Essays on land use regulation

Graduation date: 2007This dissertation consists of three papers on land use economics and regulation. The first paper focuses on the environmental impacts of land use and their implications for the design on water quality trading policies. The second and third papers address local land use regulations and their impact on land values and land use patterns. The first paper provides a national-scale, watershed-level assessment of land use impacts on water quality and aquatic ecosystems in the United States. The results suggest that the level of conventional water pollution in a watershed is significantly affected by the amount of land allocated to intensive agriculture and urban development, while the level of toxic water pollution is significantly affected by the amount of land allocated to transportation and mining. Implications of the results for the design and implementation of water quality trading policies are discussed. The second paper develops an empirical framework to conduct an exploratory analysis of effects of land use regulations on land values and land use patterns in a GIS-based landscape near Eugene, Oregon. All the land use regulations considered in this study, including exclusive farm use zoning, forest zoning, urban growth boundary designation, residential density zoning, commercial zoning, and industrial zoning, are found to affect land value and use both inside and outside of the designated zones. While there are many issues this framework does not address, preliminary results indicate that regulations (except commercial zoning) tend to increase the value of land outside the designated zones, but reduce the value of land inside the designated zones. The framework is applied to measure the reduction in value due to regulations vs. the value of individual exemptions at the parcel level to illuminate the controversy surrounding Oregon's Measure 37. The reductions in value due to regulations are found to be considerably smaller than the values of individual exemptions for almost all regulations contested in the Measure 37 claims. The third paper evaluates the efficiency of the current system of land use regulation, analyzes the possible changes to the regulatory structure, and studies the role of spatial and temporal interaction among neighboring land uses