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Cityscape: Volume 25 Number 2 | Recent Reforms in Zoning | Learning From Land Use Reforms: Housing Outcomes and Regulatory Change

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The goal of Cityscape is to bring high-quality original research on housing and community development issues to scholars, government officials, and practitioners. Cityscape is open to all relevant disciplines, including architecture, consumer research, demography, economics, engineering, ethnography, finance, geography, law, planning, political science, public policy, regional science, sociology, statistics, and urban studies.

Cityscape is published three times a year by the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.



Recent Reforms in Zoning

Volume 25 Number 2

Mark D. Shroder

Michelle P. Matuga

Learning From Land Use Reforms: Housing Outcomes and Regulatory Change

Noah M. Kazis
University of Michigan Law School


Zoning is changing. Paradigms that have stood for a century—like the predominance of singlefamily- only residential zoning—are being questioned and, in some places, abandoned. Political sacred cows, like regulatory mandates for new construction to provide that most valued of amenities, off-street parking, have been gored. Major reforms to loosen zoning and increase the supply of housing have taken place in cities big and small, in state houses and city halls, from coast to coast. Without overstating the case—in most places, the status quo remains unchanged, and even in the few, change has been incremental—there has been a groundswell of support for rethinking the restrictiveness of the American land use system.


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