From Middle to Upper Class Sprawl? Land Use Controls and Changing Patterns of Real Estate Development in Northern New Jersey

During the past twenty-five years the land use controls that shape residential real estate development in the United States have changed in potentially significant ways. From the 1950s to the 1980s, land use laws promoted middle-class sprawl by reserving extensive tracts of land for the construction of moderately priced, single-family homes on lots of less than one acre. More recently, suburbs have adopted land use controls that promote upper class sprawl by reserving large areas for the construction of small numbers of expensive homes on spacious lots. This regulatory shift can be explained in several ways: a homevoter hypothesis that derives the new controls from the economic interests of suburban homeowners and a regional spillover hypothesis that attributes the adoption of new controls to desires by planning commissioners, consultants, and nongovernmental organizations to do as other communities are doing. We assess these explanations through a case study of changing land use controls in the suburban New Jersey Highlands west of New York City. Between 1975 and 2002 the region saw large increases in preserved open space, a doubling of the required minimum lot area for houses, increases in the real price of housing, declines in the number of newly constructed homes, and a shift in residential real estate development toward the urban core. Multivariate analyses of the changes in land use controls support the regional spillover hypothesis. The implications of this dynamic for conservation policies, environmental injustices, and greenhouse gas emissions are briefly explored.