Zoning is central to the practice of planning, but planning programs rarely forefront zoning's exclusionary history and its implications for inequities when teaching about it. We created a multi-campus course, Zoning for Equity, to explore how planners can end exclusionary zoning and use zoning to advance social justice. After 3 years of teaching the course, we share four principles for revising zoning education in planning curricula. Planning programs are responsible for educating new cohorts of planners who can guide contemporary zoning reforms with advancing equity as a core mission; this Viewpoint suggests guidelines for achieving such an objective.

Like many university cities, Champaign, Illinois, has recently experienced a surge in student housing in its Campustown neighborhood, with 25 developments and over 2500 new housing units built from 2008 to 2019. Four of the new buildings exceed 10 stories, far denser and more imposing than the Campustown of only two decades ago. The local conventional wisdom holds that this growth resulted from loosened zoning restrictions, an explanation we reject. Instead, our interviews and document analysis reveal a more complex interplay of infrastructure investment, university enrolment policies, developer decision-making, and investment capital. Our analysis shows how government, developer, and university stakeholders interacted with one another in what Norton Long called the local ecology of games, updating Campustown into a student dormitory for a larger and more elite student body.

Student housing is a crucial contributor to urban revitalization and neighborhood change. This paper offers a framework for conceptualizing student housing, engaging the complexity of the sector, including universities, students, and local governments, and placing it within the context of urban housing markets. Amidst university budget shortfalls and enrollment expansion, a dedicated student housing industry has emerged to fill housing shortfalls. The industry has reshaped local development patterns, with developers, operators, and investors capitalizing on the demand. Drawing from diverse academic research, this paper synthesizes insights into the form, processes, and implications of student housing, examining its relationship with higher education trends, its impact on neighborhood dynamics, and the interplay of market forces and institutional priorities. Focused primarily on the North American context, the discourse lays the groundwork for a renewed understanding of the importance of student housing in university communities and the ways local policy can help shape it.

We generate the first cross-city panel dataset of land-use reforms that increase or decrease allowed housing density and estimate their association with changes in housing supply and rents. To generate reform data, we use machine-learning algorithms to search US newspaper articles between 2000 and 2019, then manually code them to increase accuracy. We merge these data with US Postal Service information on per-city counts of addresses and Census data on demographics, rents, and units affordable to households of different incomes. We then estimate a fixed-effects model with city specific time trends to examine the relationships between land-use reforms and the supply and price of rental housing. We find that reforms that loosen restrictions are associated with a statistically significant 0.8% increase in housing supply within three to nine years of reform passage, accounting for new and existing stock. This increase occurs predominantly for units at the higher end of the rent price distribution; we find no statistically significant evidence that additional lower-cost units became available or moderated in cost in the years following reforms. However, impacts are positive across the affordability spectrum and we cannot rule out that impacts are equivalent across different income segments. Conversely, reforms that increase land-use restrictions and lower allowed densities are associated with increased median rents and a reduction in units affordable to middle-income renters.

The other two respondents have carefully articulated many objections to David Imbroscio’s essay, responding to its arguments on its own terms. Rather than another point-by-point response, I offer a counternarrative that looks toward the future. In my view, ending exclusionary zoning (EZ) is an important element in a campaign to avoid some of the suffering low-income people in the United States will experience as the global climate emergency becomes increasingly acute, the national population ages, and the entrenched power of right-wing libertarians sustains inequality. Parochial actions like EZ will further complicate responses to these challenges. My response argues that for these reasons, Imbroscio’s essay is neither ethical nor logical.

Problem, research strategy, and findings Pundits and economists have recently inferred that zoning explains housing price inflation in fast-growth metro areas. In this article, we use the results of a longitudinal survey of local governments in the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in 2003 and 2019 to show the limitations of this narrative. Many local governments do use zoning that limits apartment construction; in some metros, more places embraced than abandoned exclusionary zoning. Rather than too little housing, however, these regions had depressed markets long dominated by racially motivated exclusionary zoning. Meanwhile, zoning grew more accommodating to apartments in strong-market metro areas that have concerned the pundits. Our work covers only the 2003-2019 period for about 800 jurisdictions in the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, and it only generally explains some of the changes we observe. Further qualitative research is needed, therefore, to spotlight what it takes to reform land use regulation to address unaffordability and exclusion. Takeaway for practice Local land use planners in the United States have ethical and legal obligations to undo the racial segregation designed into zoning from its founding. They also must prepare for continued population growth. Tools and strategies exist to do both of these, and some planners have the commitment and political space to use them. In other places, planners and their professional organizations need to change rules within their own communities and advocate for state legislative reforms so that planning works predictably to unwind unequal and exclusionary settlement patterns within neighborhoods and cities.

"Knowing What Land Use Regulations Localities Have "On the Books" Can Reveal Regulatory Stringency—And Much More." Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(2), pp. 264–265

Transit-oriented development (TOD) often raises land values and can promote gentrification and the displacement in low-income communities. Little research, however, has shown how communities have organized to fight for more equitable TOD processes and outcomes within particular metropolitan contexts and dynamics of neighborhood change. This case study examines the role of neighborhood-based advocacy and organizing in fighting for equitable TOD and tackling key political and planning challenges in a predominantly Latinx immigrant inner-ring suburb. Their successes show the strengths of community-based, cross-sector coalitions in generating more equitable and inclusive TOD processes, plans, and policies that target conditions of place-based precarity.

Transportation influences residential location choices generally, but low-income households often face unique constraints because of a lack of access to automobiles. This article examines how vehicle access influences the type of neighborhoods in which low-income households are able to secure housing following a move to a new neighborhood. We rely on data from the Moving to Opportunity program to estimate locational attainment models, including a wide range of variables capturing various dimensions of neighborhood opportunity. Our findings suggest that auto access enables low-income households to secure housing in neighborhoods that exhibit a wide range of positive neighborhood attributes, including lower poverty rates, lower housing vacancy rates, higher median household income, higher labor-force participation, and higher adult high school graduation rates.

Amid concerns that increasingly stringent local land-use regulations are constraining housing development across the United States, there is a need for an empirical investigation into whether, how, and where such regulations are being enacted. In this article, we report the results of a nationwide (n = 728 jurisdictions, representing almost a quarter of the U.S. population) survey of local land-use regulation, unprecedented for having been conducted at two distinct points in time (1994 and 2003). Using descriptive statistics and logistic modeling, we arrive at four main findings. First, we find that regulations are in flux to an underappreciated degree, being frequently enacted but also often abandoned. Second, we find a strong regional orientation to the use of certain regulatory tools. Third, we find more evidence in support of land-use regulations being used to solve local problems than to intentionally exclude new residents. Finally, we find that high levels of education are frequently associated with the use of tools that have a redistributive or proaffordable housing intent.

Theories of criminology suggest that neighborhood-level economic activity affects the conditions that make crime more likely. However, most studies on neighborhoods and crime focus solely on residential characteristics and ignore the commercial ones. In this article, we estimate the effect of neighborhood-level economic activity on crime holding residential characteristics constant. To do so, we use crime and census data combined with a detailed data set on establishments in Washington, DC from 2000 to 2010 to create a comprehensive measure of neighborhood-level economic activity. We exploit the panel nature of the data to identify the directionality of the results by removing unobserved heterogeneity and estimating lags and leads of economic activity. Results indicate that increases in economic activity are associated with reductions in property crime, but that the reduction in property crime occurs before the growth in economic activity and rises afterward. Violent crime declines the same year as growth in economic activity.

The United States has huge internal variation in its land use policy. The chapter explores the clustering of land use regulations and affordable housing programs into regulatory regimes. It explores the regulatory regimes of land use regulation in two US metropolitan areas: San Francisco and New York. San Francisco is dominated by 'modern' regulatory regimes; New York is dominated by traditional regimes. The chapter considers that, among the nations, United States has the most federal system of governance among the nations. Local government structure is one of the most important components of the institutional framework for land use planning in the United States. California requires all its local governments to adopt 'general plans' consisting of seven elements: land use, housing, circulation, open space, recreation, public facilities, safety, and noise. California has also enacted programs to encourage the construction of a range of housing types in its communities.

Why do we see persistence, recurrence, and new emergence of concentrated poverty in U.S. cities? In this article, we explore an understudied connection: whether an important part of the built environment—a series of attributes that constitute precarious housing—constitutes a durable substrate on which concentrated poverty predictably emerges and recurs and if so, how this might vary across the United States. Poverty grew fastest between 2000 and 2005–2009 in tracts that began the decade with high levels of rented one- to four-family housing, multifamily housing, housing between 20 and 25 years old, and households paying over 30% of their income for housing costs. In addition, poverty grew fastest in tracts with high percentages of black or Hispanic households in 2000.

From 2010 to 2030 the United States will become more racially and ethnically diverse, but demographic projections suggest the patterns of increasing diversity will vary widely across cities and regions. In this brief, we project changes in the population shares across geographies for four major groups: Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites, nonHispanic blacks, and non-Hispanic others. Though growing diversity across the United States will be welcome in many ways, it will also bring challenges to areas in which different groups increase in population share.

This paper defines economic inclusion as the ability of all people, including the disadvantaged, to share in economic gains, that is, the conditions that allow for broadly shared prosperity. Beyond the “right” to access consumption in cities, and beyond relatively standardized safety net policies that support economic security, inclusion demands intentional, flexible, context-appropriate strategies aimed at shifting the dynamics of local land and labor markets, public education, and other institutions. The paper analyzes the varied contexts for designing and supporting such strategies in a rapidly changing society, where urban regions have long been critical to incorporating a broad cross-section of people, including immigrant newcomers. Four dimensions are particularly crucial: an urban area’s level of economic growth, the quality of its jobs, its demographic profile, and its geography of opportunity (degree and form of spatial inequality). Economic inclusion is particularly urgent in America’s strongest local markets, which are pricing out the lowest-wage workers and showing a disturbing tendency to import rather than grow the talent needed for the emerging, innovation-driven economy. But weak-market regions face important challenges—and a range of options for leveraging demographic and other changes—as well. And for now, in all types of cities, innovative and promising strategies remain small in scale, in part because they are competing for support with entrenched, underperforming systems.