New Article: Creating Density: The Limits of Zoning Reform

New Article: Christopher Serkin, Creating Density: The Limits of Zoning Reform, 11 Property Rights J, 183 (2022). Abstract below:

This paper appears in the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Journal, in a volume honoring Vicki Been. An emerging “liberaltarian consensus” objects to the costs created by land use regulations. Reformers argue that in the absence of restrictive zoning, multifamily housing and apartment buildings would proliferate. This would create greater density and all manner of benefits: unlocking economic gains, undermining zoning’s racist propensities, and reducing carbon emissions. But the benefits of zoning reform are likely to be more context-dependent than reformers admit. Some American cities with the lightest land use regulations, like Houston and Phoenix, are also the least dense. Telling a Panglossian story about zoning reform and over-claiming its benefits risks pushing too far. Indeed, a real problem with the current debate about zoning reform is the failure to be clear about the endgame, making tradeoffs difficult to evaluate.

In fact, what appears to be a growing consensus for reform hides three very different possible goals of reform efforts. The first is simply to remove unnecessarily burdensome regulations but not radical reform. The second reflects a changing view about optimal city size. While reformers in this camp believe that zoning limits in thriving urban centers are currently drawn too restrictively, they do not reject regulatory limits on growth and density everywhere or in the abstract. The third possible endgame is considerably more radical and ideologically anti-regulatory. It implicitly presumes that regulation should never restrict housing development, regardless of local conditions and ecological limits. This Symposium piece criticizes the current state of the debate over zoning reform for glossing over these differences. And it argues, specifically, that the liberaltarian approach will not necessarily lead to greater density as some reformers claim. It seeks to reintroduce a note of scholarly caution into what has become an increasingly heated political debate.