Ervin, David, James Fitch, Kenneth Godwin, Bruce Shepard, and Herbert Stoevener. Land Use Control: Evaluating Economic and Political Effects. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1977, 184 pp., $@@‐@@17.50

Abstract

Public programs to intervene in the private land use market are designed to achieve land use and distribution of costs and benefits much different from those that would prevail under market conditions. This book suggests a framework for evaluating these public-policy measures from the standpoint of three economic efficiency criteria: how land-use-planning measures contribute to the avoidance of certain negative effects resulting from interdependencies among land uses; how they perform in providing land-related public goods; and, are they likely to lead to an efficient provision of public services. Beyond these economic-efficiency considerations the study emphasizes the distributional consequences and the political acceptability of land-use-planning measures. Land-use techniques--traditional zoning, zoning by eminent domain, and transferable development rights--are evaluated and compared. Although none of these techniques can be judged superior to the others on the basis of all or several of the evaluative criteria, zoning ranked highest in terms of political acceptability while the extensions of zoning are improvements over zoning for meeting equity and efficient provision of public goods.