Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Open Access)
Department
Colby College. Government Dept.
Advisor(s)
Nicholas F. Jacobs
Second Advisor
Carrie LeVan
Abstract
Do we need local government? Cities maintain representative institutions of government, hold elections, and host public hearings, but does that mean they can tackle city-specific problems? This project seeks to understand how deregulatory zoning policies, a supply-side tool to increase housing supply of affordable homes, spread across the 300 largest U.S. cities, or not. Cities might implement a zoning reform because they learn from another city, desire to increase housing supply for economic conditions, imitate another city, are forced too by a higher level of government, or are ideologically motivated to do so. I test each hypothesis of diffusion through event history modeling, or survivor analysis, to untangle the reasons cities adopt deregulatory zoning policies, or not. The results suggest that ideologically liberal cities and cities within states that have passed the same zoning reforms are most likely to adopt such zoning policies. The lack of pure policy learning based on housing need in cities suggests local governments are not properly incentivized to innovate policies to respond to local problems.
Keywords
Local government, zoning, policy diffusion, single-family zoning
Recommended Citation
Nash, Fiona F., "Not in My Zoning Code: Understanding the Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion of Deregulatory Zoning Reform Across U.S. Cities" (2024). Honors Theses. Paper 1473.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/1473