In both economic and legal scholarship, a broad consensus has formed that zoning and other land use laws and regulations in our richest and most productive regions have become too strict. Land use laws, in both suburbs and downtowns, have made it too hard to build housing in the areas with the...

The centennial of the 1916 New York City Ordinance and creation of zoning in the United States provides an exceptional opportunity to reconsider the regulatory and legal basis upon which the key governmental power of zoning is founded. The motive to control the various market externalities...

Glaeser and Gyourko's (2003) (henceforth G&G's) method of measuring the gap between marginal and average land prices of housing lots has become a popular way of demonstrating the degree to which planning controls, or “regulatory taxes”, increase residential land prices. This has led...

This study draws from the redevelopment, real option, and urban spatial growth literatures to explore the spatial dynamics of the components of house prices. More specifically, the paper proposes that the capitalized value of the option to redevelop housing at the property level can be estimated...

The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the “second” and “third” worlds. We adopt the labels “transition” economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and “developing” to refer to...

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 a crisis of affordability and availability in urban housing. However, their decisions to engage in “up-zoning,”...

We provide a full characterisation of the socially optimal allocation of urban land to households and firms in a long narrow city with centrally located amenities. Households support linear costs of commuting to their workplace, and linear costs of travelling to the centre to benefit from...