Land use regulations affect housing supply and affordability, which have implications for racial and economic segregation, urban sprawl, and neighborhood investment. But because of the decentralized nature of zoning, no central entity has records of localities’ varying local land use regulations across the country. This brief introduces the National Longitudinal Land Use Survey (NLLUS), created by the Urban Institute, to researchers, local officials, advocates, and residential development practitioners. The NLLUS captures a wide array of residential land-use practices from across the US based on surveys of jurisdictions in the most populous core-based statistical areas in the country in 1994, 2003, and 2019.
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