A draft of my chapter on “Land Use Regulation” for the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Classical Liberalism (edited by Richard Epstein, Liya Palagashvili, and Mario Rizzo) is now available on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Land use regulation is a major function of every government in the world. It raises many issues for classical liberalism. This chapter provides an overview of three of the most important areas of land-use policy: the use of eminent domain to forcibly take property for government-approved projects, regulations that restrict property owners’ use of their land, and the relationship between property rights in land and migration restrictions.
Part I covers the use of eminent domain to take private property, and arguments for its limitation to genuinely “public” projects, as opposed to coerced transfers between private owners. Advocates of the latter argue they are needed to overcome “holdout” problems. But unconstrained use of eminent domain is a serious threat to property rights and hampers economic development.
Part II considers regulatory restrictions on land use that do not involve physical occupation of property. There is a longstanding debate about the value of such restrictions and whether the government should pay owners compensation. The most significant regulatory restrictions of this type in many nations are zoning rules restricting housing construction.
Finally, Part III provides a critical overview of property-rights rationales for restricting mobility, particularly in the form of international migration. Such theories justify severely constraining the liberty and property rights of both migrants and natives.
In addition to contributing to this volume on classical liberalism, I am also a contributor to Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism, edited by Jason Brennan, Bas van der Vossen, and David Schmidtz, and the Cambridge Handbook of Classical Liberal Thought, edited by M. Todd Henderson. Yet, I’m far from clear on what differentiates libertarianism and classical liberalism, or even if there really is a meaningful difference between the two. I explored that question in more detail in a previous post.
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