Zoning and the American Suburb
Abstract: American suburbs were transformed after WWII, with mixed-use development giving way to low-density, purely residential neighborhoods. This paper investigates the role of zoning in this transformation and provides clear, causal evidence on the role of regulation over the long run. First, we find that developers were creating large, uniformly sized lots with dimensions that clustered at round numbers even before zoning was adopted. However, residential parcels developed under zoning are 18 percentage points less likely to have stores nearby and 9 percentage points less likely to be near apartments today. Zoning also increased lot sizes: if all subdivision had occurred without minimum lot size regulations, there would be 4.4\% more single-family housing units in suburban Cook county. We confirm these causal effects using the Public Land Survey System as a source of exogenous variation in the zoning of undeveloped land. Taken together, our results indicate that land use regulation accelerated the emergence of exclusively detached single-family residential neighborhoods over to the suburban form that would have prevailed without zoning, which would have featured more mixed uses and smaller lots.
Allison Shertzer is an Economist and Economic Adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
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