In many communities on the urban-rural fringe, subdivisions are subject to clustering rules, in which houses must be located on a portion of the total land area and the remainder of the land is left as open space. This open space may be undisturbed forest or pastureland, or it may include...

Zoning regulations that include a maximum housing density sometimes require that houses be quot;clusteredquot; in one section of a subdivision and the rest of the land be left as a common green space. We examine house sales in one county on the fringe of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area...

This paper reviews different approaches to using transferable development rights (TDRs) as a way to preserve rural lands in the face of development pressure. One TDR program is examined in detail, that of Calvert County, Maryland, which has had an active TDR market since the mid-1980s. This...

Many economists see current land use patterns as inefficient due to various market failures, and planners argue that current patterns do not follow sound planning practice. One policy of interest to both groups is transferable development rights (TDR). TDRs allow the development rights from land...