data, we find that sudden rent decontrol in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995 caused overall crime to fall by 16 percent—approximately 1,200 crimes annually. We estimate…
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Second generation rent control seeks to prevent negative quantity effects by exempting newly built units. The artificially lowered rent in the controlled segment makes renting attractive for households that would…
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In many global cities the rental housing market is partially regulated. We document that the Paris housing market is dual: a flexible rent sector coexists with a large controlled rent…
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Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy…
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A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology,…
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Zoning ordinances and the like have been endemic in the United States for the better part of a century. These laws have always influenced the location of housing within a…
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How does neighbors’ income affect individual well-being? Our analysis is based on rich US local data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which contains information on where respondents live…
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An unprecedented surge in U.S. rental demand in the decade since the housing crisis has raised the specter of a rental affordability crisis, the brunt of which is borne by…
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Previous literature has shown that land use regulations influence where people choose to live within the U.S. by impacting housing prices. In this paper, we study the impact of these…
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As the inaugural State of the Nation’s Housing report noted, the majority of Americans were well housed in 1988, and a number of metrics point to improving conditions since then….
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Worldwide, land ownership is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. This paper studies the impacts of land concentration on the long-run development of communities founded in the frontier…
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Tall commercial buildings dominate city skylines. Nevertheless, despite decades of research on commercial real estate and horizontal patterns of urban development, vertical patterns have been largely ignored. We document that…
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Hence this report, which aims to help leaders understand how, and how much, changing demands for place are influencing the clustering of jobs both across and within metropolitan areas. The…
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In order to highlight the significance of why this policy change would be detrimental for the California housing market, it is critical to understand the ways that rent control reduces…
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“A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology,…
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This paper examines the tech cluster phenomenon by considering three partially answered questions. We first ask how to define a tech cluster—that is, what properties are required to be a…
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Residential energy demand can be greatly influenced by the types of housing structures that households live in, but few studies have assessed changes in the composition of housing stocks as…
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Policymakers must focus on improving the jobs-housing fit—or connecting jobs with affordable housing—which is essential for working families and for the economy. Michela Zonta Expanding the Supply of Affordable Housing…
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We exploit variation in mortgage modifications to disentangle the impact of reducing long-term obligations with no change in short-term payments (“wealth”), and reducing short-term payments with no change in long-term…
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In this paper, we discuss what economic researchers have learned about density and what we see as the most significant gaps in this understanding. We begin by describing how economic…
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How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights – such as the right of possession or the right of transfer – differentially impact outcomes, such as…
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The experience of Houston reaffirms much of what researchers already know: minimum-lot-size regulations limit urban development, driving up lot sizes and thereby increasing housing prices. By liberalizing these rules, the…
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“The State’s density bonus law (Government Code Section 65915 – 65918) has over the course of the last several legislative sessions been the subject of bills modifying the statute and…
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In most countries, average wages tend to be higher in larger cities. In this paper, we focus on the role played by the matching of workers to firms in explaining…
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What are the local-level impacts of zoning change? I study recent Chicago upzonings that increased allowed densities and reduced parking requirements in a manner exogenous of development plans and neighborhood…
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The problem of local-government barriers to housing supply is finally enjoying its moment in the sun. For decades, the states did little to remedy this problem and arguably they made…
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We assess the impact of home-sharing on residential house prices and rents. Using a dataset of Airbnb listings from the entire United States and an instrumental variables estimation strategy, we…
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Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking…
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We use data on the appraised land value from a data set of more than 16 million appraisals to produce annual estimates of the average price of land used in…
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At the heart of urban economics are agglomeration economies, which drive the existence and extent of cities. This paper estimates urban agglomeration effects, exploring simple and very nuanced measures of…
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Differences in the supply of housing generate substantial variation in housing prices across the United States. Because housing prices influence migration, the elasticity of housing supply also has an important…
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Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a major social concern in the United States and other developed countries. There is an extensive economic literature estimating the social costs associated with SUDs…
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Like many large metropolitan areas, the Washington D.C. region faces a housing supply crunch. From 2010 to 2016, the population grew roughly twice as fast as the number of housing…
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In this brief, we present findings from interviews and focus groups with developers, general contractors, architects and nonprofits working to build both affordable and market-rate housing in San Francisco. The…
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In this Article, we argue that non-cumulative zoning is an idea whose time has passed, if there ever was a convincing case for it at all. The two major justifications…
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Regulatory constraints on housing production have shut millions of Americans out of the country’s most productive labor markets. Historically, Americans have moved to the parts of the country that offered…
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The high-tech sector is increasingly concentrated in a small number of expensive cities, with the top ten cities in “Computer Science”, “Semiconductors” and “Biology and Chemistry”, accounting for 70%, 79%…
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We estimate the local and aggregate effects of total factor productivity growth on US workers’ earnings, housing costs, and purchasing power. Drawing on four alternative instrumental variables, we consistently find…
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The location of individuals determines their job opportunities, living amenities, and housing costs. We argue that it is useful to conceptualize the location choice of individuals as a decision to…
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Land is among the most valuable assets in the United States, and its value is a function of how we use land and what we build on it. According to…
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The U.S. market for home improvement and repair is now well over $400 billion annually as the housing stock faces pressure to meet the nation’s growing and changing housing needs….
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This chapter explores the potential importance of local housing market regulation in determining homelessness in the U.S. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the connection between the operation of…
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The most immediate impact of HQ2 for non-college-educated residents would most likely be higher housing costs due to increased demand from the influx of new workers. Housing is already pricey:…
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Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy…
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The paper estimates a simultaneous equations model of housing price inflation 1975-1978 for a cross-section of 51 metropolitan areas…One of the major sources of inflation is shown to be a…
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Real estate returns and employment growth rates over the 1983-1997 period for forty-six major MSAs are used to examine the relationship between employment growth and real estate return. The results…
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One of the most frustrating and contentious issues in California in recent years has been the shortage of housing. Even as 10 million people have been added to the state’s…
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For more than a century, educated cities have grown more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital. This fact survives a battery of other control variables, metropolitan area fixed…
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Effective governance of residential development and housing markets poses difficult challenges for land regulators. In theory, excessive land restrictions limit the buildable supply, tilting construction toward lower densities and larger,…
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In this paper, we explore the transportation-land use policy connection. More specifically, we consider the question: can land use policy be used to alter transportation behavior? The answer is of…
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We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints are interpreted as shadow…
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Spring of 2007 will mark the 10th anniversary of the passage of Maryland’s Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation Initiative; an effort designed to discourage sprawl development, foster more compact communities,…
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This chapter investigates spatial variations in prices over the boom-bust cycle of housing markets both within and across urban areas. It considers the role of a new supply proxy–commuting time–in…
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The total cost of regulation amounts to about forty percent of the cost of housing across the various price segments in all of San Diego County…This study indicates that approximately…
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We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995. Pooling data on the…
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Walmart often faces strong local opposition when trying to build a new store. Opponents often claim that Walmart lowers nearby housing prices. In this study we use over one million…
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The general ideas that motivate the selection of the model developed below are commonplace in the voluminous recent literature on urban economics and geography. It has frequently been observed that…
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Two types of zoning are identified: externality zoning, which is designed to achieve a Pareto efficient pattern of land use, and fiscal zoning, which is designed to accomplish some other…
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The note is a comment on and extension of “The Effect of Zoning on Land Value,” by J. C. Ohls, R. C. Weisberg, and M. J. White. It is suggested…
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These examples of three of the best known and oldest growth management systems illustrate that, at both the metropolitan and submetropolitan level, a general effect of such systems can be…
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This paper investigates the impact of land-use zoning such as building-height and building-density restrictions on housing rent, land rent, the design parameters of a building, and population density in a…
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This study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities. The theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive,…
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The late 1960s and early 1970s brought increasing public concern over environmental issues such as rising population growth, resource depletion, and the overall quality of life. The State of Oregon,…
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Regardless of the community’s rationale for limiting growth, the result may be the exclusion of poor households from the community. Studies of growth control support the assertion that growth control…
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Using a virtually unique data base for Vancouver, Canada, this study examines the ways in which various zoning classifications and land uses affect the sale prices of single-family residences over…
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Both theory and observation suggest that three types of incentives are pertinent to suburban zoning decisions. From a legal and economic perspective, the rationale for zoning is to promote the…
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In recent years in the United States, government regulation of the housing industry has increased dramatically. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, many communities became increasingly dissatisfied with the…
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The British Town and Country planning system was originally designed to guide rather than restrict development. It has grown into a system which restricts development across the board. This has…
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Tests of the efficiency of single family home prices are performed using repeat sales prices of 39,210 individual homes in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco/Oakland for 1970-86. The market…
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Both large bodies of water and local governments restrict the supply of urban land. In this paper we measure water’s restriction on supply and test its effect on land price….
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There is evidence that the implementation of the planning system creates ‘scarcity rents’ for land in different uses by acting as a constraint on land supply. This paper provides, for…
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This study analyzes the adoption of growth controls in suburban municipalities. It combines data from census materials with a 1973 questionnaire survey of city planning officials concerning local growth control…
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The developer must also comply with zoning requirements, which are generally designed to protect property values by excluding “undesirable” projects. The objections are legion. “The height limit has been exceeded,”…
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In short, it is time to discard the tired baggage of conventional zoning and start afresh with a new approach to land-use policy. What is needed are land-use policies that…
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This paper analyzes a simple model of an urban area with growth and uncertainty…Even though investors are risk neutral, uncertainty affects both land rents and land prices in equilibrium because…
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Local land use regulations have been justified on the ground that local governments are authorized to exercise police power to protect the public health, safety, and welfare of their residents…
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In this paper, we examine the effects of state land-use controls on the aggregate demand and supply of residential land. Previous studies have examined the effect of land-use regulation on…
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The 1970s spawned a ‘first generation’ of growth controls which featured explicit (or implicit) restrictions on residential housing construction. These restrictions were typically implemented in small, affluent, and predominantly white…
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The increasing use of impact fees represents a new trend in local fiscal policy which can have important effects on real estate markets. The ramifications for economic efficiency as well…
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This study proposes, and finds evidence supporting, the hypothesis that restrictive residential land-use and minimum lot-size zoning are substitute ways of controlling the population intensity of future residential development. In…
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To explain the large differences in labor productivity across U.S. states we estimate two models–one based on local geographical externalities and the other on the diversity of local intermediate services–where…
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The problems of public housing and related subsidy programs are less the result of poor maintenance and design than a fundamental misunderstanding of the role which housing plays in social…
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Under urban planning in the United States, virtually every major development is subjected to the vagaries of the rezoning process and the uncertainties associated with legislative review by planning boards…
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When competitive landowners/developers control incorporation and zoning decisions, efficient patterns of development emerge. When, by contrast, early arrivals control policy, they may impose zoning restrictions that force later entrants to…
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What then is the appropriate role of government with respect to urban spatial structure, from the perspective of the monocentric model? If automobile travel cannot be priced efficiently then government…
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By showing evidence of strategic interaction in the choice of growth controls, the paper suggests that important local policy decisions of this type are not taken in a vacuum. When…
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Urban sprawl has sparked a national debate over land-use policy. At least 19 states have established either state growth-management laws or task forces to protect farmland and open space. Dozens…
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Local and state government officials and environmental activists use the term to create images of disorder, chaos, and irrational decision making about land use by Michigan’s private landowners. These officials…
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More than 100 cities and counties have adopted some form of a growth boundary—a limit on land development beyond a politically designated area—to curb sprawl, protect open space, or encourage…
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Urban-growth boundaries are emerging as one of the most popular growth-management tools in the fight against suburbanization. More than 100 cities and counties have adopted them, and statewide mandates for…
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Based on two surveys of 490 Californian cities and counties, the study examines the effects of local growth-control enactment between 1979 and 1988 on net housing construction between 1980 and…
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This article argues that urban spatial expansion results mainly from three powerful forces: a growing population, rising incomes, and falling commuting costs. Urban growth occurring purely in response to these…
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