The Impact of Land Use Restriction on Housing Supply and Urban Form
by Brendan Patrick Elliott
Abstract
Rising home prices have led to public concern regarding housing affordability and availability. Interest in the role that land use regulations may play in reducing housing availability has been of increasing interest. While many of these regulations were initially implemented to preserve neighborhood character and promote sustainable growth, many contend that these regulations have the unintentional consequence of restricting supply and raising housing costs. Previous literature typically studies the impacts of land use regulation in individual cities or metropolitan areas, but questions remain whether these results can generalize to other cities across the country. Utilizing a two-time period panel dataset on city-level regulations across the nation, I assess whether minimum lot size, project approval delays, and impact fees cause a reduction in housing availability across cities. In most cases, increased levels of these regulations reduce housing availability in jurisdictions of medium to high population density whereas results are insignificant for jurisdictions of low population density.
Professor Grace Kim, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: R14; R31; R38
Keywords: Land Use, Zoning, Housing Supply
Hedonic Modeling of Singapore’s Resale Public Housing Market
By Jiakun Xu
The large-scale, high-density public housing market in Singapore invites hedonic analysis, due to its homogeneity in structure quality across all neighborhoods. This paper builds a time-dummy hedonic regression model incorporating geospatial features for a large dataset of resale transactions from 2000 to 2016. Significant anticipatory price effects are found for new subway stations, which peak at two years before station opening. A hedonic price index suggests that affordability was a problem during the sustained period of property price inflation from 2011 to 2013. District-level analysis shows evidence of increasing rent gradients, wealth disparities, and “lottery” effects in asset growth. I discuss the potential contributions of these insights to wealth and equity considerations in public policy
design.
Data available upon request. Email dus_asst@econ.duke.edu
Advisors: Charles Becker, Tracy Falba | JEL Codes: C21, R3, R31, R38, R41
