Urban Spatial Structure and Property Rights

Abstract

The relationship between urban spatial structure and property rights or institutions at large is an understudied topic. This paper summarizes related literature and examines the impacts of urban structure on property rights from five perspectives: property rights autonomy and transportation technology, market competition of bundled goods, spatial market structure, ex post efficiency, and inertia of the city. These five perspectives together offer a realistic approach to understand many urban property rights phenomena, such as private residential communities (which features homeowners association or HOA) being mostly located outside the city center, leasehold communities (such as shopping malls) often found in the center or subcenters, rental more desirable by the poor, as well as public institutions’ dominance in central cities.