Local Land Use Controls and Demographic Outcomes in a Booming Economy

John M. Quigley, University of California at Berkeley
Steven Raphael, University of California at Berkeley
Larry A. Rosenthal, University of California at Berkeley

Abstract

We analyze the link between autarchic land use policies adopted by local governments in California and the substantial redistribution of its population during the decade of the 1990s. We relate changes in population growth by racial and ethnic group in California cities to measures of the extent to which locally adopted policy favors expansion of the single-family housing stock. We control for the initial conditions of housing and labor markets by relying upon census measures for 1990, and we account for the potential endogeneity of contemporaneous land use policies by r elying upon exogenous measures of the "exclusivity" and "pro-growth" propensities of the local public sector recorded by a statewide survey in the early 1990s.