Inclusionary Zoning and Exclusionary Development: The Politics of ‘Affordable Housing' in North Brooklyn

A key element of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New Housing Marketplace program has been the use of voluntary inclusionary zoning, through which private developers have been offered tax breaks and density bonuses to develop affordable housing on newly rezoned land. While this program has failed to alleviate the housing affordability crisis in New York City, little attention has been paid to its political effects on community‐based struggles over housing. This article addresses this question by examining the 2005 Greenpoint‐Williamsburg Waterfront Rezoning, which combined a voluntary inclusionary zoning program with a tenant services contract intended to mitigate the residential displacement effects of the rezoning. I critically examine its design, execution and monitoring, based on two years of work as an organizer and administrator of the tenant services contract. I argue that technologies of consent and control have reshaped the politics of housing in North Brooklyn by replacing resistance to gentrification with amelioration of its effects, through the anticipated creation of affordable housing. The upshot has been an emergent politics of housing in which real estate‐led development is regarded not as a cause of gentrification but as its solution.     

Exclusionary zoning and the provision of education: An effect of Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Township of Mount Laurel

Mt. Laurel put the housing needs of the poor ahead of the efficient provision of local public services by limiting the ability of towns to use exclusionary zoning. Consumer Surplus Analysis shows that the welfare loss from this change in Northeastern New Jersey is very small (on the order of one percent), and that the groups which benefit are those who have gained freedom of access to new jurisdictions.     

中国城市居住分异研究

对城市居住空间的研究是城市社会学的一个重要内容.自建国以来,我国城市居住空间经历了逐渐分异的历史变迁过程.如果不对居住分异加以适当的调控就会出现居住空间极化与隔离问题.城市居住空间极化是社会不公正在居住空间上的表现.城市政治经济转变与城市规划、土地制度改革与房地产开发、住房制度改革与住房商品化是转型过程中城市居住分异形成的三个主要原因.扩大中等收入群体规模、增加社会自组织力量、制定公正的社会政策是优化城市居住空间结构的有效途径.     

The Market for Residential Architecture: 19th Century Row Houses in Boston′s South End

This study explores the market response to a major 19th century American urban architectural form, the row house. The paper presents an hedonic price index for a set of housing characteristics including lot and house size, location amenities within the neighborhood, construction materials, architectural style, and detailed architectural features. The homogeneity in form and layout of the row houses coupled with the variety of architectural styles and detailed features provides an unusual opportunity to test the effect of architecture on market value. The housing characteristics included in the study account for 88% of the price variance across the sampled row houses. The evidence marshalled here suggests that residential architecture matters in the marketplace and that specific architectural features are more highly valued when they differentiate one row house from its immediate neighbors.     

天津滨海新区房地产业发展和住房保障体系研究

住房是人的基本权利，各国政府均十分关注。住房保障是市场经济必不可少的补充，是房地产发展的重要组成部分。滨海新区人口规模的扩大、经济的高速发展对住宅需求持续增加。然而，滨海新区在房地产市场发展过程中也暴露出一些问题。本文研究了滨海新区房地产业和住房保障体系的经济背景和社会背景，剖析了深圳和浦东新区以及英国、日本、新加坡和我国香港地区的住宅经验。通过比较分析，提出完善滨海新区房地产业和住房保障体系的具体措施。     

Large lot zoning and subdivision costs: A test

This paper tests two hypotheses: (1) that large lot zoning is a binding constraint on the residential land market and (2) that subdivision costs are inversely related to lot size. The paper shows that, in general, the two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive but that they can be distinguished in the case of a test conducted across tracts of unsubdivided vacant land. A hedonic price model for vacant land is developed and then estimated using disaggregate data from a New York City suburb.     

Necrotecture: Lifeless Dwellings and London's Super‐Rich

This article problematizes the relationship between the global super‐rich and processes of property development that have generated large volumes of underused residential space. Evidence is presented to show that much of London's new skyline is underused or lies entirely empty, so that one interpretation of this new landscape of super‐prime residential development is that it is a kind of dead residential space or necrotecture. These relatively lifeless spaces can be interpreted as the particularly wasteful result of continuing rounds of international capital investment in the built environment and the overconsumption of housing and other resources by the super‐rich. Necrotectural forms, seen in new towers and spectacular homes, appear to index a massive misdirection of development capacity, even as the city experiences a massive social crisis that continues to be played out in the wider housing market.     

大城市开发区流动人口居住特征研究--以上海浦东新区为例

主要采用第五次人口普查数据,对上海开发区--浦东新区流动人口的居住状况进行分析和研究.研究表明流动人口在大城市具有明显的非居民化的居住特征,表现在居住场所集中于城市边缘,居住地更换频繁,居住质量差和居民身份认同感缺乏.为了保障流动人口在大城市的居住健康和大城市整体的健康发展,促进流动人口在城市的居住和谐,有必要采取措施,推进区域产业结构升级,调控城市人口规模,制定流动人口的居住标准,提升住房质量;增进流动人口的居民身份认同,;逐步取消户籍制度,增进本地人口与外来人口的居住融合.     

Land use externalities, open space preservation, and urban sprawl

Parcel data on residential land conversion are used to investigate how land use externalities influence the rate of development and modify policies designed to manage urban growth and preserve open space. Several “smart growth” policies are found to significantly influence land conversion, including a development clustering policy that concentrates development and generates preserved open space. In addition to directly affecting a parcel's hazard rate of conversion, this policy is found to affect neighboring parcels' conversion by generating a positive open space externality that hastens their development. The implication that the clustering policy could generate a more sprawled pattern of development is explored using spatial simulation.     

Voluntary income clustering and the demand for housing and local public goods

Economists have suggested that wealthy communities use “fiscal zoning” in order to protect their tax bases. Such zoning would be unnecessary if tastes for local public goods were sufficiently correlated with tastes for the taxed good, residential property. The common notion of “bid rent” can be extended to derive a formula to show under what conditions fiscal zoning is redundant. Our information about the values of the relevant parameters is not sufficiently precise, however, to determine whether these conditions are met.     

Alternative Policies for Preserving Farm and Open Areas: Analysis and Evaluation of Available Options

A bstract . Rapid urban growth disrupts land use patterns on the urban-rural fringe , increasing development pressure on nearby farm and open lands. Many public agencies have attempted to moderate these development pressures through intervention in the local land market in order to preserve remaining open areas. There are essentially five ways that governmental units can act to preserve farm and open lands: public purchase of these lands; restrictive zoning laws ; public purchase of the development rights to open lands; programs of transferable development rights, and preferential assessment property tax programs. Each of these methods imposes burdens on different groups and creates winners and losers among property owners, taypayers and others. This paper analyzes the economic impacts of these open space preservation programs and evaluates their effectiveness in achieving their goals. None of the programs evaluated is judged to be perfect in preserving open space, but the public purchase of development rights is seen to be an equitable second-best solution.     

Rent control with reputation: theory and evidence

Rent-control policy is modeled as an implicit contract between voters of a community and suppliers of rental housing. It is shown that if residents can make an ex ante commitment to never adopt rent controls they will do so. When precommitment is not possible there are conditions under which a policy of never adopting rent controls is not self-enforcing. Under such circumstances a state-invariant ceiling price is shown to be a subgame-perfect equilibrium rent-control policy. The model is tested using data for New Jersey where local option regarding the choice of rent control policy was declared constitutional in the early 1970s. Probit analysis is used to determine whether predictions of the model are supported by an investigation of factors leading to imposition of rent controls by 64 of the 245 communities in the sample.     

Do liberal cities limit new housing development? Evidence from California

Traditional explanations for why some communities block new housing construction focus on incumbent home owner incentives to block entry. Local resident political ideology may also influence community permitting decisions. This paper uses city level panel data across California metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2008 to document that liberal cities grant fewer new housing permits than observationally similar cities located within the same metropolitan area. Cities experiencing a growth in their liberal voter share have a lower new housing permit growth rate.     

Job creation and housing construction: Constraints on metropolitan area employment growth

Differences in the supply of housing generate substantial variation in house prices across the United States. Because house prices influence migration, the elasticity of housing supply also has an important impact on local labor markets. I assemble evidence on housing supply regulations and examine their effect on metropolitan area housing and labor market dynamics. Locations with relatively few barriers to construction experience more residential construction and smaller increases in house prices in response to an increase in housing demand. Furthermore, housing supply constraints alter local employment and wage dynamics in locations where the degree of regulation is most severe.     

Do political parties matter for local land use policies?

Despite interest in the impact of land use regulations on housing construction and housing prices, little is known about the drivers of these policies. Conventional wisdom holds that homeowners have an influence on restrictive local zoning. In this paper, we contend that the party controlling local government might make a major difference. We draw on data from a large sample of Spanish cities for the 2003–2007 political term and employ a regression discontinuity design to document that cities controlled by left-wing parties convert much less land from rural to urban uses than is the case in similar cities controlled by the right. The differences between governments on the two sides of the political spectrum are more pronounced in places with greater population heterogeneity and in those facing higher housing demand. We also present evidence suggesting that these partisan differences might ultimately impact on housing construction and housing price growth.     

Housing transactions and macroeconomic fluctuations: a case study of England and Wales

This paper focuses on the drivers for transactions of residential properties using England and Wales as a case study. We present a non-technical discussion of a theoretical framework that rationalizes the positive correlation of income, housing prices and housing transactions over the business cycle. We then extend the theoretical framework to explain how the credit market liberalization of the early 1980s, demographic changes and construction activity have affected the trend in housing transactions and contributed to making the 1980s a period of exceptionally high transaction levels in England and Wales. We present evidence in support of the view that housing demand fluctuations have been the key driver of housing transactions, in particular, changes in housing demand from first-time buyers.     

An Economic Analysis of Housing Abandonment

Landlord abandonment of rental housing has affected many American cities since the 1960's. Because of data limitations, there have been few empirical analyses of the determinants of housing abandonment. In this paper, we use a rich database that contains information on individual residential properties in New York City to estimate a reduced form model of owner abandonment. We model an owner's decision to abandon his or her property as being similar to an investor's decision to exercise a put option on a financial instrument. When required to pay delinquent taxes, a wealth-maximizing landlord has an incentive to cede ownership of his or her residential property when the value of all outstanding liens exceeds the property's market value. Estimates from the model are used to examine whether empirical evidence supports this option model of abandonment.     

Optimal density of radial major roads in a two-dimensional monocentric city with endogenous residential distribution and housing prices

This paper proposes an analytical urban system equilibrium model for optimizing the density of radial major roads in a two-dimensional monocentric city. The proposed model involves four types of agents: local authorities, property developers, households and household workers (i.e. commuters). The local authorities aim to maximize the total social welfare of the urban system by determining the optimal density of radial major roads in the city. The property developers seek to determine the intensity of their capital investment in the land market to maximize the net profit generated from the housing supply. The households choose residential locations that maximize their utility within a budget constraint, and the commuters choose the radial major roads that minimize their individual costs of travel between home and workplace. A heuristic solution procedure is developed to find the urban system equilibrium solution. A system optimum model is also proposed to optimize the density of radial major roads that maximizes the social welfare of the urban system. The proposed model can endogenously determine household residential distribution and land values across the city, along with the housing market structure in terms of housing prices and space. Numerical comparative static analyses of congestion pricing and road infrastructure investment (adding a new radial major road) are carried out together with evaluation of the effects of the service level of radial major roads, urban population size, and household income level on the urban economy.     

School quality and housing prices: Empirical evidence from a natural experiment in Shanghai,China

The endogeneity of education quality and quantity accounts for difficulties in appropriately identifying the causal relationship between education and housing prices. To determine how education quality is capitalized into housing prices, we deal with endogeneity bias by employing a natural experiment occasioned by China’s education reforms. Based on monthly panel data for 52 residential areas in Shanghai, we conducted a natural experiment based on the exogenous designation of specific high-quality schools as Experimental Model Senior High Schools (EMSHS). Our natural experiment proved useful in analyzing how new information affected housing prices in China’s developing housing market. We found evidence that housing prices included allowances for these new EMSHS designations. In general, the presence of an additional EMSHS (of the best quality) per square kilometer increases housing prices by 17.1%. If one additional, previously non-designated high school is designated as EMSHS in a residential area, housing prices will be 6.9% higher.