"The major portion of this paper examines the impacts on housing costs of the most important types of land-use, environmental, and construction regulations - zoning, subdivision controls, growth management techniques, building codes, and environmental regulations - by reviewing the literature and presenting some simple theoretical models. A final section of this paper presents some initial empirical results of the author's research on the impact of local land-use regulations on land and housing costs in California."--Page 3

Modern empirical work on the choice between renting and owning focuses on the concept of the "user cost" of housing, which integrates into a single measure the various components of housing costs. The standard approach implicitly assumes that households know the user cost of housing with certainty. However, the ex post user cost measure exhibits substantial variability over time, and it is highly unlikely that individuals believe themselves able to forecast these fluctuations with certainty. In this paper, we construct and estimate a model of the tenure choice that explicitly allows for the effects of uncertainty. The results suggest that previous work which ignored uncertainty may have overstated the effects of the income tax system upon the tenure choice.