We provide estimates of the impact of restrictive residential land use environments on the price of land across major American housing markets. Using micro data on vacant land purchased to develop single family housing, we implement a new empirical strategy for estimating so-called ‘zoning taxes’ – the amount by which land prices are bid up due to supply side regulations. Our results are broadly consistent with previous findings that zoning taxes are especially burdensome in large coastal markets. However, our more recent data indicates that price impacts in the big west coast markets now are the largest in the nation. In the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle metropolitan areas, the price of land everywhere within those three markets having been bid up by amounts that at least equal typical household income. Finally, we show that our zoning tax estimates are strongly positively correlated with a new measure of local housing market supply constraint (the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index of 2018). This relationship is not mechanically driven as the regulatory index is constructed from survey data that do not incorporate land or house price data in any way.

我们估计了限制性住宅用地使用环境对美国主要住房市场土地价格的影响。使用为开发单户住宅而购买的空置土地的微观数据，我们实施了一种新的实证策略来估算所谓的“分区税”——由于供应方法规而导致土地价格上涨的金额。我们的结果与之前的研究结果大致一致，即分区税在大型沿海市场中尤其繁重。然而，我们最近的数据表明，西海岸大型市场的价格影响现在是全国最大的。在旧金山、洛杉矶和西雅图大都市区，这三个市场内各地的土地价格都被抬高了至少等于典型家庭收入的金额。最后，我们表明，我们的分区税估计与当地住房市场供应限制的新衡量标准（2018 年沃顿住宅土地使用监管指数）呈强正相关。这种关系不是机械驱动的，因为监管指数是根据不以任何方式包含土地或房价数据的调查数据构建的。