Michael Manville
Biographic Data
| ID | 4408739 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Manville |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Manville |
| SIGNATURE | MANVILLE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4218-6427 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
State Preemption in Theory and Practice
In U.S. law, states can override actions of local governments that contravene state interests. In practice, preemptions are often more ambiguous nudges, and local responses can vary by interpretation and interests. This paper explores one such case of state preemption: California's 2022 law that limited local governments’ ability to require automobile parking. We find that the law's complexity and ambiguity created intense debates about interpret…
Neighborhood change and transit ridership
Using data from Southern California, we examine the idea that rising housing prices in transit-rich neighborhoods contributed to pre-COVID declines in transit use. We merge ridership data from the Los Angeles region’s two largest transit providers with tract-level Census data on housing costs and other socioeconomic attributes. We show descriptively that a small share of Census tracts account for a disproportionate share of both total transit rid…
Renter Nonpayment and Landlord Response
How renters respond to economic hardship, and how landlords respond when tenants fail to make rent, are understudied questions, owing largely to limited data. We use experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic to begin answering these questions. Drawing on both new census data and two original surveys of renters in Los Angeles County, we test nine hypotheses about the sources of renter distress and landlord reactions to it. We find that lost work and …
Liberals and Housing
Do political liberals support or oppose zoning changes that allow more market-rate development? I use survey data from California and show that liberals are ambivalent. The ambivalence is explained in part by homeownership, which is associated with opposition to new housing of all kinds, even as it has little influence on attitudes about other policies. Even controlling for ownership, however, I find that self-identified liberals remain ambivalen…
Does Discretion Delay Development
Problem, research strategy, and findings Local governments sometimes approve multifamily housing through a discretionary process, meaning a public body must vote to entitle the proposal before it can seek a building permit. By-right entitlement, in contrast, allows developers to apply directly for a building permit. We tested the hypothesis that by-right approvals are faster. Faster approval can make multifamily development more feasible, which c…
Vehicle access and falling transit ridership
ACSP Distinguished Educator, 2017
Unwanted Housing
We examine pervasive opposition to building market-rate housing and relate it to localism: a perspective that grants moral authority to incumbent residents. We argue that localism has become prevalent in housing planning in the United States and that its seeming equality-allowing all communities the right to define themselves-conceals profound imbalances that favor the affluent. We use survey data from California to measure localism, using opposi…
It’s Time to End Single-Family Zoning
Local planning in the United States is unique in the amount of land it reserves for detached single-family homes. This privileging of single-family homes, normally called R1 zoning, exacerbates inequality and undermines efficiency. R1’s origins are unpleasant: Stained by explicitly classist and implicitly racist motivations, R1 today continues to promote exclusion. It makes it harder for people to access high-opportunity places, and in expensive …
Planning Knowledge and the Regulatory Hydra
"Planning Knowledge and the Regulatory Hydra." Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(2), pp. 268–269
Last Thoughts From Manville, Monkkonen, and Lens
This article responds to: The View From Minneapolis: Comments on “Death to Single-Family Zoning” and “It’s Time to End Single-Family Zoning”, Ending Single-Family Zoning: Is There a Plan B?, Not a Matter of Choice: Eliminating Single-Family Zoning, Calls to End All Single-Family Zoning Need More Scrutiny, Eliminating Existing Single-Family Zoning Is a Mistake, Though Rumors of Its Demise Might Be Exaggerated..., The Detached Single-Family Home Ge…
Zoning and affordability
Would increasing allowable housing densities in expensive cities generate more housing construction and make housing more affordable? In a provocative article, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper survey the evidence and answer no. Restrictions on housing density, they contend, do not substantially influence housing production or price. They further argue that allowing more density in growing metropolitan areas would only improve housing out…
Parking behaviour
The Poverty of the Carless
We document the falling socioeconomic status of American households without private vehicles and the continuing financial burden that cars present for low-income households that own them. We tie both these trends to the auto-orientation of America’s built environment, which forces people to either spend heavily on cars or risk being locked out of the economy. We first show that vehicle access remains difficult for low-income households and vehicl…
Opposition to development or opposition to developers? Experimental evidence on attitudes toward new housing
Opposition to new housing at higher densities is a pervasive and understudied problem, and an obstacle to both urban sustainability and housing affordability. Most existing research on housing opposition focuses on subsidized affordable housing, rather than new market-rate development. Scholars also tend to examine opponents' stated concerns, which often overlap and may obscure their underlying motivations. This article uses a survey-framing expe…
The Social and Fiscal Consequences of Urban Decline
We examine the fiscal consequences of sustained population loss in American cities. We find the starkest difference between growing and declining cities in their levels of social and economic distress: Declining cities have higher rates of poverty and crime. Our evidence also suggests that shrinking cities have less fiscal capacity than growing cities, although this relationship is complicated by an apparent nonlinearity: Shrinking and rapidly gr…
Motivations for Growth Revolts
This article suggests that “ballot box growth revolts”—instances where citizens use direct democracy to curb development—may be caused by local governments’ use of discretionary development approvals. We further suggest that growth revolts themselves provide a useful window into discretionary approvals, and illustrate how discretion can create conflict. Discretion is appealing to fiscally constrained cities because it lets them bargain with devel…
Would Congestion Pricing Harm the Poor? Do Free Roads Help the Poor
Congestion pricing could reduce urban congestion, but might disproportionately benefit the affluent and burden the poor. We show that this common concern also applies to free roads. Free urban highways primarily subsidize richer people, and the resulting congestion creates pollution that disproportionately burdens poorer people. Furthermore, the poor drivers burdened by peak-hour road pricing would be a small minority of total peak-hour drivers a…
Why do voters support public transportation? Public choices and private behavior
Credible commitment and congestion pricing
The Price Doesn’t Matter If You Don’t Have to Pay
Congestion pricing is an effective way to combat congestion, and market prices for curb parking are an appealing way to implement pricing, because paying to park is more politically acceptable than paying to drive. But pricing is effective only if users have to pay, and market-priced parking is vulnerable to nonpayment. To illustrate this problem, we survey parking meters in Los Angeles. We focus on legal nonpayment, and show that almost 40 perce…
People, Race and Place
This article examines an idea that is often asserted but rarely tested: that Americans associate big cities with African Americans and that, as a result, racial attitudes influence support for urban policy. Thirty-five years of public opinion data show that cities are in fact a ‘racialised’ concept, and that the relationship between racial attitudes and support for place-based urban policy is as large as that between racial attitudes and support …
Behaviour, Preferences and Cities
The resurgence of big, old cities and their regions is real, but it is merely a part of a broader pattern of urban change in the developed countries, whose broadest tendency is urban emergence, including suburbanisation, and movements of population to certain 'Sunbelt' regions. The problem is that it is difficult to accommodate explanation of both resurgence and emergence using the main explanations in the field today. These include: theories of …
Beyond the Spatial Mismatch
Beneath the broad umbrella of agreement about transportation’s relationship to poverty is considerable discord about the specific nature of the problem and about where and how transportation solutions should be applied. Much of the existing scholarship on this topic focuses on the spatial mismatch hypothesis, the geographic separation between employment and housing. Although this concept has merit, to meet the transportation needs of welfare reci…
Behaviour, Preferences and Cities
The resurgence of big, old cities and their regions is real, but it is merely a part of a broader pattern of urban change in the developed countries, whose broadest tendency is urban emergence, including suburbanisation, and movements of population to certain 'Sunbelt' regions. The problem is that it is difficult to accommodate explanation of both resurgence and emergence using the main explanations in the field today. These include: theories of …
The Poverty of the Carless
We document the falling socioeconomic status of American households without private vehicles and the continuing financial burden that cars present for low-income households that own them. We tie both these trends to the auto-orientation of America’s built environment, which forces people to either spend heavily on cars or risk being locked out of the economy. We first show that vehicle access remains difficult for low-income households and vehicl…
Zoning and affordability
Would increasing allowable housing densities in expensive cities generate more housing construction and make housing more affordable? In a provocative article, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper survey the evidence and answer no. Restrictions on housing density, they contend, do not substantially influence housing production or price. They further argue that allowing more density in growing metropolitan areas would only improve housing out…
Opposition to development or opposition to developers? Experimental evidence on attitudes toward new housing
Opposition to new housing at higher densities is a pervasive and understudied problem, and an obstacle to both urban sustainability and housing affordability. Most existing research on housing opposition focuses on subsidized affordable housing, rather than new market-rate development. Scholars also tend to examine opponents' stated concerns, which often overlap and may obscure their underlying motivations. This article uses a survey-framing expe…
The Social and Fiscal Consequences of Urban Decline
We examine the fiscal consequences of sustained population loss in American cities. We find the starkest difference between growing and declining cities in their levels of social and economic distress: Declining cities have higher rates of poverty and crime. Our evidence also suggests that shrinking cities have less fiscal capacity than growing cities, although this relationship is complicated by an apparent nonlinearity: Shrinking and rapidly gr…
Unwanted Housing
We examine pervasive opposition to building market-rate housing and relate it to localism: a perspective that grants moral authority to incumbent residents. We argue that localism has become prevalent in housing planning in the United States and that its seeming equality-allowing all communities the right to define themselves-conceals profound imbalances that favor the affluent. We use survey data from California to measure localism, using opposi…
Motivations for Growth Revolts
This article suggests that “ballot box growth revolts”—instances where citizens use direct democracy to curb development—may be caused by local governments’ use of discretionary development approvals. We further suggest that growth revolts themselves provide a useful window into discretionary approvals, and illustrate how discretion can create conflict. Discretion is appealing to fiscally constrained cities because it lets them bargain with devel…
Would Congestion Pricing Harm the Poor? Do Free Roads Help the Poor
Congestion pricing could reduce urban congestion, but might disproportionately benefit the affluent and burden the poor. We show that this common concern also applies to free roads. Free urban highways primarily subsidize richer people, and the resulting congestion creates pollution that disproportionately burdens poorer people. Furthermore, the poor drivers burdened by peak-hour road pricing would be a small minority of total peak-hour drivers a…
Parking behaviour
People, Race and Place
This article examines an idea that is often asserted but rarely tested: that Americans associate big cities with African Americans and that, as a result, racial attitudes influence support for urban policy. Thirty-five years of public opinion data show that cities are in fact a ‘racialised’ concept, and that the relationship between racial attitudes and support for place-based urban policy is as large as that between racial attitudes and support …
Beyond the Spatial Mismatch
Beneath the broad umbrella of agreement about transportation’s relationship to poverty is considerable discord about the specific nature of the problem and about where and how transportation solutions should be applied. Much of the existing scholarship on this topic focuses on the spatial mismatch hypothesis, the geographic separation between employment and housing. Although this concept has merit, to meet the transportation needs of welfare reci…
Behaviour, Preferences and Cities
The resurgence of big, old cities and their regions is real, but it is merely a part of a broader pattern of urban change in the developed countries, whose broadest tendency is urban emergence, including suburbanisation, and movements of population to certain 'Sunbelt' regions. The problem is that it is difficult to accommodate explanation of both resurgence and emergence using the main explanations in the field today. These include: theories of …
The Price Doesn’t Matter If You Don’t Have to Pay
Congestion pricing is an effective way to combat congestion, and market prices for curb parking are an appealing way to implement pricing, because paying to park is more politically acceptable than paying to drive. But pricing is effective only if users have to pay, and market-priced parking is vulnerable to nonpayment. To illustrate this problem, we survey parking meters in Los Angeles. We focus on legal nonpayment, and show that almost 40 perce…
People, Race and Place
This article examines an idea that is often asserted but rarely tested: that Americans associate big cities with African Americans and that, as a result, racial attitudes influence support for urban policy. Thirty-five years of public opinion data show that cities are in fact a ‘racialised’ concept, and that the relationship between racial attitudes and support for place-based urban policy is as large as that between racial attitudes and support …
Credible commitment and congestion pricing
Why do voters support public transportation? Public choices and private behavior
Motivations for Growth Revolts
This article suggests that “ballot box growth revolts”—instances where citizens use direct democracy to curb development—may be caused by local governments’ use of discretionary development approvals. We further suggest that growth revolts themselves provide a useful window into discretionary approvals, and illustrate how discretion can create conflict. Discretion is appealing to fiscally constrained cities because it lets them bargain with devel…
Would Congestion Pricing Harm the Poor? Do Free Roads Help the Poor
Congestion pricing could reduce urban congestion, but might disproportionately benefit the affluent and burden the poor. We show that this common concern also applies to free roads. Free urban highways primarily subsidize richer people, and the resulting congestion creates pollution that disproportionately burdens poorer people. Furthermore, the poor drivers burdened by peak-hour road pricing would be a small minority of total peak-hour drivers a…
The Social and Fiscal Consequences of Urban Decline
We examine the fiscal consequences of sustained population loss in American cities. We find the starkest difference between growing and declining cities in their levels of social and economic distress: Declining cities have higher rates of poverty and crime. Our evidence also suggests that shrinking cities have less fiscal capacity than growing cities, although this relationship is complicated by an apparent nonlinearity: Shrinking and rapidly gr…
The Poverty of the Carless
We document the falling socioeconomic status of American households without private vehicles and the continuing financial burden that cars present for low-income households that own them. We tie both these trends to the auto-orientation of America’s built environment, which forces people to either spend heavily on cars or risk being locked out of the economy. We first show that vehicle access remains difficult for low-income households and vehicl…
Opposition to development or opposition to developers? Experimental evidence on attitudes toward new housing
Opposition to new housing at higher densities is a pervasive and understudied problem, and an obstacle to both urban sustainability and housing affordability. Most existing research on housing opposition focuses on subsidized affordable housing, rather than new market-rate development. Scholars also tend to examine opponents' stated concerns, which often overlap and may obscure their underlying motivations. This article uses a survey-framing expe…
It’s Time to End Single-Family Zoning
Local planning in the United States is unique in the amount of land it reserves for detached single-family homes. This privileging of single-family homes, normally called R1 zoning, exacerbates inequality and undermines efficiency. R1’s origins are unpleasant: Stained by explicitly classist and implicitly racist motivations, R1 today continues to promote exclusion. It makes it harder for people to access high-opportunity places, and in expensive …
Planning Knowledge and the Regulatory Hydra
"Planning Knowledge and the Regulatory Hydra." Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(2), pp. 268–269
Last Thoughts From Manville, Monkkonen, and Lens
This article responds to: The View From Minneapolis: Comments on “Death to Single-Family Zoning” and “It’s Time to End Single-Family Zoning”, Ending Single-Family Zoning: Is There a Plan B?, Not a Matter of Choice: Eliminating Single-Family Zoning, Calls to End All Single-Family Zoning Need More Scrutiny, Eliminating Existing Single-Family Zoning Is a Mistake, Though Rumors of Its Demise Might Be Exaggerated..., The Detached Single-Family Home Ge…
Zoning and affordability
Would increasing allowable housing densities in expensive cities generate more housing construction and make housing more affordable? In a provocative article, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper survey the evidence and answer no. Restrictions on housing density, they contend, do not substantially influence housing production or price. They further argue that allowing more density in growing metropolitan areas would only improve housing out…
Parking behaviour
Unwanted Housing
We examine pervasive opposition to building market-rate housing and relate it to localism: a perspective that grants moral authority to incumbent residents. We argue that localism has become prevalent in housing planning in the United States and that its seeming equality-allowing all communities the right to define themselves-conceals profound imbalances that favor the affluent. We use survey data from California to measure localism, using opposi…
ACSP Distinguished Educator, 2017
Renter Nonpayment and Landlord Response
How renters respond to economic hardship, and how landlords respond when tenants fail to make rent, are understudied questions, owing largely to limited data. We use experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic to begin answering these questions. Drawing on both new census data and two original surveys of renters in Los Angeles County, we test nine hypotheses about the sources of renter distress and landlord reactions to it. We find that lost work and …
Liberals and Housing
Do political liberals support or oppose zoning changes that allow more market-rate development? I use survey data from California and show that liberals are ambivalent. The ambivalence is explained in part by homeownership, which is associated with opposition to new housing of all kinds, even as it has little influence on attitudes about other policies. Even controlling for ownership, however, I find that self-identified liberals remain ambivalen…
Does Discretion Delay Development
Problem, research strategy, and findings Local governments sometimes approve multifamily housing through a discretionary process, meaning a public body must vote to entitle the proposal before it can seek a building permit. By-right entitlement, in contrast, allows developers to apply directly for a building permit. We tested the hypothesis that by-right approvals are faster. Faster approval can make multifamily development more feasible, which c…
Vehicle access and falling transit ridership
Neighborhood change and transit ridership
Using data from Southern California, we examine the idea that rising housing prices in transit-rich neighborhoods contributed to pre-COVID declines in transit use. We merge ridership data from the Los Angeles region’s two largest transit providers with tract-level Census data on housing costs and other socioeconomic attributes. We show descriptively that a small share of Census tracts account for a disproportionate share of both total transit rid…
State Preemption in Theory and Practice
In U.S. law, states can override actions of local governments that contravene state interests. In practice, preemptions are often more ambiguous nudges, and local responses can vary by interpretation and interests. This paper explores one such case of state preemption: California's 2022 law that limited local governments’ ability to require automobile parking. We find that the law's complexity and ambiguity created intense debates about interpret…
Political science (15 works) · Economics (13 works) · Business (11 works) · Housing Market and Economics (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Engineering (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Transport engineering (8 works) · Urban Transport and Accessibility (8 works) · Transportation Planning and Optimization (7 works)