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.

Property Rights and Urban Form

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

NBER

May 2021

How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights, including those of possession and transfer, influence the shape of cities? This paper incorporates insecure property rights into…
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Warding Off Development: Local Control, Housing Supply and NIMBYs

Evan Mast

W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

July 2020

Local control of land-use regulation creates a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) problem that can suppress housing construction, contributing to rising prices and potentially slowing economic growth. I study how increased local control…
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Single-Family Zoning Reform: An Analysis of SB 1120

David Garcia, Julian Tucker, and Isaac Schmidt

Terner Center for Housing Innovation

July 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated California’s housing crisis by heightening social and economic inequalities, with disparate impact on those unable to perform their jobs. The strong likelihood of a prolonged…
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The rise and effects of homeowners associations

Wyatt Clarke and Matthew Freedman

Journal of Urban Economics

July 2019

In the U.S., nearly 60% of recently built single-family houses, and 80% of houses in new subdivisions, are part of a homeowners association (HOA). We construct the first near-national map…
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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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Who Participates in Local Government? Evidence from Meeting Minutes

Katherine Levine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer, and David Glick

Perspectives on Politics

June 29, 2018

Scholars and policymakers have identified neighborhood activism and participation as a valuable source of policy information and civic engagement. Yet, these venues may be biasing policy discussions in favor of…
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The Effect of New Luxury Housing on Regional Housing Affordability

Evan Mast

W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

March 19, 2019

I study the short-run effect of new housing construction on housing affordability using individual address history data. Because most new construction is expensive, its effect on the market for more…
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Does Homeownership Influence Political Behavior? Evidence from Administrative Data

Andrew B. Hall and Jesse Yoder

Stanford University

August 7, 2018

Does owning property influence how individuals engage in the political process? This is a fundamental question in political economy, and a timely one given recent interest in understanding “NIMBYism” and…
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Waiting for Affordable Housing in New York City

Holger Sieg and Chamna Yoon

NBER

June 2019

We develop a new dynamic equilibrium model with heterogeneous households that captures the most important frictions that arise in housing rental markets and explains the political popularity of affordable housing…
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Does Property Ownership Lead to Participation inLocal Politics? Evidence from Property Records andMeeting Minutes

Jesse Yoder

June 25, 2019

Homeowners and renters have participated in politics at different rates throughout American history, but does becoming a property owner motivate an individual to access forms of political participation likely to…
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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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Serial Filing: How Landlords Use the Threat of Eviction

Philip ME Garboden and Eva Rosen

City & Community

May 15, 2019

While recent research has illustrated the frequency and deleterious consequences of eviction, the number of executed evictions pales in comparison to the number of poor families threatened with eviction. This…
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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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Recalibrating Local Politics to Increase the Supply of Housing

Chris Elmendorf

Regulation

Summer 2019

Is there a way for states to usefully recalibrate the local politics of land use while accepting homeowners as they are? This essay argues that state planning mandates could be…
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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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The effects of housing supply restrictions on partisan geography

Jason Sorens

Political Geography

September 2018

Economists have scrutinized the effects of residential building restrictions on the cost of housing, growth, and migration in recent years. More strictly zoned states and metro areas have lost population…
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Gentrification And The Health Of Low-Income Children In New York City

Kacie Dragan, Ingrid Ellen, and Sherry A. Glied

Health Affairs

September 2019

Although the pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the US, little is known about the health consequences of growing up in gentrifying neighborhoods. We used New York State…
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Social Connectedness in Urban Areas

Michael Bailey, Patrick Farrell, Theresa Kuchler, and Johannes Stroebel

NBER

July 2019

We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to explore the spatial structure of social networks in the New York metro area. We highlight the importance of transportation infrastructure in…
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Housing Supply Elasticity and Rent Extraction by State and Local Governments

Rebecca Diamond

Stanford Graduate School of Business

July 24, 2015

Governments may extract rent from private citizens by inflating taxes and spending on projects which benefit special interests. Using a spatial equilibrium model, I show that less elastic housing supplies…
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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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Sources of Inaction in Household Finance: Evidence from the Danish Mortgage Market

Steffen Andersen, John Y. Campbell, Kasper Meisner Nielsen, and Tarun Ramadorai

American Economic Review

October 2020

We build an empirical model to attribute delays in mortgage refinancing to psychological costs inhibiting refinancing until incentives are sufficiently strong; and behavior, potentially attributable to information-gathering costs, lowering the…
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Flattening the Curve: Pandemic-Induced Revaluation of Urban Real Estate

Arpit Gupta, Vrinda Mittal, Jonas Peeters & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

NBER

April 2021

We show that the COVID-19 pandemic brought house price and rent declines in city centers, and price and rent increases away from the center, thereby flattening the bid-rent curve in…
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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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Neighborhood Effects and Housing Vouchers

Morris A. Davis, Jesse M. Gregory, Daniel A. Hartley & Kegon T.K. Tan

NBER

February 2021

Researchers and policy-makers have explored the possibility of restricting the use of housing vouchers to neighborhoods that may positively affect the outcomes of children. Using the framework of a dynamic…
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Balancing the “Zoning Budget”

David Schleicher

Yale Law School

2011

The politics of urban land use frustrate even the best intentions. A number of cities have made strong political commitments to increasing their local housing supply in the face of…
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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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Balancing Priorities

National Low Income Housing Coalition

National Low Income Housing Coalition/p>

october 2018

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the largest national affordable housing program in the U.S. By 2030, nearly half a million current LIHTC units, or nearly a quarter of…
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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 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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Do the Rich and Poor Colocate in Large Cities?

Takatoshi Tabuchi

Science Direct

September 2019

This paper focuses on colocation rather than segregation in the context of Japanese large cities. Using the time cost of commuting from traditional urban economic theory, we analyze how different…
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How Land Use Law Impedes Transportation Innovation

David Schleicher

Yale Law School

April 2016

Transportation scholars have long known that infrastructure investments both depend upon current land use patterns and spur changes in those patterns. There is a massive literature built around what are…
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Housing Booms and Local Spending

Albert Solé-Olléab and Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal

Science Direct

September 2019

This paper examines how local governments adjust their spending in response to a temporary revenue windfall generated by a housing boom. We focus on Spanish local governments because of the…
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City Replanning

Roderick M. Hills Jr and David Schleicher

George Mason Law Review

August, 2014

We argue, by contrast, that the dismissal of plans was shortsighted and has helped contribute to the excessive strictness of zoning in our richest and most productive cities and regions,…
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California Zoning: Housing Construction and a New Ranking of Local Land Use Regulation

Salim Furth and Olivia Gonzalez

Mercatus Research

August 28, 2019

New survey data on residential land use regulation in California have allowed us to create the Mercatus-Augmented Terner California Housing Regulation (MATCHR) Index, which characterizes formal restrictions on density in…
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The Effects of Critical Habitat Designation on Housing Supply: An Analysis of California Housing Construction Activity

Jeffery E. Zabel and Robert Paterson

Journal of Regional Science

February 2006

Under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is required to designate critical habitat for listed species. Designation could result in modification to or delay of residential…
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When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism

Michael Hankinson

American Political Science Review

August 2018

How does spatial scale affect support for public policy? Does supporting housing citywide but “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) help explain why housing has become increasingly difficult to build…
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The Effect of Land Use Regulation on Housing and Land Prices

Keith Ihlanfeldt

Journal of Urban Economics

May 2007

This paper investigates the effects of land use regulation restrictiveness on house and vacant land prices. In contrast to prior studies, the index of restrictiveness is treated as an endogenous…
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Does Eviction Cause Poverty? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Cook County, IL

John Eric Humphries, Nicholas S. Mader, Daniel I. Tannenbaum, and Winnie L. van Dijk

NBER

August 2019e

Each year, more than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them. Many cities have recently implemented policies aimed at reducing the number of evictions, motivated by…
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Supply, Demand and the Challenge of Local Control

Alicia Sasser Modestino, Clark Ziegler, Tom Hopper, Calandra Clark, Lucas Munson, Mark Melnik, Carrie Bernstein, and Abby Raisz

The Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2019

June 2019

The Greater Boston Housing Report Card serves as an annual assessment of housing conditions in Greater Boston and what needs to be done to meet the region’s goals for current…
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Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation

David Schleicher

The Yale Law Journal

January 2017

This Article advances two central claims. First, declining interstate mobility rates create problems for federal macroeconomic policymaking. Low rates of interstate mobility make it harder for the Federal Reserve to…
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Planning an Affordable City

Roderick M Hills and David Schleicher

Iowa Law Review

2015

First, we argue in Part III.A that binding, comprehensive plans allow legislators to create “contracts” across electoral districts that are otherwise impossible when zoning proceeds through piecemeal lot-by-lot bargaining. In…
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The City as a Law and Economic Subject

David Schleicher

University of Illinois Law Review

Fall 2010

The study of the relationship between local government law and economics has long had one central text: Charles Tiebout’s famous 1956 article, A Pure Theory of Local Expendatures. Tiebout developed…
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Ethnic Enclaves and the Zoning Game

John Mangin

Yale Law and Policy Review

2018

In today’s economically vibrant and high-cost cities like New York, San Fran- cisco, and Washington, D.C., housing growth and housing affordability are a function of two variables: zoning and politics….
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The Location Market

Daniel B. Rodriguez and David Schleicher

George Mason Law Review

April 2014

This paper focuses on the benefits businesses and residents get from being able to locate in specific places inside a given city. First, it argues that agglomeration economics — the…
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Does Condominium Development Lead to Gentrification?

Leah Platt Boustan, Robert A. Margo, Matthew M. Miller, James M. Reeves, and Justin P. Steil

NBER

August 2019

The condominium structure, which facilitates ownership of units in multi-family buildings, was only introduced to the US during the 1960s. We ask whether the subsequent development of condominiums encouraged high-income…
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Welcome to the New Columbia: The Fiscal, Economic and Political Consequences of Statehood for D.C.

David Schleicher

Yale Law School

2014

A quick overview: Part I of this Essay will discuss the special fiscal and economic conditions that New Columbia would face. On one hand, statehood would better allow D.C. to…
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The role of racial bias in exclusionary zoning: The case of Durham, North Carolina, 1945–2014

Andrew H Whittemore

Economy and Planning A: Economy and Space

June 6, 2018

This paper investigates the distribution of and motivations for zoning decisions that decreased allowed residential density or prevented denser residential development in urbanized portions of Durham, North Carolina, from 1945…
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Opposition to Development or Opposition to Developers? Survey Evidence from Los Angeles County on Attitudes towards New Housing

Paavo Monkkonen and Michael Manville

UCLA

February 22, 2018

Opposition to new housing at higher densities is a pervasive problem in planning. Such opposition constrains the housing supply and undermines both affordability and sustainability in growing metropolitan areas. Relatively…
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The Geography of Inequality: How Land Use Regulation Produces Segregation and Polarization

Jessica Trounstine

Brigham Young University/p>

July 2018

High levels of racial segregation persist in the United States. We argue that land use control is an important tool for maintaining this pattern. Cities have the capacity to make…
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Local Land-Development Policies and Urban Housing Values

Jennifer R Wolch and SA Gabriel

Environment and Planning

October 1981

This paper evaluates the urban housing price impacts of local state land-development policy, and suggests that local governments have multiple objectives and constraints which shape their policy stance toward growth….
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Urban Sprawl and Quality Growth in Ohio

Samuel Staley and Matthew Hisrich

Reason Foundation

December 2001

Urban sprawl has surged to the forefront of local policy debate in Ohio. Concerns about the loss of open space, farm productivity, traffic congestion, and rising public-service costs have led…
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Office Space Supply Restrictions in Britain: The Political Economy of Market Revenge

Paul C. Cheshire, Christian A. L. Hilber

NA

May 29, 2008

Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world and regulatory constraints are the obvious explanation. We estimate the ‘regulatory tax’ for 14 British and 8 continental European…
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City Unplanning

David Schleicher

Yale Law Journal

January 2013

Generations of scholarship on the political economy of land use have tried to explain a world in which tony suburbs use zoning to keep out development but big cities allow…
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The Economics of Place-Making Policies

Edward L. Glaeser and Joshua D. Gottlieb

Brookings Institution

Spring 2008

Should the national government undertake policies aimed at strengthening the economies of particular localities or regions? Agglomeration economies and human capital spillovers suggest that such policies could enhance welfare. However,…
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Determinants of restrictive suburban zoning: An empirical analysis

Barbara Sherman Rolleston

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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Evaluating the Effectiveness of Regulatory Growth Management Programs: An Analytic Framework

John I. Carruthers

Journal of Planning Education and Research

June 2002

This article develops an analytic framework for evaluating the effectiveness of regulatory growth management programs. First, the literature review assembles a large body of recent research examining the evolution of…
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Housing Externalities

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Raymond Owens III

Journal of Political Economy

September 2008

Using data compiled from concentrated residential urban revitalization programs implemented in Richmond, VA, between 1999 and 2004, we study residential externalities. Specifically, we provide evidence that in neighborhoods targeted by…
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On the origins of land use regulations: Theory and evidence from US metro areas

Christian A.L.Hilber and FrédéricRobert-Nicoud

Journal of Urban Economics

May 2013

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 benefit the former group…
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Preservation Follies

Edward Glaeser

City Journal

Spring 2010

Wolfe wrote in the Village Voice that “to take their theory to its logical conclusion would be to develop Central Park. . . . When you consider the thousands and…
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The Irony of Inclusionary Zoning

Robert C. Ellickson

Southern California Law Review

1983

Between 1973 and 1980, the average sale price of a single-family house in the five-county Los Angeles area rose from $40,700 to $115,000, or by 183%. This increase not only…
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Community development with endogenous land use controls

Dennis Epple, Thomas Romer, and Radu Filimon

Journal of Public Economics

March 1988

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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The Impact of Building Restrictions on Housing Affordability

Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko

Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review 9, no. 2 (2003): 21–39

January 2003

The bulk of the evidence marshaled in this paper suggests that zoning, and other land-use controls, are more responsible for high prices where we see them. There is a huge…
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On the origins of land use regulations: The ‘influential landowner’ hypothesis

Christian A. L. Hilber and Frédéric Robert-Nicoud

Princeton University

March 2009

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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Do political parties matter for local land use policies?

Albert Solé-Ollé and Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal

Journal of Urban Economics

November 2013

Despite interest in the impact of land use regulations on housing construction and housing prices, little is known about the drivers of these policies. Conventional wisdom holds that homeowners have…
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Planning and Zoning for Group Homes: Local Government Obligations and Liability Under the Fair Housing Amendments Act

Brian J. Connolly and Dwight H. Merriam

The Urban Lawyer

Spring 2015

Across the diverse landscape of land use matters, few regulatory issues and approval processes elicit as much emotion and opposition as planning and zoning decisions relating to housing for persons…
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The Advisory Commission on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing: Its Behavior and Accomplishments

Anthony Downs

Housing Policy Debate

1991

In March 1990, Secretary Jack Kemp of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) appointed a 22-member commission to investigate the nature and extent of regulatory barriers to…
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Reputation in land development markets

J. Vernon Henderson and Thomas J. Miceli

Journal of Urban Economics

November 1989

This article incorporates a political decision process into an urban land use model to predict the likely location of a public good. It fills an important gap in the literature…
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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 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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Japanese Zoning

NA

Urban kchoze

April 6, 2014

This might be the single most interesting characteristic of Japanese zoning that differentiates it from zoning in North America. Here, cities are essentially the sole masters of their zoning, they…
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Regulatory Review for the States

Edward Glaeser and Cass Sunstein

National Affairs

Summer 2014

Housing regulations are ancient and often motivated by obvious risks. Boston banned thatched roofs in 1630, the year of the city’s founding, in the wake of an urban fire. New…
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The Destructive Role of Land Use Planning

Andrew P. Morriss and Roger E. Meiners

Tulane Environmental Law Journal

2000

Over the past century, land use planning by regulatory agencies has increasingly displaced the decentralized process of private landowners making their own decisions about land use. Local governments, county governments,…
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The Adoption of Growth Controls in Suburban Communities

John R. Logan and Min Zhou

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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An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for its Exclusionary Effects

William A. Fischel

Urban Studies

February 2004

I outline the twentieth-century history of American zoning to explain how homeowners came to dominate its content and administration in most jurisdictions. Zoning’s original purpose was to protect homeowners in…
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Reducing Poverty and Economic Disress after ARRA: Potential Roles for Place-Conscious Strategies

Manuel Pastor and Margery Austin Turner

Urban Institute

April 14, 2010

In what follows, we lay out the case for new, place-conscious strategies. We begin by reviewing the well-documented case that place does indeed matter—that where you grow up affects where…
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Urban Land Use Regulation: Are Homevoters Overtaking the Growth Machine?

Vicki Been, Josiah Madar, and Simon McDonnell

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

April 12, 2014

The leading theory about urban land use regulation argues that city zoning officials are full partners in the business and real estate elite’s “growth machine.” Suburban land use officials, in…
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The “Unique Circumstances” Rule in Zoning Variances—An Aid in Achieving Greater Prudence and Less Leniency

Osborne M. Reynolds Jr.

The Urban Lawyer

Winter 1999

It has frequently been emphasized by courts and commentators that the power to award variances should be exercised sparingly and that a variance should be awarded only if it will…
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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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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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To Defer Or Not To Defer: Judicial Review Of Zoning Board Decisions In New York

Elliot Gardner

Cardozo Public Law, Policy and Ethics Journal

May 2004

Judicial review is particularly important in the case of special use permits (also known as special exceptions), where a statute or ordinance specifically allows the sought-after use, but zoning boards…
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New housing supply and the dilution of social capital

Christian A.L. Hilber

Journal of Urban Economics

May 2010

This paper examines the role of local housing supply conditions for social capital investment. Using…data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, it is documented that the positive link between…
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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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Fiscal Stress and Growth Management Effort in Wisconsin Cities, Villages, and Towns

Daniel Diaz, and Paul Green Gary

State and Local Government Review

Winter 2001

This article also contributes to our understanding of growth management policy. Much of the research on growth management has focused primarily on the state level and has assumed that municipalities…
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The Rise of the Skilled City

Edward L. Glaeser and Albert Saiz

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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On the theory of growth controls

Robert Engle, Peter Navarro, and Richard Carson

Journal of Urban Economics

November 1992

[We show] in our model that the primary beneficiaries of growth controls are owners of developed land, e.g., homeowners, while the primary losers are owners of undeveloped land. Since the…
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Why Have Housing Prices Gone Up?

Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven E. Saks

American Economic Review

February 2005

Since 1950, housing prices have risen regularly by almost two percent per year. Between 1950 and 1970, this increase reflects rising housing quality and construction costs. Since 1970, this increase…
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The Quiet Revolution Revived: Sustainable Design, Land Use Regulation, and the States

Sara C. Bronin

Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review

August 2010

In 1971, The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control inspired numerous scholarly debates about the states’ role in land use regulation. In that book, Fred Bosselman and David Callies recognized…
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Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth

Enrico Moretti and Chiang-Tai Hsieh

National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper

May 2015

We study how growth of cities determines the growth of nations. Using a spatial equilibrium model and data on 220 US metropolitan areas from 1964 to 2009, we first estimate…
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The Exclusionary Effect of “Mansionization”: Area Variances Undermine Efforts to Achieve Housing Affordability

Catherine Durkin

Catholic University Law Review

Winter 2006

Home ownership near the workplace has become unattainable for many working Americans. Despite the overall increase in national home-ownership rates, according to the Urban Land Institute, “[a] rapid population rise…
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The Effects of Land Use Regulation on the Price of Housing: What Do We Know? What Can We Learn?

John M. Quigley and Larry A. Rosenthal

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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Determinants of Restrictive Residential Zoning: Empirical Findings

Laurie J. Bates, Rexford E. Santerre

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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A Requiem for Smart Growth?

Gerrit Knaap

National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education

March 3, 2006

The most formidable obstacle to smart growth is inertia. Change is hard. And for significant change in urban structure there must be significant change in preferences, politics, institutions, and infrastructure….
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The Evolution of Zoning since the 1980s: The Persistence of Localism

William A. Fischel

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

September 21, 2010

The “evolution” in the title pulls together three themes in this essay. One is an assessment of where the practice of zoning has gone since I published my first book,…
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Homevoters vs. leasevoters: A spatial analysis of airport effects

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Wolfgang Maennig

Journal of Urban Economics

May 2015

We use a public referendum on a new aviation concept in Berlin, Germany, as a natural experiment to analyze how the interaction of tenure and capitalization effects influences the outcome…
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The Puzzle of Local Double Taxation: Why Do Private Community Associations Exist?

Robert H. Nelson

The Independent Review

Winter 2009

One important neglected issue is why community associations exist at all, given that they are subject to a large financial disincentive in the form of double taxation. Much as business…
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Comparing Forecasting Methods: Expert Land Use Panel vs. Simple Land use Allocation Model

Reid Ewing and Richard J. Kuzmyak

National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education

2005

An Expert Land Use Panel was used to forecast the land use impacts of a major highway project in the Washington, DC area, the Inter-County Connector. What makes this panel…
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Evaluating the Demand for Residential Growth Controls

Alan Gin and Jonathan Sandy

Journal of Housing Economics

June 1994

This paper estimates the demand for residential growth controls using voting results for the November 1988 election in San Diego County. An empirical model is estimated to determine the effect…
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Regulation and Property Values: The High Cost of Monopoly

John M. Quigley

Institute of Business and Economic Research

August 2006

Housing prices are much higher in areas with more stringent regulation. Housing supply is much less responsive to economic incentives in areas with more stringent land use regulation. These analyses…
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Land use regulation and welfare

Matthew A. Turner, Andrew Haughwout, and Wilbert van der Klaauw

Federal Reserve Bank of New York

January 20, 2011

We estimate the effect of land use regulation on the value of land by exploiting variation in regulation and land values across municipal borders. Since the value of land gives…
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