This website features a collection of links to outside resources, many of which were cited in The Captured Economy, for readers interested in learning more about regressive regulation.
To filter the reference library by topic, please use the links on a topic page or open this page on a full-size screen and use the provided menu.
NBER
May 2021
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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Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University
2019
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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Mercatus Center
September 2019
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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NBER
May 2019
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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Urban Affairs Review
September 2, 2016
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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Human Geography and Planning
May 2019
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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NBER
May 2019
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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AEA Papers and Proceedings
May 2019
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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AEA Papers and Proceedings
May 2019
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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AEA Papers and Proceedings
May 2019
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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AEA Papers and Proceedings
May 2019
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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Columbia Business School
April 10, 2019
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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SSRN
March 1, 2019
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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Pro-Market
April 30, 2018
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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The Review of Income and Wealth
April 6, 2018
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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Journal of Regional Science
June 2018
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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"One Hundred Years of Zoning and the Future of Cities"
October 2017
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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Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University
June 2018
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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November 11, 2019
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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Journal of Urban Economics
July 2018
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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Where Jobs are Concentrating and Why It Matters to Cities and Regions
June 2019
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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UC Berkeley Fisher Center
September 1, 2018
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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University of Iowa
March 19, 2019
“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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Tech Clusters
Summer 2020
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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Environmental Science & Technology
28 January 2021
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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Expanding the Supply of Affordable Housing for Low-Wage Workers
August 10 2020
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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American Economic Review
October 2020
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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The Economics of Urban Density
Summer 2020
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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NBER
September 2020
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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Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houston
August 2020
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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League of California Cities
October 7, 2016
“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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Urban Affairs Review
January 29, 2019
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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UC Davis School of Law
February 9, 2019
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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SSRN
April 10, 2018
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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American Economic Association
March 4, 2019
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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American Enterprise Institute
January 2019
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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Science Direct
August 14, 2019
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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Journal of Urban Economics
2008
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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NBER
January 2019
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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Brookings Institution
May 14, 2018
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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Berkley University Terner Center
Publication date her
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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The Univerity of Chicago Law Review
2010
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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Hamilton Project
January, 2019
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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NBER
September 2019
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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NBER
May 2018
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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NBER
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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D.C. Policy Center
November 2019
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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Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University
March 12, 2019
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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University of California, Berkeley
November 2009
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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Brookings Institution
June 29, 2018
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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Columbia Business School
April 10, 2019
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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Urban Geography
1985
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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American Real Estate Society
1998
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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Public Policy Institute of California
2002
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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Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs
2004
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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Journal of Policy Development and Research
2005
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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National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education
2005
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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Centre for Economic Performance
2006
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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Idaho Law Review
2007
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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NBER
2013
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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Fermanian Business and Economic Institute at PLNU
2014
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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Journal of Political Economy
2014
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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Journal of Urban Economics
2015
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 American Economic Review
May 1967
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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Journal of Urban Economics
October 1974
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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Journal of Urban Economics
January 1976
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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Land Economics
August 1979
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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Urban Studies
February 1981
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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The Journal of Political Economy
December 1982
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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Land Economics
February 1985
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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Land Economics
February 1986
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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Journal of Urban Economics
November 1986
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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Journal of Urban Economics
January 1987
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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Journal of Law and Economics
April 1987
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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IEA
July 15, 1988
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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American Economic Review
March 1989
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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Journal of Urban Economics
May 1989
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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The Planner
October 1989
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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Social Science Quarterly
March 1990
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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Cato Policy Analysis
April 4, 1990
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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Reason Foundation
May 1990
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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Journal of Urban Economics
September 1990
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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Washington University Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law
January 1991
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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Journal of Regional Science
February 1991
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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Policy Sciences
May 1991
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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Journal of Urban Economics
September 1991
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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Journal of Regional Science
May 1994
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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American Economic Review
March 1996
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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Reason Foundation
July 1996
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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Reason Foundation
November 1997
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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Journal of Public Economics
March 1998
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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Journal of Economic Literature
September 1998
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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Journal of Urban Economics
November 1998
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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Reason Foundation
January 1999
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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Reason Foundation
September 1999
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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Reason Foundation Policy Study
October 1999
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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Reason Foundation
October 1999
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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Urban Studies
November 1999
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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International Regional Science Review
April 2000
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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