Louis A. Rose

Urban land supply: Natural and contrived restrictions

Abstract Both large bodies of water and local governments restrict the supply of urban land. In this paper we measure waters restriction on supply and test its effect on land price. We then extend Hamiltons and Fischels pioneering work on governmental restriction, providing an improved test of the monopoly zoning hypothesis that such restriction further affects land price. Regression analysis of data from 45 urban areas suggests that the two restrictions combine to explain 40% of typical interurban price differentials.

Topographical constraints and urban land supply indexes

Abstract This paper develops and applies a method for measuring the extent to which large bodies of water restrict urban land supply. The amount of land available for urban use is the sum of weighted annular areas, net of water, around the urban center. The weights exponentially decrease toward zero with distance from the center at a rate determined by the population density gradient. The method of measurement and the weights are derived from the theory of a monocentric city with a perfectly competitive land market. The method is applied to calculate land supply indexes for the 40 most populous U.S. urban areas in 1980, and indexes over time for two land-filled urban areas. Such indexes can be constructed to account for restrictions imposed by mountains and by zoning. They are useful in empirical studies of land, housing, transportation, and population density.

Land values and housing rents in urban Japan

This paper describes and systematically explains observed variation in land values and housing rents in urban Japan. It fits a structural models reduced form equations to intertemporal data over 35 years, intercity data across 27 major cities, and intracity data in the three largest metropolitan areas. Explanatory variables are population, income, their growth rates, the interest rate, the inflation rate, urban land supply, and distance from the city center.

Urban Land Price: The Extraordinary Case of Honolulu, Hawaii

The price of land in Honolulu is higher than in any other major US urban area. This paper examines several determinants of the supply and demand for land and discusses their likely influence on Honolulus land price. It utilises comparisons between demand and supply conditions in Honolulu and in the forty most populous US urban areas to ascertain the strength of the respective determinants. The regression results confirm that natural and institutional constraints restricting the supply of land play an important role in determining price in Honolulu and in the forty-city sample.

The Political Economy of Urban Land Reform in Hawaii

In the mid 1960s there were about 22 000 single-family leasehold homes in Honolulu. Dissatisfaction with leasehold led to reform legislation in 1967, allowing lessees to buy leased land. By 1991 less than 5000 lessees remained. This paper examines why landowners elected to lease rather than sell land and attributes the rise of leasehold to legal constraints on land sales by large estates, duties of estate trustees and the federal tax code. Ideological forces initiated land reform in 1967, but rent-seeking forces captured the process in the mid 1970s. It is concluded that Hawaiis experiment with leasehold was a failure due to the difficulties associated with specifying and enforcing long-term contracts in residential land.