Study Examines the Effect of 'Holdouts' on the Development Patterns of Los Angeles

Tim Hyde shares the news of a new study in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy measuring the impact of "holdouts" (i.e., landowners who refuse to sell property in the face of land assembly efforts) in Los Angeles County. Hyde also describes holdouts as a "problem" when development interests can't assemble large enough parcels to reinvent the city for more density, new transit, or other investments.

One of the key assumptions of the "Today's City to Tomorrow's City: An Empirical Investigation of Urban Land Assembly" study is that when developers can’t assemble enough land to make large development projects profitable, "the city stays more spread out than it otherwise should."

According to Hyde, the authors of the study "develop a model of land assembly and show that, if there is no holdout problem, that land selling into an assembly should be no more valuable than other land…because the intrinsic value of otherwise equivalent land – land in the same neighborhood and of the same size – should not depend on whether the land is bought for assembly or not."

The findings of the study: "that people in Los Angeles County want more dense development than the market is currently providing, but problems with land assembly are preventing the market from equilibrating."