The Growth of Control? Changes in Local Land-Use Regulation in Major U.S. Metropolitan Areas From 1994 to 2003

ABSTRACT

Amid concerns that increasingly stringent local land-use regulations are constraining housing development across the United States, there is a need for an empirical investigation into whether, how, and where such regulations are being enacted. In this article, we report the results of a nationwide (n = 728 jurisdictions, representing almost a quarter of the U.S. population) survey of local land-use regulation, unprecedented for having been conducted at two distinct points in time (1994 and 2003). Using descriptive statistics and logistic modeling, we arrive at four main findings. First, we find that regulations are in flux to an underappreciated degree, being frequently enacted but also often abandoned. Second, we find a strong regional orientation to the use of certain regulatory tools. Third, we find more evidence in support of land-use regulations being used to solve local problems than to intentionally exclude new residents. Finally, we find that high levels of education are frequently associated with the use of tools that have a redistributive or proaffordable housing intent.

KEYWORDS:

• growth management
• land-use zoning
• local
• municipalities
• regulation
• smart growth
• state

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although it may be unlikely that the new Trump Administration will use the machinery of the federal government to induce governments to remove land-use regulations, efforts to do so may well shift to state governments in the coming years.

2. We report statistical significance in Tables 4 and 5 at the levels of p < .1, p < .05, p < .01, and p < .001. p < .1 is sometimes regarded as too low of a statistical bar for model results to clear; we include such results here for the sake of completeness. In general, including model coefficients that are significant only at this level does not in any meaningful way affect the broad pattern of results that we report here.

3. Note that neither of the jurisdiction type variables (city or town, with county being the base case) yielded significant coefficients in any of the 12 models. Logged population, which did emerge as significant in several cases, might be expected to be correlated with these jurisdiction types, but correlation coefficients with the two jurisdiction-type dummies are in fact small (see the correlation matrix in Table A1 in the Appendix).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rolf Pendall

Rolf Pendall ([email protected]) is Codirector of the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC.

Jake Wegmann

Jake Wegmann ([email protected]) is an assistant professor in community and regional planning at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jonathan Martin

Jonathan Martin ([email protected]) is a professor at the Graduate Center for Planning at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

Dehui Wei

Dehui Wei ([email protected]) is a research assistant professor in the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management at the University of Oregon.