Land Use Change Dynamics in Southern California: Does Geographic Elasticity Matter?

Abstract

This article examines how municipal planning contexts can shape urban land use dynamics by investigating the parcel-level land use changes in a five-county Southern California metropolitan area between 1990 and 2005. An analysis, based on a multinomial logit model, shows that land use change patterns significantly vary by municipalities that were situated in heterogeneous planning contexts. More specifically, cities with limited ability to expand their jurisdictional boundaries are found to provide more recreational areas and urban open spaces, while restricting nonconventional land uses. However, no evidence of a shift from single-family to multifamily residential development is detected for such cities.

Navigating the Future: Land Redevelopment Scenarios and Broader Impact Assessment in Southern California

“…In an attempt to support more informed decision making, we conduct a baseline land use change simulation and scenario-based impact assessment. For the baseline simulation, we employ a multinomial logit model, which has been widely used for empirical investigations of urban land use change (see e.g., Zhou and Kockelman, 2008;Fragkias and Geoghegan, 2010;Kim et al, 2017) and can be briefly expressed as follows.…”

Building more housing near transit: A spatial analysis of residential densification dynamics

“…Some of these studies analyzed changes in lot sizes, floor-to-area ratios, dwelling units per acre, and/or housing composition to capture the detailed patterns of densification processes (see, e.g., Atkinson-Palombo, 2010;Broitman and Koomen, 2015;Kopits et al, 2012;Delmelle et al, 2014). More recent work, such as Gabbe (2018) and Kim et al (2018), explored what facilitated or impeded the more intensive use of urban land parcels using comprehensive land use datasets, as done in this study.…”

“…Not all municipalities are equally cooperative in establishing visions and planning strategies for the entire region. Rather, in this large metropolitan region with over 180 cities, land use decisions are largely influenced by each city's unique situation and municipal planning contexts (Kim et al, 2018). Recent years have witnessed rising tensions over the extent to which cities control land use and the exclusiveness of local land use power (Stahl, 2020).…”

“…To accomplish this, given that densification is a rare event, the sampling procedure here is designed to (1) first select densified land parcels (1s) in a random fashion with the minimum distance and (2) then choose a matched number of non-densified parcels (0s) in the same manner, as presented in Figure 3. 3 By doing so, this spatial sampling approach provides a desired ratio of 1 and 0 observations, all of which are spaced apart from each other, while ensuring statistical randomness as much as possible in the iterative selection process, as done in Kim et al (2018).…”

Income Inequality and Economic Segregation in Los Angeles from 1980 to 2010

“…The newly incorporated places have surrounded existing localities, limiting their ability to expand geographically and achieve a critical mass for fiscal efficiency and other goals (Kim et al 2018). Furthermore, this fragmented structure of governance has profound implications for the working of the metropolitan region, shaping the behaviour of both public and private sectors (Kim and Jurey 2013).…”