ABSTRACT
The prospect of using land-use regulatory policies to promote compact development forms is simultaneously their proponents’ hope and their detractors’ fear. “We are in favor of compact development being subjected to a market test; we oppose attempts to impose these through command-and-control zoning and design regulations…” write Gordon and Richardson (1997, 97). The opposite use of such regulations—that is, zoning to limit compact developments in low-density suburbs—is by virtually all accounts the more common use of municipal regulatory power; as such it might be expected to attract more criticism for its “command-and-control” nature. But this chapter considers a somewhat more pragmatic question: Can land-use regulatory policy actually raise development densities and land-use mixing to levels that the market is not interested in providing?
