Graduation Year

2025

Date of Submission

12-2024

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE)

Reader 1

Professor Andrew Sinclair

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2024 George Ashford

Abstract

This paper interprets interviews with participants in a local land use controversy to explore the role of voters’ financial incentives in shaping local land use politics. Drawing on previous studies that characterize the politics of urban and suburban housing development as driven by the economic incentives of different groups, predominantly homeowners’ incentive to increase residential property values, the paper seeks to address a key puzzle for scholars and reformers: why homeowners do not support land use policy changes that would increase their property values. While the literature has evolved from modeling restrictive zoning as an efficient pricing scheme for local public goods to modeling it as a sub-optimal result of metro-level collective action problems, neither theory accounts for the apparent insensitivity of homeowners to the opportunities for capital gains created by upzoning. Interviews indicate that homeowners do weigh development’s impact on property values when forming their beliefs about land use policy, but that they also value the aesthetics and “feel” of their neighborhood for its own sake. These findings imply that homeowners are more likely to take a strong stance against development when their financial incentives are aligned with their aesthetic preferences than when the two are in conflict.

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