"Zoning has for a century enabled cities to chart their own course. It is a useful and popular institution, enabling homeowners to protect their main investment and provide safe neighborhoods. As home values have soared in recent years, however, this protection has accelerated to the degree that new housing development has become unreasonably difficult and costly. The widespread Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome is driven by voters’ excessive concern about their home values and creates barriers to growth that reach beyond individual communities. The barriers contribute to suburban sprawl, entrench income and racial segregation, retard regional immigration to the most productive cities, add to national wealth inequality, and slow the growth of the American economy. Some state, federal, and judicial interventions to control local zoning have done more harm than good. More effective approaches would moderate voters’ demand for local-land use regulation—by, for example, curtailing federal tax subsidies to owner-occupied housing"--Publisher's description.

Why are house prices in many advanced economies rising faster than incomes? Why isn’t land and location taught or seen as important in modern economics? What is the relationship between the financial system and land? In this accessible but provocative guide to the economics of land and housing, the authors reveal how many of the key challenges facing modern economies - including housing crises, financial instability and growing inequalities - are intimately tied to the land economy. Looking at the ways in which discussions of land have been routinely excluded from both housing policy and economic theory, the authors show that in order to tackle these increasingly pressing issues a major rethink by both politicians and economists is required.

The book draws together the economic literature relating to the supply of land for development. The standard view appears to be that the owners of land have no interest other than to allow their land to be used for the activity which would yield the highest income. But in reality this is not so and the book's aim is to demonstrate this, to set out the reasons and to show the economic effects of the fact that landowners have other motives. The book covers the supply of land for urban development and shows how land has characteristics which differentiate it from other factors of production which will also affect its supply for some uses, e.g. land is fixed in location and its price and value are inseparable from where it is. New light is cast on the market for land (by concentrating on the supply side), and on land use planning (by taking an economic viewpoint).

The aim of this book is to bring methods of land-market and land-price analysis to the foreground. It relates substantive research findings for land and urban development and blends these with a focus on research design and methodology. Its findings have relevance beyond the topics of housing and land: it broaches the whole question of how research design and general approach may lead to fundamentally different findings, different priorities, and different policy prescriptions and preoccupations. It is based on work done in the Third World, but is also relevant to studies of the industrialized world.

The aim of this book, first published in 1977, is to use the tools developed by modern microeconomics to provide a framework for the analysis of policies towards the allocation of land and the control of activities using land. The principle focus of the book is the general justification for intervention in the urban land and property markets, the principles for evaluating such intervention and the proper role of the public sector within the urban economy. It also considers in some detail the practical problems involved in putting these principles into effect.

With nearly 10 million low- and moderate-income working households paying more than half their income towards their rent or mortgage, cities are increasingly using their zoning authority to encourage the development of new workforce housing units. A study by the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing assesses and illustrates the economics of the most common approach: inclusionary zoning (IZ). Through IZ, cities require or encourage developers to create below-market rental apartments or for-sale homes in connection with the local zoning approval of a proposed market-rate development project. This study-based on in-depth analytic modeling, an extensive literature review, and interviews with developers and other land use experts-provides such advice on what incentives work best in which development scenarios. The study's purpose is to enable policy makers to better understand how an IZ policy affects real estate development and how to use the necessary development incentives for IZ to be most effective.