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Many commentators and scholars blame a lack of regulation for the present economic crisis. They maintain that the crisis is mainly due to the alleged neoliberal deregulation of the socio-economic system. This article considers a different possible explanation, attributing greater responsibility to interventionist public policies. In this perspective, and within a framework of general reform, the role of land and building regulations in particular will be critically discussed. To avoid any misunderstanding: the idea is not to put 'all' the blame on public intervention, but to also recognize its contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine land use planning outcomes over a 30-year period in the Portland, OR-Vancouver, WA (USA) metropolitan area. The four-county study region enables comparisons between three Oregon counties subject to Oregon's 1973 Land Use Act (Senate Bill 100) and Clark County, WA which implemented land use planning under Washington's 1990 Growth Management Act. We describe county-level historical land uses from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s, including low-density residential and urban development, both outside and inside of current urban growth boundaries. We use difference-in-differences models to test whether differences in the proportions of developed land resulting from implementation of urban growth boundaries are statistically significant and whether they vary between Oregon and Washington. Our results suggest that land use planning and urban growth boundaries now mandated both in Oregon and Washington portions of the study area have had a measurable and statistically significant effect in containing development and conserving forest and agricultural lands in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area. Our results also suggest, however, that these effects differ across the four study-area counties, likely owing in part to differences in counties’ initial levels of development, distinctly different land use planning histories, and how restrictive their urban growth boundaries were drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long and active tradition of land use planning in the United States, and planners have tried to subordinate regulation, primarily zoning, to prior planning. However, this project has met with only limited success. Americans prefer to make small-scale, ad hoc land use decisions. The reasons include the tradition of plans as blueprints for unlimited growth, the legal ability of local governments to ignore the regional impacts of their decisions, America’s preference for sprawling suburbia, the marginal status of plans in zoning law, and the chilling impact of the Supreme Court’s takings jurisprudence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]