Slow Growth in Cities May Have Lessened Foreclosures

Researchers found in their analysis of 300 California municipalities that the cities that had slow growth or anti-growth policies were less impacted by the housing crisis, writes Mark Bergen for Forbes.

1 minute read

September 21, 2011, 12:00 PM PDT

By Kristopher Fortin


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."

Tuesday, September 20, 2011 in Forbes

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