Law Commons^™

Learning From Land Use Reforms: Housing Outcomes And Regulatory Change, Noah Kazis

Law & Economics Working Papers

This essay serves as the introduction for an edited, interdisciplinary symposium of articles studying recent land use reforms at the state and local level. These papers provide important descriptive analyses of a range of policy interventions, using quantitative and qualitative methods to provide new empirical insights into zoning reform strategies.

After situating and summarizing the collected articles, the Introduction draws out shared themes. For example, these essays demonstrate the efficacy of recent reforms, not only at facilitating housing production but at doing so in especially difficult contexts (like when producing affordable housing and redeveloping single-family neighborhoods). They point to the …

Comprehensive Rezonings, Sara C. Bronin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Of all powers given to local governments, the power to zone is one of the most significant. Zoning dictates everything that gets built in a locality—and thus effectively dictates all of the key activities that take place within it. Nationwide, most zoning codes were adopted in the first half of the twentieth century. Many, including the zoning codes of New York City and Chicago, were significantly revised in the 1960s. While these codes have been revised piecemeal, just a few American cities have undergone a comprehensive revision: replacing the old code with a completely new one.

A comprehensive rezoning can …

Requiem For Regulation, Garrett Power

Faculty Scholarship

This comment reviews U.S. Supreme Court decisions over the past 100 years which have considered the constitutional limitations on governmental powers. It finds that at the three-quarter mark of the 20th century, a remarkable set of Court precedents had swollen the regulatory powers of governments while shrinking private rights to property and contract. But since the Reagan years, a more conservative Court has undertaken to curtail governmental activity in general, and to limit federal, state, and local planning in particular. A number of 5-4 decisions expanded private property rights and contracted the scope of the federal “commerce power.” The comment …

Back To The Future: Is Form-Based Code An Efficacious Tool For Shaping Modern Civic Life?, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

This Essay serves as a critique of the New Urbanism in general and of form-based code in particular as a tool of the New Urbanism. It may be true that form-based code offers more flexibility than traditional zoning schemes and thus may offer some respite from acknowledged ills such as social and racial divisions created by exclusionary zoning and other tools, and from the relative inutility of single or limited use districts. However, I will argue that these benefits are eclipsed by some of the problems of form-based code. Form-based code is frequently hailed as a back to the future …

Locational Justice: Race, Class, And The Grassroots Protest Of Property Takings, Judith E. Koons

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Book Review. The Zoning Dilemma By D. R. Mandelker, A. Dan Tarlock

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Not In Accordance With A Comprehensive Plan: A Case Study Of Regional Shopping Center Location Conflicts In Lexington, Kentucky, A. Dan Tarlock

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Evolving Judicial Attitudes Toward Local Government Land Use Control, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

The year 1967 begins the second half-century of zoning in the United States. The first comprehensive zoning ordinance was adopted by New York City in 1916. In the fifty years that have elapsed, zoning has become, notwithstanding a growing disenchantment with it on the part of planners, the most widely employed technique of land use control in the United States. At the present time only Houston, of all the major cities in the United States, lacks a zoning ordinance. And, though I have not obtained precise figures, we are all familiar with the increasingly large per centage of small municipalities, …