Laws That Incentivize Housing Production: Report

As communities across the country grapple with rising housing costs, increasing housing shortages and widening inequality, state legislatures are taking action and seeking solutions to encourage housing production by targeting a key factor: restrictive local land use regulations. A new paper from the Terner Center and Urban Institute presents new tools to better understand how states have approached driving local action on housing production. This report develops a new typology to classify these approaches, from state standards to carrots and sticks, and it applies that typology to the first nationwide database of 144 pro-housing laws. The paper finds that laws often employ more than one policy lever or goal, and that many laws were iteratively developed over multiple legislative sessions.

Read Incentivizing Housing Production: State Laws to Encourage or Require Municipal Action at the Terner Center site.