The Local Residential Land Use Regulatory Environment Across U.S. Housing Markets: Evidence from a New Wharton Index Joseph Gyourko Jonathan Hartley Jacob Krimmel NBER Working Paper No. 26573

Issued in December 2019

NBER Program(s):Public Economics

We report results from a new survey of local residential land use regulatory regimes for over 2,450 primarily suburban communities across the U.S. The most highly regulated markets are on the two coasts, with the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan areas being the most highly regulated according to our metric. Comparing our new data to that from a previous survey finds that the housing bust associated with the Great Recession did not lead any major market that previously was highly regulated to reverse course and deregulate to any significant extent. Moreover, regulation in most large coastal markets increased over time. You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery. Access to NBER Papers You are eligible for a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, a journalist, an employee of the U.S. federal government with a ".GOV" domain name, or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy. If you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work VPN or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper emailed to your work email address below. The email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution. Gmail and other free email addresses will not have access. E-mail:

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appendix Acknowledgments Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w26573