Thinking Outside the Lot: Historical Parcel Boundaries and Housing Supply
Published:
with Devin Bissky-Dziadyk and Stephan Heblich
Abstract:
This project studies how those historical subdivision patterns and regulatory choices continue to constrain housing supply. While current policy debates focus on zoning reform and density increases, redevelopment in built-up neighborhoods depends not only on regulation but also on the inherited configuration of land and built form. Where land is divided into many small parcels, meaningful increases in density typically require assembling multiple contiguous lots. This creates coordination problems, strategic holdout, and delay, potentially muting the housing supply response even when zoning allows additional density (Duranton and Puga, 2015; Glaeser and Gyourko, 2018; Baum-Snow and Duranton, 2025).
The objective is to quantify how historical parcel fragmentation affects the probability, timing, and scale of redevelopment today, and to measure how much these frictions reduce the housing supply elasticity in high-demand areas. The results will clarify to what extent persistent supply shortages stem from formal regulation versus coordination failures embedded in the city's historic parcel structure. This result carries practical implications for redevelopment policy in existing neighbourhoods, where parcel assembly frictions may warrant direct intervention, and for the design of new neighbourhoods to allow for densification a century after their initial development.