reference library

/reference library
reference library2018-06-08T14:23:35-07:00

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.

Suburbanization in the United States 1970-2010

Stephen J. Redding

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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Housing America’s Older Adults 2019

Policy Advisory Board of the Joint Center for Housing Studies

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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Inclusionary Zoning and Housing Market Outcomes

Emily Hamilton

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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The Spatial Mismatch Between Innovation and Joblessness

Edward L. Glaeser and Naomi Hausman

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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Gentrification, Property Tax Limitation, and Displacement

Isaac William Martin Kevin Beck

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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Housing, urban growth and inequalities: The limits to deregulation and upzoning in reducing economic and spatial inequality

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper

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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Does Gentrification Displace Poor Children? New Evidence from New York City Medicaid Data

Kacie Dragan, Ingrid Ellen, and Sherry A. Glied

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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Who Pays for Rent Control? Heterogeneous Landlord Response to San Francisco’s Rent Control Expansion

Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian

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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Ending Rent Control Reduced Crime in Cambridge

David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer and Parag A. Pathak

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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The Effects of Second-Generation Rent Control on Land Values

Andreas Mense, Claus Michelsen and Konstantin A. Kholodilin

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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Spatial Misallocation and Rent Controls

Guillaume Chapelle, Etienne Wasmer and Pierre-Henri Bono

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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Affordable Housing and City Welfare

Jack Y Favilukis, Pierre Mabille, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

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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Should Law Subsidize Driving?

Gregory H. Shill

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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Excessive Zoning Makes Us Poorer and More Unequal

Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles

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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Neighbors’ Income, Public Goods and Well-Being

Neighbors' Income, Public Goods and Well-Being

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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Amenities, Affordability, and Housing Vouchers

David S. Bieri and Casey Dawkins

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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Land Use Regulations and Fertility Rates

Daniel Shoag and Lauren Russell

"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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The State of the Nation’s Housing 2018

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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Land Concentration and Long-Run Development: Evidence from the Frontier United States

Cory Smith

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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The vertical city: Rent gradients, spatial structure, and agglomeration economies

Crocker H. Liu, Stuart S. Rosenthal, and William C. Strange

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

Chad Shearer, Jennifer S. Vey, and Joanne Kim

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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The Case for Preserving Costa-Hawkins: Three Ways Rent Control Reduces the Supply of Rental Housing

Kenneth T. Rosen

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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Should Law Subsidize Driving?

Author name here

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

William R. Kerr and Frederic Robert-Nicoud

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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Linking Housing Policy, Housing Typology, and Residential Energy Demand in the United States

Peter Berrill, Kenneth T. Gillingham, and Edgar G. Hertwich

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

Michela Zonta

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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Liquidity versus Wealth in Household Debt Obligations: Evidence from Housing Policy in the Great Recession

Peter Ganong and Pascal Noel

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

Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga

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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Measuring Property Rights Institutions

Simeon Djankov, Edward L. Glaeser, Valeria Perotti, and Andrei Shleifer

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

Nolan Gray and Jessie McBirney

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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Not Just Density Bonuses: Dealing with Demands Beyond the Bonus

Lynn E. Hutchins and Karen M. Tiedemann

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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Matching in Cities

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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Upzoning Chicago: Impacts of a Zoning Reform on Property Values and Housing Construction

Yonah Freemark

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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Beyond the Double Veto: Land Use Plans as Preemptive Intergovernmental Compacts

Christopher S. Elmendorf

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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The Sharing Economy and Housing Affordability: Evidence from Airbnb

Kyle Barron, Edward Kung, and Davide Proserpio

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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The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco

Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian

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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The Price of Residential Land for Counties, ZIP Codes, and Census Tracts in the United States

Morris A. Davis, Stephen D. Oliner, Will Larson, and Jessica Shui

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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Measuring Urban Economic Density

J. Vernon Henderson, Dzhamilya Nigmatulina, and Sebastian Kriticos

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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Job Creation and Housing Construction: Constraints on Metropolitan Area Employment Growth

Raven Saks

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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Substance Use Disorder Treatment Centers and Property Values

Brady P. Horn, Aakrit Joshi, and Johanna Catherine Maclean

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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In whose backyards has D.C. built new housing?

Jenny Schuetz

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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Perspectives: Practitioners Weigh in on Drivers of Rising Housing Construction Costs in San Francisco

Carolina Reid and Hayley Raetz |

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 Steep Cost of Using Noncumulative Zoning to Preserve Land for Urban Manufacturing

Roderick M. Hills Jr and David Schleicher

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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Removing Barriers to Accessing High-Productivity Places

Daniel Shoag

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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The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors

Enrico Moretti

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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Who Benefits From Productivity Growth? Direct and Indirect Effects of Local TFP Growth on Wages, Rents, and Inequality

Richard Hornbeck and Enrico Moretti

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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Location as an Asset

Adrien Bilal and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

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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The Economic Costs of Land Use Regulations

Yesim Sayin Taylor

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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Improving America’s Housing, 2019

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University

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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Homelessness and Housing Market Regulation

Steven Raphael

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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Is Washington, D.C. prepared for the Amazon HQ2 ‘prosperity bomb’?

Martha Ross

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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Affordable Housing and City Welfare

Jack Y Favilukis, Pierre Mabille, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

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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On the effect of fiscal zoning on land and housing values

Paul N.Courant

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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The stochastic city

Dennis R.Capozza and Robert W.Helsley

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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The Effects of Local Growth Controls on Regional Housing Production and Population Redistribution in California

Ned Levine

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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Abolishing Exclusionary Zoning: A Natural Policy Alliance for Environmentalists and Affordable Housing Advocates

Robert L. Liberty

Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review

January 2003

Exclusionary zoning limits residential development over large areas, and even entire cities or towns, to single-family housing on large lots. Exclusionary zoning is unfair to people and families of modest…
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Why Is Manhattan So Expensive? Regulation and the Rise of Housing Prices

Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven Saks

Journal of Law and Economics 48, no. 2 (2005): 331–69

October 2005

In Manhattan and elsewhere, housing prices have soared over the 1990s. Rising incomes, lower interest rates, and other factors can explain the demand side of this increase, but some sluggishness…
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The Rise of the Sunbelt

Edward L. Glaeser and Kristina Tobio

National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 13071

April 2007

In the last 50 years, population and incomes have increased steadily throughout much of the Sunbelt. This paper assesses the relative contributions of rising productivity, rising demand for Southern amenities…
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Social Capital and Urban Growth

Edward L. Glaeser and Charles Redlick

International Regional Science Review

June 12, 2009

Social capital is often place-specific while schooling is portable, so the prospect of migration may reduce the returns to social capital and increase the returns to schooling. If social capital…
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Residential land use regulation and the US housing price cycle between 2000 and 2009

Haifang Huang and Yao Tang

Journal of Urban Economics

January 2012

In a sample covering more than 300 cities in the US from January 2000 to July 2009, we find that more restrictive residential land use regulations and geographic land constraints…
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Preserving History or Hindering Growth? The Heterogeneous Effects of Historic Districts on Local Housing Markets in New York City

Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Michael Gedal, Edward Glaeser, Brian J. McCabe

NBER

September 2014

Since Brooklyn Heights was designated as New York City’s first landmarked neighborhood in 1965, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated 120 historic neighborhoods in the city. This paper develops a…
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The Impact of Supply Constraints on House Prices in England

Christian A. L. Hilber and Wouter Vermeulen

The Economic Journal

March 7, 2016

We test the theoretical prediction that house prices respond more strongly to changes in local earnings in places with tight supply constraints using a unique panel dataset of 353 Local…
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Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco

Nellie Bowles

New York Times

March 4, 2018

Starcity’s target demographic makes $40,000 to $90,000 a year…Ms. Shiver, who makes about $85,000 a year, knew she could never afford a house here but moved anyway…Because of arcane permitting…
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Effects of an Urban Growth Management System on Land Values

Michael E. Gleeson

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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Interjurisdictional Price Effects of Land Use Controls

Susan M. Wachter and Man Cho

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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Urban Sprawl: Diagnosis and Remedies

Jan K. Brueckner

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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San Jose Demonstrates the Limits of Urban Growth Boundaries and Urban Rail

Randall O'Toole

Reason Foundation

March 1, 2003

The theory behind both urban-growth boundaries and light rail systems seems sensible at first. Growth boundaries stop development from “sprawling” beyond the limits it sets and forces new development and…
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The Wrong Side(s) of the Tracks: Estimating the Causal Effects of Racial Segregation on City Outcomes

Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat

MIT

October 2005

The strong negative correlation between a city’s level of residential racial segregation and its outcomes, particularly for black residents, is well-established. The interpretation of this relationship, however, is confounded by…
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How Have Land-use Regulations Affected Property Values in Oregon?

William K. Jaeger and Andrew J. Plantinga

Oregon State University

June 2007

This study examines the ways in which land-use regulations in general and Oregon’s land-use planning system in particular may affect property values. The study is focused on Oregon, but it…
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How Urban Planners Caused the Housing Bubble

Randal O'Toole

Cato Policy Analysis

October 1, 2009

When planners make housing unaffordable, their first response is to impose “affordability mandates” on builders. Typically, such regulations require builders to sell 15 to 20 percent of their homes below…
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Barriers to Development Inside Maryland’s PFAs: Perspectives of Planners, Developers, and Advocates

Casey Dawkins, Jason Sartori, and Gerrit-Jan Knaap

National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education

January 18, 2012

This study presents a summary of stakeholder perspectives on the effectiveness of Maryland’s Priority Funding Areas and barriers to growth within PFAs. It relies upon responses to a telephone survey…
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Regulation and Housing Supply

Joseph Gyourko, Raven Molloy

NBER

October 2014

A wide array of local government regulations influences the amount, location, and shape of residential development. In this chapter, we review the literature on the causes and effects of this…
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The Effect of Downzoning for Managing Residential Development and Density

David Newburn and Jeffrey Ferris

Land Economics

May 2016

This study analyzes the effect of a downzoning policy on both the probability and the density of residential development using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach. Spatially explicit panel data on subdivisions…
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More Housing For Better Public Transit: A Grand Bargain For New York City

Alex Armlovich

Manhattan Institute

March 27, 2018

New York City needs lots of additional private housing, but restrictive regulations make building it difficult. The city also requires better subways and buses, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA),…
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The Impact of Suburban Growth Restrictions on US Housing Price Inflation, 1975-1978

David Segal and Philip Srinivasan

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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Equilibrium of a Residential City, Attributes of Housing, and Land-Use Zoning

Hans-Jürg Büttler

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 Impact of State Land-Use Controls on Residential Land Values

James D. Shilling, C. F. Sirmans, Krisandra A. Guidry

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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Productivity and Metropolitan Density

Timothy F. Harris and Yanis M. Ioannides

Tufts University

May 15, 2000

This paper evaluates the relationship between urban productivity and density using data on metropolitan areas. This is an alternative measure of the urban economy to the one employed by Ciccone…
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Smart Growth in Action, Part II: Case Studies in Housing Capacity and Development from Ventura County, California

Geoffrey Segal, William Fulton, Susan Weaver and Lily Okamura

Reason Foundation

May 1, 2003

This report is the second portion of a two-part study that attempts to help fill this void by examining the implementation of growth management techniques in Ventura County, California, a…
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How Overregulation Creates Sprawl (Even in a City without Zoning)

Michael Lewyn

George Washington University Law School

October 28, 2005

Numerous commentators have suggested that the spread-out, automobile-dependent urban form (often referred to as “sprawl”) that dominates metropolitan America is at least partially caused by government regulation of land use….
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Zoning as a Barrier to Multifamily Housing Development

Gerrit Knaap, Stuart Meck, Terry Moore, and Robert Parker

Journal of the American Planning Association

July 2007

Among our conclusions: It is possible to use zoning and housing trend data to gain insights into the effects of zoning on high density, multifamily housing development. In some jurisdictions,…
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The Wealth of Cities: Agglomeration Economies and Spatial Equilibrium in the United States

Edward L. Glaeser and Joshua D. Gottlieb

Journal of Economic Literature

December 2009

Empirical research on cities starts with a spatial equilibrium condition: workers and firms are assumed to be indifferent across space. This condition implies that research on cities is different from…
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Land use regulation: Where have we been, where are we going?

Ralph B. McLaughlin

Cities

March 2012

Contrary to current international, national, and regional trends of neo-liberal policy reform, government regulation of urban land use has continued to increase in many countries worldwide. This is surprising, given…
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The Comparative Advantage of Cities

Donald R. Davis, Jonathan I. Dingel

NBER

October 2014

What determines the distributions of skills, occupations, and industries across cities? We develop a theory to jointly address these fundamental questions about the spatial organization of economies. Our model incorporates…
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Housing prices, mortgage interest rates and the rising share of capital income in the United States

Gianni La Cava

Bank for International Settlements

July 25, 2016

Piketty documents how the share of aggregate income going to capital in the United States has risen in the post-war era. Rognlie has since shown that this is largely due…
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A Single Solution for New York’s Two Biggest Problems

Reihan Salam

The Atlantic

April 11, 2018

And then there is displacement, fear of which looms large in the local imagination. As New York City has grown more desirable, it has experienced net population growth. While large…
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Employment Growth and Real Estate Return: Are They Linked?

Youguo Liang and Willard McIntosh

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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Wages, Rents, and the Quality of Life

Jennifer Roback

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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Growth controls: policy analysis for the second generation

Peter Navarro and Richard Carson

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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Residential Construction: Using the Urban Growth Model to Estimate Housing Supply

Christopher J. Mayer and C.Tsuriel Somerville

Journal of Urban Economics

July 2000

This article presents an empirical model of housing supply derived from urban growth theory. This approach describes new housing construction as a function of changes in house prices and costs…
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Social Capital and the Built Environment: The Importance of Walkable Neighborhoods

Kevin M. Leyden

American Journal of Public Health

September 2003

I sought to examine whether pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use neighborhoods encourage enhanced levels of social and community engagement (i.e., social capital). The study investigated the relationship between neighborhood design and individual levels…
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Urban Colossus: Why is New York America’s Largest City?

Edward L. Glaeser

Federal Reserve Bank of New York

December 1, 2005

New York has been remarkably successful relative to any other large city outside of the sunbelt and it remains the nation’s premier metropolis. What accounts for New York’s rise and…
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New Housing Supply and the Dilution of Social Capital

Christian A. L. Hilber

Research Papers in Environmental and Spatial Analysis

September 6, 2007

This paper examines the role of local housing market conditions for social capital accumulation and neighborhood club good provision. A model of individual investment decisions predicts that in a setting…
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New housing construction in Phoenix: Evidence of “new suburbanism”?

Carol Atkinson-Palombo

Cities

April 2010

Stereotypical images of suburbs as homogeneous, residential neighborhoods comprised of single-family houses on individual lots have become synonymous with sprawl. Discourses on smart growth, new urbanism, and sustainability promote increasing…
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The Effect of Land-Use Controls on the Spatial Size of US Urbanized Areas

Marin V. Geshkov, Joseph S. DeSalvo

Journal of Regional Science

April 16, 2012

On a sample of U.S. urbanized areas in 2000, we test theoretical hypotheses of the effect of land-use controls on the spatial size of urban areas. We find that minimum…
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Mapping Opportunity: A Critical Assessment

Eli Knapp, Gerrit-Jan Knaap, and Chao Liu

National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education

October 30, 2014

A renewed interest has emerged on spatial opportunity structures and their role in shaping housing policy, community development, and equity planning. To this end, many have tried to quantify the…
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Property Taxation, Zoning, and Efficiency in a Dynamic Tiebout Model

Levon Barseghyan and Stephen Coate

American Economic Journal

August 2016

This paper presents a new dynamic Tiebout model and uses it to revisit a classic argument in state and local public finance. The argument, due to Hamilton, is that a…
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Rents Are Falling Fast in Some NYC Boroughs

Oshrat Carmiel

Bloomberg

April 12, 2018

Here’s some good news for New York City apartment-hunters: Manhattan rents dropped 3.8 percent in March from a year earlier, the most since 2011.The news is even better for tenants…
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Cities Under Pressure: Local Growth Controls and Residential Development Policy

Paul G. Lewis and Max Neiman

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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The Price Effects of Urban Growth Boundaries in Metropolitan Portland, Oregon

Gerrit J. Knaap

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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