Fixing Urban Planning with Ostrom: Strategies for Existing Cities to Adopt Polycentric, Bottom-Up Regulation of Land Use

Campaigns to address high housing costs by reforming urban planning to allow more housing have had some notable successes, but they continue to face considerable opposition. Proposals often involve top-down preemption of municipal zoning decisions by higher authorities such as state legislatures.

In places where reform remains politically difficult, I suggest trying the opposite tactic to overcome opposition: introducing laws to allow ultralocal, bottom-up land use decisions, which would address spillover and other concerns and enable win-win bargaining to permit more housing. This tactic draws upon research in the field of common-pool resources founded by Elinor Ostrom. Under my suggested approach, small communities would be able to demand a share of the profits from development in exchange for allowing it on terms and in a form that they like.