Vicki L. Been

Courses

• Colloquium on Law, Economics and Politics of Urban Affairs

  This course will allow students to explore the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of current debates about landlord/tenant law. As Matt Desmond's Pulitzer Prize winning Evicted revealed, evictions and other housing instability for renters is exacting a huge toll on households, children, and neighborhoods. Cities across the country are proposing reforms, ranging from access to legal services for all low income tenants to new generation rent-regulation regimes. But there is much we don't know about how housing courts work, how tenants negotiate disputes with their landlords, how local governments enforce housing quality requirements and other tenant protections, and how landlords respond to changes in the legal regimes. Further, many of the reforms are untested, and may not be cost effective, or may have serious unintended consequences. We will meet with nationally prominent scholars and practitioners in law, economics, sociology, and public administration to discuss research in progress on these issues. In background sessions, students learn the law, theory and methodology necessary to discuss the work in progress with its author. In colloquium sessions, students discuss the work with the author and other invited guests. Students submit written questions for the author and prepare short papers critiquing the work and the author's defense of the work.

• Land Use Regulation

  This course examines how land use is regulated and controlled. It begins by discussing why and when government regulation, rather than private market ordering, might be necessary to control land use patterns. It develops a typology of the kinds of regulatory and market-based tools that are available to control land use, and provides a framework for evaluating the appropriateness of alternative tools. It then explores the rights an owner of land has if a particular regulation of land is either inefficient, unfairly burdensome, unfairly disruptive of the owner's settled expectations, or an infringement upon the owner's civil liberties. The course then switches sides to examine the rights of those who oppose the landowner's plans. Finally, the course focuses on particular problems that plague the land use regulatory system, such as the financing of development, exclusionary zoning, residential segregation, the fair distribution of undesirable land uses, and gentrification.