Housing Market Effects of Inclusionary Zoning

This article presents an empirical analysis of the effects of inclusionary zoning policies on housing prices and starts in California during the period from 1988 through 2005. The analysis compares cities with and without such policies and isolates the effects of inclusionary zoning programs by carefully controlling for spatial and temporal conditions, such as the neighborhood or school district within which the house is located and changing market conditions over time. The analysis found that inclusionary zoning policies had measurable effects on housing markets in jurisdictions that adopt them; specifically, the price of single-family houses increases and the size of single-family houses decreases. The analysis also found that, although the cities with such programs did not experience a significant reduction in the rate of single-family housing starts, they did experience a marginally significant increase in multifamily housing starts. The magnitude of this shift varied with the stringency of the inclusionary requirements. Finally, the analysis found that the size of market-rate houses in cities that adopted inclusionary zoning increased more slowly than in cities without such programs. The results are fully consistent with economic theory and demonstrate that inclusionary zoning policies do not come without costs

Does Job Creation Tax Credit Program in Maryland Induce Spatial Employment Growth or Redistribution?

The Job Creation Tax Credit (JCTC) program is one of the five major Smart Growth Programs initiated by the State of Maryland in 1996 and amended in 1997. Like other tax credit programs it is intended to create jobs, but it is also a place-based policy in the sense that eligibility is limited to jobs created in Priority Funding Areas (PFAs). This paper examines whether the JCTC program has furthered the goals of smart growth by concentrating job growth within well defined regions of the state. Towards this end, both the number and the relative share of employment inside and outside of the PFAs are compared using three econometric models. The empirical analysis examines employment in five economic sectors ((1) primary, (2) manufacturing, (3) transportation, communication and utilities (T.C.U.), (4) finance, insurance and real estate (F.I.R.E.) and (5) services) over the years (1994 to 1998) using ZIP Code data. The result shows that jobs in the T.C.U. and services industries have responded to the state incentive program while three other sectors have not; the distribution of jobs in the primary sector have grown counter to the state incentive policy and jobs in manufacturing and F.I.R.E. have been unaffected by the program

Comprehensive Planning for Sustainable Rural Development

Concern among state legislators about rural development and rural land use is not new. In many states, agriculture remains an important feature of the economic, cultural, and political landscape. As rural incomes, populations, and prosperity have declined, states have adopted a variety of policies in response. Rural land and development policies in most states, however, are often more symbolic than influential, poorly integrated, and grossly misguided (Audirac, 1997). For rural areas, very few states mandate or facilitate rural comprehensive planning, often due to opposition from rural legislators. Farmlands (cropland and grazing land) constitute the largest share of land use by acreage in the country and have an even higher share in the rural areas (USDA, 2000). Although a relatively smaller and decreasing part of the overall economy, farmland uses employ 21 percent of the nation’s workforce (including processing, wholesale and retail trade of farming goods) and about 7 percent of nation’s workforce in production (2002 numbers). Therefore, focusing planning on urban land use alone is unfortunate, because rural areas, perhaps even more than their urban counterparts, have much to gain from comprehensive planning

Estimating the Impacts of Capital Bikeshare on Metrorail Ridership in the Washington Metropolitan Area

Bikeshare programs have transformed the urban transportation landscape. However, their impacts on rail transit have not been fully examined. Some researchers find shared bikes help reduce the first-mile/last-mile gaps and boost rail transit ridership, although others see bikeshare as a competitor for riders. Previous studies have mostly relied on surveys of bikeshare program users as the data source, and few have addressed this question using more rigorous methods. In this paper, the authors take the Washington metropolitan area as an example and use statistical methods to quantify the impact of the bikeshare program on rail transit ridership. Using detailed ridership data between 2010 and 2015, they break down Metrorail ridership by type (entries vs. exits) and time of the day (AM peak vs. PM peak) to analyze how Capital Bikeshare (CaBi) interacts with Metrorail. Furthermore, Metrorail stations are categorized into core stations and peripheral stations to examine the impacts of CaBi in different built environments. Regression results show that the impacts of CaBi vary by Metrorail station location. For core Metrorail stations, CaBi docking stations within ¼-mile of a Metrorail station reduce rail ridership in all measures. In particular, CaBi would reduce the number of AM-peak exits by 4,738 per station per month. However, CaBi complements Metrorail in peripheral neighborhoods. Having CaBi installed nearby would increase monthly Metrorail ridership by 1,175 AM-peak exits, 1,417 PM-peak entries, 2,284 AM-peak entries, and 2,422 PM-peak exits. Based on the findings, the authors suggest a collaboration between Metrorail and CaBi to add more bikeshare stations within ¼-mile of peripheral Metrorail stations to increase the ridership of both systems

The Spatial Structure of Cities in the United States

In recent years, the spatial structure of cities has become the subject of considerable interest, as travel behavior, greenhouse gas emissions, loss of habitat, public expenditures, and more are thought to be influenced by urban spatial structure. In this paper we examine the spatial structure of 35 metropolitan areas in the United States. Based on the 2010 Census data, we focus on the distributions of populations in metropolitan areas in 2010 and on changes between 1990 and 2010. Specifically, we examine population levels and population density at the metropolitan, urbanized area, principal city, and census block group levels. We find that significant differences in recent growth patterns remain between the older and more densely developed cities of the Northeast and cities in the South and West. Most urban growth is now occurring in cities in the South and West causing them to experience increases in density in their principal cities, urbanized area, and nonurbanized areas. We also find, however, that much of the population growth in the largest metropolitan areas of the United States continues to occur at the urban fringe, causing overall densities to decline

Housing Market Effects of Inclusionary Zoning

Many communities across the country face affordable housing challenges. An increasing number of communities are considering inclusionary zoning as a response. Inclusionary zoning programs, which require developers to sell a certain percentage of newly developed housing units at below market rates to lower income households, are politically attractive because they are viewed as a way to promote housing affordability without raising taxes or using public funds. Standard economic theory, however, suggests that such programs act like a tax on housing construction. And just like other taxes, the burdens of inclusionary zoning are passed on to housing consumers, housing producers, and landowners. As a result, inclusionary zoning policies could exacerbate the affordable housing problem that they are designed to address. Although debate over the merits of inclusionary zoning has continued for nearly three decades, there have been no rigorous studies on their effects on housing prices and starts. We offer such an analysis here, estimating the effects of inclusionary zoning policies on single family housing prices, single family and multifamily housing starts, and the size of single family housing units in California over the period from 1988 to 2005. In our analyses, we are able to isolate the impacts of inclusionary zoning programs by carefully controlling for spatial and temporal conditions, such as the neighborhood or school district within which the house is located, and changing market conditions over time

A functional integrated land use-transportation model for analyzing transportation impacts in the Maryland-Washington, DC region

The Maryland-Washington, DC region has been experiencing significant land-use changes and changes in local and regional travel patterns due to increasing growth and sprawl. The region\u27s highway and transit networks regularly experience severe congestion levels. Before proceeding with plans to build new transportation infrastructure to ad-dress this expanding demand for travel, a critical question is how future land use will affect the regional transportation system. This article investigates how an integrated land-use and transportation model can address this question. A base year and two horizon-year land use-transport scenarios are analyzed. The horizon-year scenarios are: (1) business as usual (BAU) and (2) high gasoline prices (HGP). The scenarios developed through the land-use model are derived from a three-stage top-down approach: (a) at the state level, (b) at the county level, and (c) at the statewide modeling zone (SMZ) level that reflects economic impacts on the region. The transportation model, the Maryland Statewide Transport Model (MSTM), is an integrated land use-transportation model, capable of reflecting development and travel patterns in the region. The model includes all of Maryland, Washington, DC, and Delaware, and portions of southern Pennsylvania, northern Virginia, New Jersey, and West Virginia. The neighboring states are included to reflect the entering, exiting, and through trips in the region. The MSTM is a four-step travel-demand model with input provided by the alternative land-use scenarios, designed to produce link-level assignment results for four daily time periods, nineteen trip purposes, and eleven modes of travel. This article presents preliminary results of the land use-transportation model. The long-distance passenger and commodity-travel models are at the development stage and are not included in the results. The analyses of the land use-transport scenarios reveal insights to the region\u27s travel patterns in terms of the congestion level and the shift of travel as per land-use changes. The model is a useful tool for analyzing future land-use and transportation impacts in the region. © 2011 Mishra et al

Facilitating Transit Oriented Development in the Purple Line Corridor: The Plans and Regulations Information Tool

The Plans and Regulations Information Tool (PaRIT) is a computing interface that enables spatial queries to identify and access the many plans and regulations that apply to a given place. These plans and regulations are created by various government, intergovernmental, and non-governmental organizations and are created at different times with different functional, spatial, and temporal scopes. As argued elsewhere (Hopkins & Knaap, 2016), we should neither expect these plans to be consistent nor try to make them consistent. PaRIT accesses multiple plans and regulations to give decision-makers emergent information in support of several plan-using tasks: plan commission staff report, affordable housing location opportunities, developer location opportunities, aggregating ideas across plans for advocacy such as bikeways or affordable housing (National Center for Smart Growth, 2019), neighborhood group advocacy/opposition, looking for consistency or contradictions related to particular goals such as hazards or climate change mitigation (Berke, Malecha, Yu, Lee, & Masterson, 2019). We demonstrate the capabilities of PaRIT in applications to the Purple Line light rail transit project in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties, Maryland, north of Washington, DC. This tool operationalizes concepts for creating Information Systems of Plans (Finn, Hopkins, & Wempe, 2007; Kaza & Hopkins, 2012), structured databases for collecting, indexing, and querying the many plans that typically apply and relating these plans to regulations. The tool relies on an extensive database of geo-spatially defined plans that express intentions or visions of important organizations in both Counties. These plans range from traditional neighborhood level land-use plans to county-wide general plans but also include educational facility master plans and bicycle and pedestrian plans. Regulations included in the tool include legally binding rights, incentives or constraints on land development in the corridor such as zoning, impact fees, and economic development incentive zones. Funded by the Federal Transit Administration, the tool is designed to facilitate transit-oriented development across the Purple Line Corridor. Spatial queries can be defined in several ways: by street address; by drawing a point, line, or polygon; by uploading shapefiles; and a buffer can be added to any of these queries. Queries can use filters to focus on particular types of plans or regulations. Query results present important attributes of each plan or regulation that applies to that location and include links to PDFs and websites for the complete documents. A summary report can be formatted in printable format