I am an Assistant Professor of Finance and Real Estate at the University of Colorado Boulder (Leeds School of Business). My research interests are Urban and Real Estate Economics, Public Economics, and Industrial Organization.

Email: jaehee.song@colorado.edu

 
 

The Effects of Residential Zoning
in U.S. Housing Markets

Revision requested at Journal of Urban Economics

I construct a new nationwide dataset to measure the stringency of residential zoning in the U.S. and analyze its effects on housing prices and demographic sorting. First, I develop and implement a structural break detection algorithm to infer minimum lot size regulations from property tax records. The dataset covers over 16,000 local jurisdictions within Core-Based Statistical Areas, capturing both cross-jurisdictional and within-jurisdictional variations in zoning stringency. I find that 18.5 percent of single-family constructions bunch at the regulated lot size and that density regulations are strongly associated with a higher share of white homeowners, higher incomes, and higher housing prices. Second, using this dataset and a spatial discontinuity design at municipality borders, I estimate the impacts of minimum lot size regulations on housing markets. The results indicate that doubling the minimum lot size increases home sales prices by 14 percent and rents by 9 percent. Moreover, restrictive zoning disproportionately attracts high-income white homeowners, exacerbating residential segregation.

Why Zoning is Too Restrictive

with Jack Favilukis

Zoning restrictions lowered aggregate growth by 36 percent (Hsieh and Moretti, 2019). If these restrictions are so costly, why do they exist? We propose a novel theory for why zoning is more stringent than the social optimum: the more zoning authorities a metro is fragmented into, the more restrictive zoning is in the metro. When zoning decisions are made locally, voters restrict development to avoid local congestion externalities, but fail to internalize worsened metro-wide housing affordability. Empirically, the HHI of local governments within a metro alone explains 12 percent of zoning variation across the U.S. Using lagged HHI in 1900 as an instrument, we show that fragmentation of zoning authorities increases zoning stringency and housing costs. Our results provide clear policy advice --- zoning decisions should be made globally. Indeed, facing housing affordability crises, several states and nations have begun to adopt global zoning reforms.

The Housing Choice Voucher program provides substantial rental subsidies to low-income households, yet many recipients struggle to secure housing with their vouchers, particularly in low-poverty areas. This paper examines a key bottleneck in the program: landlord discrimination against voucher holders. Using a nationwide dataset from a major online rental platform, we identify listings that explicitly seek or reject voucher holders. We find significant variation across metropolitan areas, with voucher-seeking listings ranging from nearly zero to 18 percent and voucher-rejecting listings ranging from nearly zero to 28 percent. Within metros, landlords in high-poverty neighborhoods with larger Black and voucher populations are more likely to seek voucher holders, while rejection of voucher holders is relatively more common in low-poverty neighborhoods. Using a difference-in-differences design, we provide causal evidence that statewide prohibitions on source-of-income discrimination significantly reduce voucher-rejecting listings, especially in low-poverty neighborhoods, effectively eliminating cross-neighborhood differences in discriminatory behavior.