Local Growth Controls Research Articles

Local urban growth controls and regional economic growth

Local land use regulations have been adopted to restrict population growth and urban sprawl in an attempt to prevent future problems like congestion, pollution, and loss of open space. However, when regulations become widespread in a region, it can be difficult for young workers and newcomers to find appropriate housing in the region. Because local governments may neglect the effects of their policies on the rest of the region, the resulting population size can be inefficient. We show that local adoption of housing regulations tends to over-restrict population growth when there are strong agglomeration economies in the regional production. On the other hand, when there is congestion in production, coordination among jurisdictions is undesirable if business interests are neglected.

New urban development: looking back to see forward

The recent recession is one result of how local planning laws and practices have stifled competition, discouraged innovation, and artificially pushed up prices in America's most economically vibrant regions. Economist and consultant Claude Gruen unravels the story behind how these unintended consequences have resulted from the evolution of local zoning, growth controls, and laws intended to increase housing affordability. New Urban Development traces how locally induced housing cost increases led federal policy-makers to toss out the safeguards against lending excesses that had been put in place during the 1930s. But the story begins much earlier, during the colonial era, continuing up through the mortgage collapse that ushered in the recession of 2008. In his sweeping history of these issues, Gruen considers gentrification, environmentalism, sprawl, anti-sprawl movements, and more. His clarification of how urban development change occurs backs up his recommendations for increasing the production of housing and replacing obsolete commercial and industrial spaces with development that serves the twenty-first-century economy. New Urban Development specifies thirteen changes to policies at the federal, state, and local levels to provide better and less expensive urban housing, desirable neighborhoods, and thriving workplaces across the country.

Commercial and industrial land use change, job decentralization and growth controls: a spatially explicit analysis

This article studies the creation of commercial and industrial spaces and consequently jobs in suburban and exurban areas of Montgomery County, MD – part of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. We utilize a spatially explicit framework of land use change analysis – which to date, has been applied solely in studies of residential decentralization and sprawl – to examine employment decentralization, a dominant trend in the United States. In view of the actual and potential impacts of this form of urban development, we argue for the need for balanced attention to both residential and job decentralization due to inconclusive evidence on whether people follow jobs or firms follow people towards suburbia and exurbia. We test the significance of market conditions, local government growth controls and other factors as drivers of industrial and commercial land use change through discrete choice statistical models.

Spillovers and Local Growth Controls: An Alternative Perspective on Suburbanization

ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, many local jurisdictions in politically fragmented metropolitan regions have enacted growth control and management measures to tackle the challenges arising from rapid suburban growth. These locally implemented growth controls have produced spillovers—the spatial shifts of homebuilding and households to nearby localities. Using data for California, this paper investigates the link between growth controls and homebuilding. The results suggest that some of the excess homebuilding can be linked to the presence or absence of growth control measures and thus be attributed to spillover effects. Moreover, generators of spillovers are nearly exclusively located in urban areas along the coast whereas the receptors of spillovers are primarily found at the metropolitan fringes and in peripherally located jurisdictions of the interior.

Price and quantity competition among heterogeneous suppliers with two-part pricing: applications to clubs, local public goods, networks, and growth controls

Models of club goods, local public goods, and growth controls appear to have theoretical structures distinct from usual oligopoly models. This article shows, however, that they are special cases of a generalized oligopoly model that incorporates the possibility of two-part pricing and externalities between consumers (either congestion or network externalities). Our generalized two-part pricing model not only serves as a synthesis of a wide range of models but also allows us to obtain several new results on equilibrium prices. Another advantage of our model is that it can be interpreted as a reduced form of more complicated models that have spatial structures. This facilitates extension to the case where firms are heterogeneous and the number of firms is arbitrary.

The Effects of Local Growth Controls on Regional Housing Production and Population Redistribution in California

Based on two surveys of 490 Californian cities and counties, the study examines the effects of local growth-control enactment between 1979 and 1988 on net housing construction between 1980 and 1990. It is shown that local growth-management measures significantly displaced new construction, particularly rental housing, possibly exacerbating the expansion of the metropolitan areas into the interiors of the state. Further, the measures impacted low-income households and minorities particularly. Not all growth-control measures were associated with this change. Measures which limited available land or which downsized existing zoning had stronger effects.

Changing Sources of Suburban Support for Local Growth Controls

Surveys conducted over time in the Orange County, CA, suburban region are used to test hypotheses about the predictors of support for local growth controls. Between 1982 and 1993, public support for local growth controls first increased and then declined. Negative community perceptions are consistently related to support for local growth controls, while higher municipal growth rates are never significant. Higher socio-economic status is related to support for stricter growth controls only at the early stage, while perceived rapid growth is a significant factor at later times. Personal characteristics that have been related to environmentalism (i.e. age, liberalism) become significant predictors of perceiving rapid growth in the latest stage. The changing sources of suburban support for local growth controls help to explain why previous studies taken at one point in time have contradictory findings.

Do Growth Controls Work?: A New Assessment

Abstract This article presents a partial evaluation of local growth controls as applied in seven mid-size California cities: Camarillo, Livermore, Lodi, Red-lands, San Luis Obispo, Thousand Oaks, and Walnut Creek. Through a comparison of the seven growth control cities with similar (and usually nearby) cities that did not adopt controls, this article reports on three aspects of local growth control: Do local growth controls actually reduce local rates of population growth? Do local growth controls increase the price of housing? And what is the link between growth control and community fiscal health?

The Interjurisdictional Effects of Growth Controls on Housing Prices

Institute of University of I ' Business and California at I Economic Research Berkeley FISHER CENTER FOR REAL ESTATE AND URBAN ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER SERIES WORKING PAPER NO. 84-83 THE INTERJURISDICTIONAL EFFECTS OF GROWTH CONTROLS ON HOUSING PRICES L By These papers are preliminary in nature: their purpose is to - stimulate discussion and LAWRENCE KATZ comment. Therefore, they . KENNETH T_ ROSEN are not to be cited or quoted in any publication without the ex- press permission of the author. WALTER A. HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS _

The Tiebout Model: Bring Back the Entrepreneurs

Several recent papers in the literature have reformulltlated the nature of equilibrium in IFiebout mo(lels by alSSlIuim`ing an exogenous number of communities, inflexible commullity l)OU(alaries, anti in pirticular inactive lantlowners and developers. Ihis paper argues that these assumptions are unwarranted and reSul1t iIn in(eterminate solutions and incorrect analyses. Determinate lOn1g-rUn1 solutions require equilibrium in intercommui land markets, which in turn require giving lantlowners and/or entrepreneurial (leveloelers an active role in the models. The role of politics in these models and its juxtaposition with entrepreneurial activities are also analyzed.

Growth Management and Land use Controls: The San Francisco Bay Area Experience

Local land use and growth controls have had a substantial negative impact on the San Francisco Bay Area housing market. These regulations have significantly diminished the availability of development opportunities in the region and forced builders to make major changes in the way they do business and costly alterations in their development projects. Both the empirical evidence reviewed and the case studies documented in this paper indicate that building moratoria, growth management systems, and restrictive zoning practices have helped lead to significantly increased house prices in those Bay Area communities in which they are present. The evidence strongly suggests that land use controls as they are currently utilized in the Bay Area provide a poor policy alternative for reconciling important environmental and fiscal considerations with equally important regional and national housing needs.

The Impact of Growth Control Regulations on Housing Prices in California*

This paper examines the impact of growth controls on the price of new single‐family homes. Four types of growth controls are discussed and each is found to have a significantly different impact on housing prices. Regulations that are imposed by one locality only are first compared to those that are imposed by a locality whose neighbors also control growth. In California, increases in house prices in communities with only local growth controls cannot be distinguished from communities that do not control growth. However, the 1969 to 1976 housing price increase in growth control jurisdictions located in extensively regulated housing markets is significantly higher than in local‐only or no‐control jurisdictions. In addition, controls that restrict the rate of development are compared to those that specify the quality of development. In the extensively regulated San Francisco Bay area, the 1969 to 1976 housing price increase was 35% higher in rate‐controlled communities and 20% higher in quality‐controlled communities than in no‐control communities.