This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 18th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown. What's the relationship between zoning and the cost of housing.

Perhaps not surprisingly, more restrictive zoning is strongly related to higher housing costs.

In a new policy analysis, the Cato Institute's Vanessa Brown Calder examines that relationship.

This should be a really important issue for people who aspire to be homeowners, people

who are homeowners, and people who care about the quality of neighborhoods

and maintaining some integrity of neighborhoods.

And that's this link between the price of housing and zoning.

So what, how does zoning affect housing prices broadly?

Well the general consensus in the academic literature is that the two are quite tightly tied together.

This is kind of, this is an almost uncontroversial topic in the academic literature.

And there does seem to be a strong relationship between zoning regulations

or land use regulations, which is just kind of more of an umbrella term for zoning

regulations and the other things that constrain the development of land and housing

prices.

And so that's something that I looked at a little bit more closely in my most recent policy analysis paper.

So how do you break it down in terms of studying the specific, it's obviously something that's been studied a lot right so how did you

break down the research okay well I used appellate court cases to determine the

strength and the amount of zoning and land use regulations over time.

Okay, so that's just a, that's a rough proxy that probably tracks pretty well with the burden of zoning specifically because if it's not

in court it's not controversial. Exactly, yep that's exactly right so generally

it's a good omnibus measure as Daniel Showag notes in his paper for determining the strength and the quantity

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