Summary of an Article on Reforming Land-Use Regulations

This article describes how excessive land use control adversely affects the cost of housing. Numerous studies showing the impact of over-regulation on housing costs are cited. The article provides both a historical and philosophical context for public land use regulation and describes key judicial decisions as well as competing public and private interests that shape the regulatory environment.Specific attention is given to the work of the Committee on Government Regulation and the Cost of Housing of the President's Commission on Housing. The various recommendations of the Commission are set forth, the central one being the enactment of state and local legislation to restrict zoning regulation to that which is necessary to achieve what the Commission terms a "vital and pressing" governmental interest. A number of other specific Commission recommendations are also enumerated including density of development, restrictions on manufactured housing, size of dwelling units, growth controls, farmland preservation, development standards and fees, and local permit processing. The article concludes with a strong statement regarding the need for public education as a prerequisite for reform. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

PLANNED INCAPACITY TO SUCCEED? POLICY-MAKING STRUCTURE AND POLICY FAILURE

Policies may fail in two analytically distinct ways: they may fail to achieve their goals, or they may fail to retain political support and be terminated. By failing to distinguish between ineffectiveness and political failure, the three most common interpretations of the War on Poverty and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (failure owing to central government incompetence, failure owing to pluralism, and "hidden" success) cannot adequately account for the gap between their ambiguous performance and their clear political failure. To understand these differences, one must understand the effect of America's fragmented political structure on the design and implementation of poverty and unemployment remedies. Under resource constraints and given a large degree of policy discretion, American states in the aggregate have retained their historic resistance to social policies that would increase short-term expenditures and reduce the attractiveness of their business climate. These jurisdictions and their Congressional representatives opposed new fully nationalized initiatives, insisting on policy designs that promised fiscal relief while protecting state and local policy control. National policymakers found that grant-in-aid programs offered the path of least resistance in these circumstances. Although social policy grant programs could win initial approval in Congress, these designs proved to be increasingly unwieldy, expensive, and difficult to control in practice. The programs yielded ambiguous overall results but provided unambiguous examples of waste, fraud and abuse, fueling the perception of failure and contributing to the backlash against these programs and their political failure. Copyright 1988 by The Policy Studies Organization.