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Report
Local Zoning Laws and the Supply of Multifamily Housing in Greater Boston
Housing affordability is a significant issue in many U.S. metropolitan areas, including Greater Boston. Affordability has always been a major challenge for low-income renters; however, even middle-income families now face considerable affordability hurdles, particularly in metro areas with strong labor markets. Where people live has important implications for their health, schooling, and economic mobility. Researchers and policymakers have devoted attention to the role of land-use practices, such as regulating residential zoning, in creating housing affordability problems, particularly in the ...
Working Paper
How to Increase Housing Affordability: Understanding Local Deterrents to Building Multifamily Housing
This paper studies how local land-use regulations and community opposition affect the trade-offs to building single-family, multifamily, and affordable housing and how their effects on rents differ from their effects on house prices. Using lot-level zoning regulations and a boundary discontinuity design at regulation boundaries in Greater Boston, we obtain causal estimates for the effects of zoning regulations on the supply of different types of housing, single-family-house prices, multifamily rents, and households’ willingness to pay for higher density. We find that relaxing density ...