Local Politics and Policy Choice of Land Use Management in Housing Supply; Regarding Hierarchical Linear Modeling.

Housing supply been an important concern for local governments in the recent and has become a more pressing issue with local governmental policy choice and adoption related with land use techniques and instruments. Efforts to understand and explain how local governments influence housing affordability and type of housing (single family housing/multi-family housing) have been less than successful because they ignore the fact that cities and unincorporated areas are nested within county government. Empirical models, thus far have not been able to capture this nested structure. This paper extends the political economy of local policymaking to investigate how the configurations of county and sub-county governments shape local policy choice for housing affordability and different type of housing supply. Multi-level analysis is applied by estimating a hierarchical linear model with survey data set which is about land use (2003) and growth management (2006) conducted by DeVoe Moore Center in Florida State University. The data set included 65 counties, 220 cities and 64 unincorporated areas in Florida. The empirical findings generally confirm the predictors of the political market explanation and reveal county level decisions and circumstances influence housing type and housing affordability at the local level and that the hierarchical structure is responsive to constituency demands. As predicted, political institution plays a mediating role with relations to constituencies' demand. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]