How State and Local Regulation Shapes Housing Density, Resilience, and Carbon Outcomes

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

As federal engagement in housing and climate policy grows more uncertain, the burden of addressing the nation's intertwined housing affordability and environmental crises falls increasingly on states and localities. Yet the regulatory tools those governments rely upon (zoning codes, tax incentives, and inclusionary housing programs were not designed with today's policy demands in mind, and their interactions produce consequences that are poorly understood and underappreciated. This panel brings together four empirical and analytical papers that examine, from complementary angles, how state and local regulatory structures shape not just how much housing gets built, but what kind, where, for whom, and at what environmental cost.

The panel opens with an examination of upzoning in Los Angeles, a high-tenancy city where successive layers of tenant protection have made redevelopment of existing rental housing increasingly difficult. The paper demonstrates that replacement requirements rather than zoning entitlements are the binding constraint on supply expansion, and that viable redevelopment is almost entirely limited to the demolition of small buildings, producing modest density gains concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods with weak market demand. The findings offer important lessons for large rental cities seeking to expand supply without displacing vulnerable residents.

A second paper shifts focus to the fiscal architecture shaping housing production, comparing Virginia and California to show how federal and state tax policy quietly steers new construction toward large-footprint, low-density, car-dependent development. These are precisely the housing typologies with the highest embodied carbon footprints and the least relevance to the households experiencing the greatest affordability stress. The paper argues that even well-intentioned upzoning reforms risk being undermined if tax incentives continue to favor suburban, materials-intensive construction over infill and transit-proximate development, and proposes targeted reforms to realign fiscal incentives with both supply and climate goals.

At the local level, a third paper investigates Fairfax County, Virginia's inclusionary zoning program, finding that its construction-type exemptions and cost-recovery limits may systematically produce a "durability gap" between affordable and market-rate units which incentivizes lower-quality exterior materials in affordable housing with long-term consequences for maintenance costs, resilience, and climate vulnerability. The case illustrates how cost-reduction rules embedded in local zoning ordinances can generate unintended lifecycle harms that compound affordability challenges over time.

The panel concludes with a structural critique of zoning itself. Drawing on three years of field research across nine Virginia localities and analysis of statewide litigation and legislative records, the final paper argues that zoning cannot carry the policy burdens now placed upon it. Without mandatory planning consistency requirements or a state administrative framework, localities are structurally unable to coordinate housing production, energy infrastructure, or decarbonization goals at the regional scale those challenges demand.

Together, these papers make a timely and cohesive contribution to understanding why state and local housing policy so frequently fails to meet the economic, environmental, and equity needs it is meant to serve and what reforms might begin to close those gaps.

Policy Area

• Housing, Community Development, and Urban Policy

Chair

• Nicholas J. Marantz, University of California Irvine

Discussants

• Justin P. Steil, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Paavo Herbert Monkkonen, University of California - Los Angeles

Organizer

• Andrew Hayashi, University of Virginia

Individual Presentations

• Upzoning meets tenant protection: Rental redevelopment constraints in Los Angeles - Presenting Author: Vera Goetze, University of California - Los Angeles

• Tax Policy as a Hidden Driver of Housing Typology and Embodied Emissions in Virginia and California - Presenting Author: Andrew Hayashi, University of Virginia

• Zoning Rules and Affordable Housing Durability Gaps - Presenting Author: Laura Buckley, University of Virginia

• Zoning At the Limit - Presenting Author: Moira Kathleen O'Neill, University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco