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 residential areas from devaluation by industrial and apartment uses that had been...

In combination with municipal zoning and the quot;vote with your feetquot; discipline proposed by Charles Tiebout, the local property tax is both a benefit tax and an efficient tax, at least when compared to statewide or federal taxes used to fund the same services. To pursue this claim, I...

Modern zoning arose in the United States and spread rapidly among American cities and suburbs in the period 1910-1930. This article argues that the invention and propagation of motorized buses and trucks in that period best account for this enthusiastic acceptance of zoning. When industrial...

The successes and failures of local government are reflected in the value of homes in the jurisdiction. Good schools and attractive public goods raise the value of homes in a locality, and unpleasant environments and high property taxes lower those same values. Home values are the report cards...

School districts have more influence on home buyers’ choices than any other local-government unit, yet hardly anyone knows why they exist. “Making the Grade” explains the development of American school districts and advances an economic argument for their continued existence. In the...

The September-to-June school year is not an agricultural holdover. It is a coordinating device to facilitate geographic mobility. The adoption of age-graded schools, which work best if all students start together, and the growth of worker mobility, which requires extra time and amenable weather...

This essay is the introduction to a volume commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Tiebout's A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures, which was first published in the Journal of Political Economy in October 1956. It presents biographical and contextual information about Charles Tiebout, who died...

This article argues that the use of eminent domain that was at issue in Poletown [304 N.W.2d 455 (Mich. 1981)] was flawed by fiscal constraints. The funding for the project, which leveled a thickly-settled neighborhood of Detroit in order to build an automobile plant, was provided almost...

This paper explores for economists how the school-finance litigation movement, which began with Serrano v. Priest in 1971, ought to be characterized in economic models. Its primary message is that this has become a national movement, not one confined to individual states. Economists should be...

Fiscal zoning is the practice of using local land-use regulation to preserve and possibly enhance the local property tax base. Economists agree that if localities can conduct "perfect zoning," which effectively makes all real estate development decisions subject to a review that balances its...