{"title":"Making housing affordable? The local effects of relaxing land-use regulation","authors":"Simon Büchler , Elena Lutz","doi":"10.1016/j.jue.2024.103689","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper examines the effects of relaxing land-use regulations on housing supply and rents at the local intra-city level. We apply a staggered difference-in-difference model, exploiting exogenous differences in the treatment timing of zoning plan reforms as identifying variation. Increasing the allowable floor-to-area ratio (FAR), i.e., upzoning, significantly increases the living space and housing units by approximately 9% in the subsequent five to ten years. This effect is stronger for larger upzonings, for rasters where zoning is binding, and where rents are high. Furthermore, upzoning leads to no difference in hedonic rents between upzoned and later-upzoned rasters. These results show that upzoning is a viable policy for increasing housing affordability. However, the effects depend on the upzoning policy design and take several years to materialize.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48340,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119024000597/pdfft?md5=588f58692c30ac97043affa3456db316&pid=1-s2.0-S0094119024000597-main.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Urban Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119024000597","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper examines the effects of relaxing land-use regulations on housing supply and rents at the local intra-city level. We apply a staggered difference-in-difference model, exploiting exogenous differences in the treatment timing of zoning plan reforms as identifying variation. Increasing the allowable floor-to-area ratio (FAR), i.e., upzoning, significantly increases the living space and housing units by approximately 9% in the subsequent five to ten years. This effect is stronger for larger upzonings, for rasters where zoning is binding, and where rents are high. Furthermore, upzoning leads to no difference in hedonic rents between upzoned and later-upzoned rasters. These results show that upzoning is a viable policy for increasing housing affordability. However, the effects depend on the upzoning policy design and take several years to materialize.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Urban Economics provides a focal point for the publication of research papers in the rapidly expanding field of urban economics. It publishes papers of great scholarly merit on a wide range of topics and employing a wide range of approaches to urban economics. The Journal welcomes papers that are theoretical or empirical, positive or normative. Although the Journal is not intended to be multidisciplinary, papers by noneconomists are welcome if they are of interest to economists. Brief Notes are also published if they lie within the purview of the Journal and if they contain new information, comment on published work, or new theoretical suggestions.