Slow Growth in Cities May Have Lessened Foreclosures

The authors say that their findings do not endorse strict growth policies, but that "Their data indicate that local maneuvers didn't affect the amount of development, but its allocation. A 'spillover effect' emerged, where restrictive land use in one region pushed new housing development into neighboring, more lax cities."

"'A lot of previous studies have assumed that cities are unable to resist larger macroeconomic forces,' Garrett Glasgow, one of the study's authors, wrote to me in an email. 'But at least in this case, we see evidence that city policies helped to mitigate the effects of a national foreclosure crisis."