In 2018, Minneapolis became the first U.S. city to eliminate single-family zoning through the Minneapolis 2040 Plan, with a central focus on improving housing affordability. Using a synthetic control approach, this paper finds that the reform reduced the growth of housing costs over the...

A wide array of local government regulations influences the amount, location, and shape of residential development. In this chapter, we review the literature on the causes and effects of this type of regulation. We begin with a discussion of how researchers measure regulation empirically, which...

We study the interaction between transit improvements and land use policies in the context of Bengaluru, one of India's largest cities. The city inaugurated a metro system in 2011. Yet it has low building heights even near metro stations, reflecting low floor-area ratio limits. We construct a...

Current knowledge of the fiscal impacts of alternative land uses comes largely from cost of community services (CCS) case studies, the results of which are viewed skeptically in the literature because of numerous methodological concerns. In order to begin to fill the gap in our understanding of...

Housing rents and home prices in many areas of the nation, including Florida, have increased much faster than the cost of construction since the 1990s, squeezing the household budgets of middle- and lower-income families. In this study we examine local impact fees and land-use regulations in...

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...

Previous studies have examined the link between land-use regulation and home prices extensively. Yet there are few studies that examine the influence of land-use regulation on housing affordability. Even more uncommon is a focus on the effects of specific types of regulation on individual...

This paper examines whether land use deregulation increases housing supply when there are additional institutional frictions, such as slow updation of ownership records and unclear titles. India's urban land ceiling (ULC) laws, which put ceiling limits on privately owned vacant land in the...

We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America. Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970 shows that nothing makes technological...

I study why some cities have strict land use regulation, how regulation affects the U.S. economy, and how policymakers can mitigate its negative consequences. I develop a quantitative spatial equilibrium model where local regulation is determined endogenously, by voting. Homeowners in productive...