The Impact of Local Residential Land Use Restrictions on Land Values Across and Within Single Family Housing Markets

Joseph Gyourko and Jacob Krimmel

No 28993, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We provide estimates of the impact of restrictive residential land use environments on the price of land across major American housing markets. Using micro data on vacant land purchased to develop single family housing, we implement a new empirical strategy for estimating so-called ‘zoning taxes’ – the amount by which land prices are bid up due to supply side regulations. Our results are broadly consistent with previous findings that zoning taxes are especially burdensome in large coastal markets. However, our more recent data indicates that price impacts in the big west coast markets now are the largest in the nation. In the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle metropolitan areas, the price of land everywhere within those three markets having been bid up by amounts that at least equal typical household income. Finally, we show that our zoning tax estimates are strongly positively correlated with a new measure of local housing market supply constraint (the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index of 2018). This relationship is not mechanically driven as the regulatory index is constructed from survey data that do not incorporate land or house price data in any way.

JEL-codes: R14 R21 R31 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Note: PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Published as Joe Gyourko & Jacob Krimmel, 2021. "The impact of local residential land use restrictions on land values across and within single family housing markets," Journal of Urban Economics, vol 126.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28993.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of local residential land use restrictions on land values across and within single family housing markets (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28993

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28993

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().