Urban land policy and housing in an endogenously growing monocentric city

Abstract

We examine the long-run effects of urban land policy on housing investment/pricing and city development. Housing is introduced through a socially constant-returns household production technology with uncompensated positive neighborhood externalities. We prove the existence/uniqueness of and characterize the balanced growth spatial equilibrium. Both a control of the housing price at the urban fringe and a zoning policy that relaxes more-than-proportionately the floor area ratio in favor of locations toward the city center are growth-enhancing. The long-run rate of growth is unambiguously lower in a regime where zoning does not differentiate land-use intensity, compared to the conventional setup.