ABSTRACT
“The single most important characteristic of the newer forms of social intervention,” writes Charles Schultze (1977, 12), “is that their success or failure depends upon affecting the skills, attitudes, consumption habits or production patterns of hundreds of millions of individuals, millions of business firms, and thousands of units of local government. The tasks are difficult not so much because they deal with technologically complicated matters as because they aim ultimately at modifying the behavior of private producers and consumers” (emphasis added). Within this scheme, local government is taken to be an autonomous actor in the marketplace, more akin to consumers and firms than to state or federal government. It is not seen as a governmental agency to which the police power of the state is delegated in certain realms. Notwithstanding the apparent regulatory nature of zoning interventions, municipal land-use regulation is often seen as something very akin to a “market force” by many observers of metropolitan policy and politics.
