Municipal zoning practices profoundly shape urban life in the United States. In regions such as Silicon Valley, regulatory barriers to residential construction have helped raise house prices to roughly ten times the national median. These astronomic prices have prompted some households to move...

Municipal zoning, shockingly, may be the most consequential regulatory program in the United States. The Article develops metrics for measuring the extent to which a locality's zoning practices are exclusionary, that is, limit the possible construction of least-cost housing. It applies the...

Chinese customs and law have traditionally prevented a land seller from conveying outright title to a buyer. The ancient custom of dian, which persisted until the 1949 Revolution, gave a land seller and his lineage an immutable option to buy back sold land at the original sale price. This...

In a given year, a resident of the United States is roughly twice more likely to move to a different home than is a resident of France (or of Western Europe as a whole). Cultural differences undoubtedly account for some of this gap. The central thesis of this article, however, is that much of...

Since the 1970s a new vehicle for the provision of housing assistance - the mixed-income, or inclusionary, project - has flowered in the United States. In a community of this sort, the developer and its government benefactors designate a fraction of the dwelling units, typically between 10 and...

Only yesterday, all animals were wild. Zoological archaeologists assert that about 15,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer forebears achieved the first domestication — the dog. Over the course of ensuing millennia, they proceeded to domesticate sheep, cattle, and other livestock. By the advent...

Commentators rightly decry the excessive segregation of American neighborhoods by race and social class. If all demographic groups were randomly distributed throughout a metropolitan area, however, there would be great diversity within each neighborhood, but no diversity among them. There is...

Most economists believe that strict rent controls deter the production and maintenance of rental housing. In a Métropolitiques essay, Loïc Bonneval challenged this consensus. Bonneval claimed that France’s severe interwar rent controls had little effect on the profitability of real estate...

Some people dwell alone, many in family-based households, and an adventuresome few in communes. The Household is the first book to systematically lay bare the internal dynamics of these and other home arrangements. Legal underpinnings, social considerations, and economic constraints all...