“How much of California’s residential land is zoned exclusively for single family homes?” is a fairly straightforward question that is surprisingly difficult to answer – because state-level data on zoning largely does not exist. Until now. In Single-Family Zoning in…
Smaller Lots, Smaller Prices: Evidence from Houston
In recent years, pro-housing reformers around the country have successfully changed state and local land use policies to allow greater density on residential lots zoned exclusively for one house. Most of these efforts have focused on adjusting regulations such as…
FAR Away from Home
In addition to the use of zoning regulations to control the location, density, and types of housing, many jurisdictions use similar regulatory tools to limit the total floor space a building can have. These limits, which typically take the form…
Exclusionary By Design: The History of Zoning in Boston Suburbs
While popular scholarship has extensively documented the racially exclusionary effects of low density and single family zoning, particularly in its earliest forms, there is less agreement on whether it was adopted for the explicit purpose of segregating by race and…
Lot Sizes: When the Bare Minimum is Way Too Much
Minimum lot size requirements are a common tool used by cities across the United States to ensure that homes are not built on parcels that are deemed aesthetically “too small” for housing. Available evidence suggests that these requirements also drive…
Why is Housing Unaffordable? The Great Migration’s Effect on Exclusionary Zoning
Published: 2020 | Alexander Sahn Abstract High housing prices drive inequality, reduce growth, and increase racial segregation. Scholars have identified laws restricting the use of land, particularly for dense multi-family housing, as a primary cause of housing unaffordability. What explains…
Planning for the Future
Published: 2020 | Anthony Breach | Centre for Cities
Housing Underproduction in California – Up For Growth
Published: 2019 | Up for Growth Abstract However, this recent imbalance continues a much longer trend in California, where restrictive local development and land-use policies have curtailed housing production for decades. These policies, enacted by local jurisdictions to maintain walkable,…
The Geography of Inequality: How Land Use Regulation Produces Segregation
Published: 2020 | Jessica Trounstine | American Political Science Review Abstract Public goods in the United States are largely funded and delivered at the local level. Local public goods are valuable, but their production requires overcoming several collective action problems…
Sustainable Communities or the Next Urban Renewal?
Published: 2020 | Moira O’Neill, Giulia Gualco-Nelson, Eric Biber | Ecology Law Quarterly Abstract California has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) to address climate change. But in California, the sector that produces the largest share of greenhouse gas…