The Best-Selling Urban Law eBooks of All Time

Many major American cities are defying the conventional wisdom that suburbs are the communities of the future. But as these urban centers prosper, they increasingly confront significant constraints. In City Bound, Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron address these limits in a new way. Based on a study of the differing legal structures of Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle, City Bound explores how state law determines what cities can and cannot do to raise revenue, control land use, and improve city schools.

Frug and Barron show that state law can make it much easier for cities to pursue a global-city or a tourist-city agenda than to respond to the needs of middle-class residents or to pursue regional alliances. But they also explain that state law is often so outdated, and so rooted in an unjustified distrust of local decision making, that the legal process makes it hard for successful cities to develop and implement any coherent vision of their future. Their book calls not for local autonomy but for a new structure of state-local relations that would enable cities to take the lead in charting the future course of urban development. It should be of interest to everyone who cares about the future of American cities, whether political scientists, planners, architects, lawyers, or simply citizens.

“Fischel . . . does for the housing debate what zoning once did for cities: brings order and coherence to what’s otherwise a mess.” — Ezra Klein, New York Times. This best-selling book describes how zoning has been overused by local communities to block new housing development in ways that exacerbate sprawl and social inequity. Named one of the best urban planning books of the decade by Planetizen, Zoning Rules! lays out the history, motivation, structure, and impact of municipal zoning in the United States and offers more effective approaches for developers and public officials to consider when instituting new regulations.

In Urban Land Rent, Anne Haila uses Singapore as a case study to develop an original theory of urban land rent with important implications for urban studies and urban theory.

Provides a comprehensive analysis of land, rent theory, and the modern cityExamines the question of land from a variety of perspectives: as a resource, ideologies, interventions in the land market, actors in the land market, the global scope of land markets, and investments in landDetails the Asian development state model, historical and contemporary land regimes, public housing models, and the development industry for Singapore and several other citiesIncorporates discussion of the modern real estate market, with reference to real estate investment trusts, sovereign wealth funds investing in real estate, and the fusion between sophisticated financial instruments and real estate.