Can Land Use Regulation Be Smarter? Planners' Role in the Informal Housing Challenge.

The article focuses on the role of land use regulation in shaping and sustaining informal housing within rapidly urbanizing cities, particularly in the Global South. It develops an integrated model that accounts for variations in income, location, and regulatory regimes to assess the effective regulatory burden on households and the absorptive capacity of formal housing markets. The framework incorporates classical urban economic theories—such as Tiebout's jurisdictional sorting and Alonso's spatial trade-offs—to explain how households adjust to land use constraints by relocating across jurisdictions or urban peripheries, often resulting in informal housing outcomes for lower-income groups. The model offers planners a practical tool to audit existing land use policies, revealing equity and efficiency implications and guiding targeted regulatory adjustments to better accommodate diverse urban populations.