Someone asked the Antiplanner if anyone has ever ranked the restrictiveness of land-use regulation by state. I don’t know of any such ranking, but I pointed out that regulation has several dimensions. Spatial regulations try to control where development can take place. Time regulations effectively limit how quickly developments can take place.
Another time dimension has to do with how long regulations have been in place. An urban-growth boundary drawn last year isn’t as restrictive as one drawn thirty years ago. Finally, land-ownership patterns can effectively restrict development even if there are no overt legal restrictions.
Given that complication, here is my estimate of ranking, with states of roughly similar regulation grouped together. Any and all comments are welcome, especially if they can help make this ranking more precise.
California: Between the Local Agency Formation Commissions, which provided de facto growth management until 2000, when the legislature gave them de novo growth-management powers; a state planning law that gives any resident the right to challenge and delay projects; and SB 375, the “condos by the train tracks” law, California has the nation’s most restrictive land-use laws by far — and it shows in the state’s housing prices.
Hawaii and Oregon: Along with California and Vermont, Oregon and Hawaii have the nation’s oldest growth-management laws. Both effectively forbid development in rural areas and heavily regulate it in urban areas. Not sure about Hawaii, but Oregon — like California — allows any resident to challenge projects, which adds a time component to the spatial regulation.
Florida, Tennessee, and Western Washington: Spatially, these states have laws just as restrictive as Hawaii’s or Oregon’s, but because the laws are more recent, they haven’t had as big an effect (though the Seattle area has been regulated by plans that preceded the state’s 1990 law). Washington’s law mandates growth management in the western part of the state, but makes it optional in the eastern part.
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Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island: These states have growth-management laws that are both more recent and less spatially restrictive than Oregon’s. But they still have a strong time restriction: it takes awhile to get permission to do anything.
Arizona, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Vermont: Although Vermont’s planning law is older than Oregon’s, it is less restrictive. Massachusetts and New Hampshire don’t even have smart-growth laws, but they (along with other New England states) have more-or-less given up on the county level of government. This effectively gives cities control of rural areas, which they use to regulate land uses.
Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Carolina, Utah, eastern Washington, Wisconsin: These states have passed laws encouraging cities to practice growth management, but only a few cities in each state have actually done it.
Just about everywhere else: Most other states have little or no growth management except in a few localities. Colorado has no state restrictions but the Ft. Collins-Boulder-Denver areas are heavily regulated. Missoula and a few other cities also have strong local growth-management plans.
Earlier this week, the Antiplanner expressed some snide remarks about a high-density development in Portland and some commenters accused me of opposing the free market at work. Portland drew its urban-growth boundary in 1979. It essentially got filled up in the early 1990s, leading land prices to increase by 10 to 15 times. Planners offered a streamlined approval process for developers who built the kind of dense, mixed-use developments that planners prefer.
Anything that happens after this kind of regulation is hardly the result of the free market at work. The Weston Specials may have been the free market at work. The Clinton Condos are not.
You’ve answered the question by ranking the states in order of smart growth regulations, but there was not a word for the regulations that are far more common (right? am I wrong about this?) – those mandating single-family, detached dwellings and limiting density rather than mandating it. Why is that? It’s a pattern I’ve noticed with you.
Good question, rationalite. It’s almost as if you’re suggesting there’s a double standard around here.
Speaking of which: Here’s a story (http://tinyurl.com/publicization) of a city in Georgia that after “trying privatized government services has decided the experiment cost too much” and is canceling its private contracts.
If the Antiplanner ran across a reverse example (of a publicized city going private), he wouldn’t hesitate to cast it as proof that publicized government doesn’t work.
Washington’s law mandates growth management in the western part of the state, but makes it optional in the eastern part.
This dichotomy provides a useful context for educating those around here who accept the Antiplanner’s arguments as gospel truth without subjecting them to even the briefest of scrutiny.
Let’s ask ourselves: why would Washington mandate growth management in the west, but make it optional in the east? Does the west differ from the east, and if so, does it differ in ways that would make some people think growth management is more appropriate in the west than the east?
These are important questions that typically go unasked in (among other things) the Antiplanner’s analyses of the impacts of growth management on housing prices. Almost (if not completely) inevitably, the Antiplanner (1) compares areas with growth management to areas without, (2) observes housing prices in each location, and (3) if areas with growth management have higher housing prices on average, concludes that this correlation implies causality, i.e. that growth management causes higher housing prices. (For example, we can look at this very post and find the following language from the Antiplanner: “California has the nation’s most restrictive land-use laws by far  and it shows in the state’s housing prices”).
I have yet to see the Antiplanner ask (much less, answer): what makes areas that adopt growth management tools different from areas that don’t? What motivates the adoption of growth management tools in the first place, and could observed differences in housing prices be a function of these factors in addition to or instead of the growth management tools themselves?
In my experience, communities tend to ignore growth management until they begin noticing the possible negative aspects of growth (e.g. traffic congestion, lost open space, pollution, strain on schools and other services, etc.). Once the costs of growth get their attention, they might very well decide to try to do something about it. It’s important to recognize the possibility (that the Antiplanner appears to ignore) that, during the period of rapid growth, demand for housing was increasing, possibly driving housing prices up with it. Then, the community might decide to adopt growth management tools, in an effort to help curb the negative impacts of growth.
Contrast this scenario with a community that has experienced little to no growth. Do they have sufficient motivation to adopt growth management tools? Is growth management even likely to be on their radar screen? Probably not. And, if they haven’t been growing, there is unlikely to have been much in the way of dramatic increases in housing prices.
But the Antiplanner comes along and compares these types of communities with each other, and essentially attributes any difference in housing prices he sees to a single, dichotomous variable that takes on two vaules: 1=has growth management, 0=does not have growth management. If communities with a value of 1 have higher housing prices than communities with a value of 0, the Antiplanner declares to the world that growth management caused any and all observed difference in housing prices.
Exploring (and possibly ruling out) alternative explanations is a fundamental procedure for making causal claims. If you’re going to claim that X causes Y, you must (among other things) explore other potential causes of Y and control for their effects. If you do not do so, we can’t know for sure that the apparent effects of X on Y are actually the result of other factors.
Some of you longer-time posters may remember an old post by the Antiplanner in which he accused planners of assuming that correlation implies causality, referring to such an erroneous procedure as “junk science”. I will leave it up to you to decide whether the Antiplanner is guilty of the very same thing he accuses planners of.
Sigh. Spam queue.
DS
D4P said:
…communities tend to ignore growth management until they begin noticing the possible negative aspects of growth (e.g. traffic congestion, lost open space, pollution, strain on schools and other services, etc.). Once the costs of growth get their attention, they might very well decide to try to do something about it.
Me:
I’ve noticed this in Dallas recently. Years of highway/suburban-style subdivision development has made Dallas… well, Dallas (for some reason the ultra-rich love it). But in the last 5-10 years they have begun to not only develop growth management controls, but encourage high density residential development in and close to downtown (for those who have been on business trips to downtown Dallas up until recently remember that it was a ghost town after 6). Also, thay have begun a large supply and demand side campaign to limit carbon and other nasty greenhouse gas emissions. And there’s more! They just adopted a form-based code for certain specified areas. Another libertarian paradise lost to the dark side I guess 🙂
Much of Gleaser/Gyourko seems based on this, the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulation Index . Haven’t you written about this?
Living in San Jose (4 generations) have experienced Growth control (Smart Growth).
Read O’Toole’s the ‘Planning Penalty’ for nation wide costs of Planning. Also read http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa602.pdf Changing San Jose into Los Angeles.
High home prices and congestion caused by Planning.
WA’s growth management law didn’t make it mandatory for western and optional for eastern. it made it mandatory for fast growing areas and optional for slow growing areas. there are 10 counties (of 39) that aren’t planning – 4 are in the west and 6 in the east.
Growth control (Smart Growth)
These two are not synonyms, and should not be automatically used interchangeably.
BTW: The “Changing San Jose into Los Angeles” provides yet another example of the Antiplanner assuming that correlation implies causality, without controlling for possible confounding factors. Witness the following statement from the Antiplanner:
As a result of land-use restrictions, which have come to be called “growth management,†the city of San Jose’s growth has steadily declined since the 1960s
In order to legitimately draw this kind of conclusion, the Antiplanner would have to identify and rule out other potential explanatory factors for the decline in San Jose’s growth. He doesn’t appear to have done so. Instead, he simply attributes the decline to growth management. Here’s the important point: it’s not that the Antiplanner is necessarily wrong, it’s that his reader has no way of actually evaluating whether he is wrong or right because he doesn’t give us the information we would need to make that determination. In essence, he approaches his analyses with an agenda, and then makes conclusive statements to promote his agenda without engaging in the kind of analysis that would enable him to draw such conclusions.
And here’s another nice example of comparing apples and oranges:
a standard four-bedroom, two-and-one half bath home in a “typical middle management neighborhood†of relatively unregulated Houston cost $155,000 in 2006. That same home in San Jose cost more than $1.4 million.
In the Antiplanner’s world, Houston and San Jose are exactly alike on all other variables that might affect housing prices, except for “growth management”, such that any and all observed difference in housing prices is attributable to growth management differences.
If a planner presented analyses that were conducted in this manner, the Antiplanner would label such planners “Junk Scientists”.
A few years back, before the 1974 Urban Growth Boundary, San Jose was growing at a rate of up to 14% a year and still home prices were the same as the Texas Cities. Builders could meet the demand but growth control increased the land costs and housing prices. We still have land values of $50,000 an acre and up to 2 million accross the street where it can be develooped.
Most states that don’t have growth management have very flexible zoning. First, if there is no zoning outside of cities, then developers can build what they want outside. That gives cities an incentive to be flexible inside. What this means is that zoning is responsive to developers, which in turn means it is responsive to the market.
That doesn’t mean there is no single-family zoning. If you live in a neighborhood of single-family homes in Kansas City or Omaha, you have some assurance that the neighborhood will stay single family. But if you own some vacant land that is zoned single family and you think there is a market for multi-family or mixed use, you can apply for a zoning change and usually get it rather quickly.
The idea that we live in single-family homes because we have been forced to do so by zoning is a myth.
Growth boundaries occur in cities that are experiencing rapid growth or are in cities that are naturally beautiful. The Midwest doesn’t have too many restrictive growth controls because it’s flat and no one is vying to live there in the first place. Point being, people pay for beauty.
If you don’t want to pay extra for housing, move to Detroit. The US is so homogeneous as it is (it wasn’t always like that), do we really need more crummy subdivision tract homes with the cute patch of lawn and ornamental flowers in front? Is that worth the environmental degradation in Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington? Democratically speaking, I’d argue that most citizens in Hawaii overwhelmingly want growth boundaries.
ROT:“Portland drew its urban-growth boundary in 1979. It essentially got filled up in the early 1990s, leading land prices to increase by 10 to 15 times. Planners offered a streamlined approval process for developers who built the kind of dense, mixed-use developments that planners prefer.”
ws:The entire post WWII highway/suburbia environment was not a free market endeavor, either. This is a great example of your blatant hypocrisy that makes you appear not credible and just generates negative comments on this board.
What’s a bigger free market infraction, billion of re-allocated tax dollars going to build suburbia that leveled inner city neighborhoods for fringe city development, or Portland fast tracking a “dense” development? Should we not give incentives for certain types developments (i.e. making deals with developers to provide a certain percentage of market rate affordable housing in new developments)?
I still lurk around this blog, if only I want to see what The Antiplanner and my other loyal opponents are thinking about.
Granted, a blog like this has a relatively low intellectual hurdle to jump, as some of the posters illustrate. On the other hand, I always like a good intellectual catfight. As my email .sig says, “He that wrestles with us strengthens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
— Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
It is also clear that The Antiplanner has a point of view, which he argues reasonably well compared to a lot of people (see http://www.americanthinker.com, for example, as people often short on specific facts backing their arguments, e.g., plenty of overheated political rhetoric and brainfarting). While much of what Randal writes wouldn’t pass academic peer review muster, much of what I write wouldn’t either–exactly because it is advocacy!
ROT:“The idea that we live in single-family homes because we have been forced to do so by zoning is a myth.”
ws:I’ve always seen it the other way around: Single-family zoning forces other uses out, in fact I have never heard where someone has stated that people are forced to live in SFR because of zoning. Look at any traditional neighborhood, even ones comprised of mostly single-family residences, and you will see that other uses are present at a walking distance.
This is not so in modern-day suburbia, where zoning of single-family, multi-family, or commercial is comprised of acres (if not miles) of that type of zoning only, with the viability of walking to an adjacent land-use highly limited or impossible, hence the auto-dependency of modern suburbia.
Even New Urbanist developments have zoning for one type of use in their plans for a given area, but do so where the different zones can interact with one another on a pedestrian scale. Let’s differentiate between wanting to maintain a certain character of a neighborhood, but doing so at the expense of keeping any and all uses out completely. Traditional neighborhoods mostly do not do this.
High-density cities don’t appear on the landscape out of nothing. They are not built by land speculators. They are built out of low-density cities as they attempt to increase in complexity. This was how New York and Chicago were built. If people are forbidden from building up their property from a single-family house to a mixed-use building, or even just split it into multiple single-family town houses and workplaces, then yes, most definitely, people are forced to live in single-family neighborhoods, with all the economic and affordability problems that this implies and that you are quick to denounce when land speculation is forbidden.
ws: The entire post WWII highway/suburbia environment was not a free market endeavor, either. This is a great example of your blatant hypocrisy that makes you appear not credible and just generates negative comments on this board.
THWM: That’s because, it is blatant hypocrisy.
Only the wacky political far right take Mr.O’Toole’s bullshit serious.
Like since when have suburban trains been anti-suburban?
Speaking of validity of lists:
Much of Gleaser/Gyourko seems based on this, the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulation Index . Haven’t you written about this?
Forgot about the Glaeser paper and the Wharton Land Use Reg. Index. they found:
Huh.
DS
“The Midwest doesn’t have too many restrictive growth controls because it’s flat and no one is vying to live there in the first place. Point being, people pay for beauty.”
Well I’m glad that you’ve decided that the midwest isn’t beautiful. 😛
I like it when the Antiplanner tells us that skinny houses and mixed use developments are ugly.
Antiplanner Dictionary
1. Elitism: When planners call something ugly.
2. Common sense: When Antiplanners call something ugly.
prk166Well I’m glad that you’ve decided that the midwest isn’t beautiful.
ws:I can’t say it’s not beautiful in it’s own right, some people like it, and that’s fine. However there is criteria of the landscape that are regarded as aesthetic, and one is topography change. Do you think the average person would think that the Californian coast or Kansas is more beautiful?
Many people find the coasts more beautiful and more conducive to living. Which is why so many live there or are moving there. And why Ricardian rents are so high.
DS
Does it strike anyone as odd that the Antiplanner routinely chooses to live in places (e.g. Oregon Coast, Central Oregon) where some kind of governmental restraint on growth and development is in place…?
To clarify, the Antiplanner appears to prefer to live in areas where very stringent governmental growth controls are put in place, so that he can have lots of open space and not be close to a lot of other people.
And yet, he routinely criticizes such growth controls in this blog and elsewhere. I guess people will say anything if they get paid enough.
“ws:I can’t say it’s not beautiful in it’s own right, some people like it, and that’s fine. However there is criteria of the landscape that are regarded as aesthetic, and one is topography change. Do you think the average person would think that the Californian coast or Kansas is more beautiful?”
Just had to point that out to have some fun. 🙂 I agree that the perception is that they are and that there are elements of the landscape that are. But I wonder how much of it is self-fulfilling. That is you tend to find beauty in where you grew up. But a tad more on that below.
“Many people find the coasts more beautiful and more conducive to living. Which is why so many live there or are moving there. And why Ricardian rents are so high.”
Not to get into writing a paper but I’d be curious how much beauty affects that sort of thing. How much of it is that people hear that and go with it? Or that is where they grew up so they find it beautiful? And with most people growing up on the coasts because that’s where most economic activity could occur 200 years ago, how much of it is self-fulfilling? On the flip side the Pembina Gorge is beautiful. The same with most anyplace in Maine. The Purcell Mountains are gorgeous. The same with Chama, New Mexico. Eastern Kentucky is lovely with the Appalachians. The same with the Sawtooth Mountains on Minnesota’s North Shore. So maybe there’s something more than just there being beauty? And that’s just accepting that water and/or mountains are beautiful.
Just curious…. seems like things others would’ve already dug into more but I don’t recall seeing much of anything on it myself.
This is well-documented in the econ and geog literature wrt hedonic valuation, amenity-seeking and climate choices. It has to do with climate (moderate temp swings), amenities, and agglomeration economies.
DS
If restrictive zoning drove home prices up, then cities with the most zoning will have the least decline. Or none at all. Does the evidence support this? Will the antiplanner ever address it?
Antiplanner,
I’m a bit surprised that Nevada did not lead your list. With 86% of its land owned by the federal government, Nevada has the strictest land-use regulation of any state.
Cheers,
Andy