Campaigns to address high housing costs by reforming urban planning to allow more housing have had some notable successes, but they continue to face considerable opposition. Proposals often involve top-down preemption of municipal zoning decisions by higher authorities such as state...

In this paper, we analyze several local referendums on land development and land-use regulation in the City of Erlangen (Germany) in the period between 2011 and 2018. To identify the positive influence of the travel distance on approval for the development of land, we employ a two-way...

The efficiency and effectiveness of land administration system had been acknowledged to be premised on so many factors, arguably the chief of which, is the degree of mutuality, frictionlessness and bi-directionality in the interrelationship that exist amongst the various factors that are...

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...

In a continuous city with three distinct land use zones consisting of firms, condominiums and detached houses, we derive the formulae – composed entirely of observable variables – which design simultaneous optimization of regulations on building size, lot size and zonal boundaries under the...

We estimate the effect of city land use regulation on housing prices in the presence of regulatory spillover. The total effect of regulation is decomposed into a direct effect in which regulation lowers housing productivity and an indirect effect in which household location choice mitigates the...

As regions across the United States are experiencing high and rising house prices, inclusionary zoning is increasing in popularity as a tool to increase the availability of affordable housing for households making less than their region's median income. However, when inclusionary zoning requires...

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 265 California jurisdictions circa 2018. To expand index coverage, we...

This paper estimates the extent to which the supply of new housing is restricted by land use regulations using a panel of California cities from 1970–1995. While land use regulation is found to significantly reduce residential development, estimates from fixed effects regressions are about...