The local effects of relaxing land-use regulation on housing supply and rents

Abstract

We examine the effect of relaxing land-use regulation on housing supply and rents at the local intra-city level. Constructing a theoretical framework based on the monocentric city model, we obtain theoretical predictions on these effects. Our framework shows that relaxing floor-to-area (FAR) restrictions lead to higher local housing supply and lower rents across the entire city, with no difference in rents between treated and non-treated areas. To bring our conceptual framework to the data, we use detailed geo-coded data from the Canton of Zurich in Switzerland from 1995 to 2020. We apply a staggered difference-in-difference model, exploiting exogenous differences in the treatment timing as identifying variation. We find that upzoning a parcel by 20% or more leads to a 13% increase in housing supply on the treated parcel in the subsequent ten years. Furthermore, changes in zoning do not significantly increase or lower rents on the treated parcels compared to the untreated parcels within the same housing market, confirming the predictions of our framework. Thus, we show that upzoning is an effective policy for increasing the housing supply without increasing rents at the local level.