reference library

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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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“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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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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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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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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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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This paper examines the tech cluster phenomenon by considering three partially answered questions. We first ask how to define a tech cluster—that is, what properties are required to be a…
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Residential energy demand can be greatly influenced by the types of housing structures that households live in, but few studies have assessed changes in the composition of housing stocks as…
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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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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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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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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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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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“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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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 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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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[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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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” 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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