Land Use and Zoning in an Urban Economy

Abstract

Zoning statutes are a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon in urban America. Allen Manvel in his report to the National Commission on Urban Problems, p. 31, estimated that 90 percent of the cities and towns in the United States with a population of over 5,000 had some kind of zoning statute in 1967. In addition, 51 of the 52 largest cities possessed such ordinances.' In spite of this ubiquity, and in spite of the recent public controversy concerning the legality of suburban exclusionary zoning, the modern economics literature on the institution is amazingly sparse. There have been some significant contributions in recent years, notably those by Otto Davis, Martin Bailey, Davis and Andrew Whinston, and John Crecine, Davis, and Robert Jackson. However, I think it is fair to say that economists have barely scratched the surface of what seems to me to be a very complex subject. In particular, there has been very little progress made in the task of incorporating zoning or land use parameters into the kinds of micro-economic models that economists are accustomed to deal with. The contrast with another urban economic institution-the property taxis rather striking in this respect. The basic objective of this paper will be to attempt to fill this gap. The first section introduces a simple model of an urban space economy with a manufacturing and residential sector. Having constructed this model, I will show how a change in the allocation of land between the two sectors affects the spatial pattern of land rents, the size of the urban labor force, and the wage rate. The second section of the paper will then be devoted to a discussion of the appropriateness and implications of a land allocation policy which maximizes aggregate land rent.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 78 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.