6  Land Use Regulations in Northern Virginia: A National Zoning Atlas

By Eli Kahn, Andrew Crouch, and Emily Hamilton¹

Originally published at Mercatus.

6.1 Introduction

In recent years, policymakers have sought solutions to the housing shortages that plague their constituents with increasing urgency. Following decades of research and increasing activist pressure to reduce restrictions on homebuilding, these policymakers and scholars are looking critically at zoning regulations and local rules that shape the type and quantity of housing allowed to be built. Local policymakers largely determine their own zoning rules and permit-approval processes, and learning how land use is regulated across locales requires consulting zoning ordinances in tens of thousands of jurisdictions in the United States.

The lack of data on zoning regulations in various local jurisdictions where they are enacted has previously inhibited research on how these rules specifically affect housing construction and prices. The National Zoning Atlas (NZA) addresses the limited information on zoning rules across the country by compiling data on rules that constrain housing construction. Researchers at the NZA along with local teams across the country have been contributing to the atlas since 2020, with complete data for nearly 3,000 jurisdictions so far. Over the past year, our team added Northern Virginia to the NZA database, creating an in-depth picture of the current regulation of housing in one of the nation’s most prosperous regions.

In this policy brief, we explain the value of collecting data on zoning and the NZA methodology, we detail results from our analysis of regulations in Northern Virginia, and we provide context for our findings.