The world today is afflicted by inequality of wealth created in large part by monopolistic ownership of land. Across the globe, in cities like Rio de Janeiro, Yangon, Johannesburg, and London, landowners in control of urban real estate in hot job markets have created a housing shortage. Hong...

Transferable Development Rights (TDRs) were supposed to be a solution to the intractable problems of land use, a bit of institutional design magic that married the interests of development and preservation at no cost to taxpayers and with no legal risk. Under a TDR program, development is...

According to Albert O. Hirschman's famous dichotomy, citizens can express their preferences with their “voice” (by voting with ballots to elect better representatives) and “exit” (by voting with their feet to choose better places to live). Suppose, however, that ballot-voting is...

The problem of credible commitment dogs every government, whether democratic or authoritarian. Governments that have sufficient power to begin a project can often change their minds. Paradoxically, such omnipotence can be crippling. If lenders cannot be assured that a current mayor’s...

Eminent domain for economic development is both attractive and appalling. States need the power to condemn because so much land in America is inefficiently fragmented. But public land assembly provokes hostility because vulnerable communities get bulldozed. Courts offer no help. The academic...

It is common for governments to accommodate religious practices by carving out exemptions to otherwise generally applicable laws that expressly or implicitly favor religion. Such exemptions, however, raise a difficult problem of defining religious (or anti-religious) “coercion.” If the state...

In many of the biggest and richest cities in America, there is a housing affordability crisis. Housing prices in these cities have appreciated well beyond the cost of construction and even faster than rising incomes. These price increases are a direct result of zoning rules that limit the...

Extracting natural gas through hydraulic fracturing of shale provokes bitterly divisive reactions from New Yorkers. With such a division of opinion, the regulation of hydraulic fracturing provides an ideal case study of whether municipal home rule can mitigate the costs of deep political...

In cities around the country, huge swaths of property in desirable locations house only empty warehouses, barely-used shipping facilities, and heavily subsidized industrial-age factories, often right across the street from high-end condos and office buildings. The reason is a widely-used, but...