Cities are the "engines of growth" because entrepreneurial and creative activities are concentrated in cities. This suggests that cities grow by hosting new businesses and "churning" industries advantageously. In so doing, cities need to adapt their spatial structure to mitigate negative...

Housing needs is a concept of central importance to state and local planning in the United States (Landis and LeGates 2000). Roughly characterized as the number and type of housing units required to accommodate a population at a given standard of housing occupancy, the formulation of a...

State foreclosure and bankruptcy laws govern the rights of mortgage lenders and borrowers during foreclosure and bankruptcy proceedings and therefore impact on lenders’ exposure to credit risk. This paper seeks to understand the effects of these state laws on the type of mortgages...

Sprawl issues ought not be a federal issue because land-use control is local. Americans have been moving to both suburban and private communities for many years, an expression of the constitutional right to travel. They seek more direct control over their personal property rights. Both trends...

This paper seeks to address questions about both the need for the CommunityReinvestment Act (CRA) and its efficiency. Using data from a recent survey of theperformance and profitability of CRA-related lending activities, three main conclusionsemerge. First, there is evidence that a majority of...

This article examines the effect of exposure to violent crime on students’ standardized test performance among a sample of students in New York City public schools. To identify the effect of exposure to community violence on children’s test scores, we compare students exposed to an...

This study examines the impact of rent control of mobile home parks in seven counties of California between 1983 and 2003. We assembled an extensive and timely data set and, thus, were able to test more carefully specified econometric models than had been employed in prior studies of California...

Real house prices are directly determined by the willingness of households to pay for (and willingness of builders to supply) a constant-quality house. Changes in the quantity of housing demanded will affect real prices only to the extent that the long-run housing supply schedule is positively...

This study examines the issue of whether CRA-related events impact the securityprices of banking institutions involved in mergers. While previous research hasestablished that bank shareholders experience a significant permanent loss of wealth uponthe announcement of a CRA protest, the current...

Many local governments are adopting inclusionary zoning (IZ) as a means of producing affordable housing without direct public subsidies. In this paper, we use panel data on IZ in the San Francisco metropolitan area and Suburban Boston to analyze how much affordable housing the programs produce...