How Land-Use Restrictions Make Places Tilt Left

A quick look at sky-high housing prices in San Francisco and Manhattan makes it clear that land-use restrictions make places more expensive—a pattern that has been documented in a large body of research. Affluent residents of these places put pressure on local politicians to limit development, in order to protect the character of their neighborhoods and property values. As I highlighted in The New Urban Crisis, the most expensive—and the most unequal and segregated—places in America today are also the most liberal and progressive. They are the places run by progressive mayors like Bill de Blasio, London Breed, and Eric Garcetti. They are also the places that gave the largest shares of votes to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

A new study published in the journal Political Geography shows that places with strict land-use regulations become more Democratic over time. The study, by political scientist Jason Sorens of Dartmouth College, finds that land-use restrictions gradually tilt places leftward—not just by attracting more highly-educated Democrats, but even more so by repelling non-college-educated workers who have become more Republican over time. Sorens defines land-use regulations as the stringency of residential zoning based on the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index (WRLURI), a measure that is commonly used in such studies.