UCLA

Regional economic development is shaped by the growth dynamics of certain industries. The forces that shape industrial location across regions reflect the demand by industries for a particular region, which is determined by the economic geography of an industry, and the comparative advantage of the region for that industry. Large metropolitan regions are not uniformly attractive to key industries, but instead offer a wide range of different locational attributes. Within metropolitan regions, decision-making is fragmented across myriad local governments. These governments (cities and their planning and economic development activities) act in a disjointed manner to shape where industries locate. Thus, local authorities may have effects on industrial location and efficiency that go beyond their borders, as they shape the geography of the industry in the region as a whole. The changing geography of the information technology (IT) industry in the San Francisco Bay Area, the home of Silicon Valley, is a key example of the intersection of the economic geography of an industry with local economic development policies. The IT industry has dispersed from its original home in Santa Clara County, around the broader 10-county metropolitan region. In 1990, cities in Santa Clara County were home to 71% of the region’s IT jobs; in 2010, they were home to 57% of these jobs. This dissertation finds that land use regulation has shaped the geography of the industry within the regional economy and considers the effects of this evolution. The principal contribution of this dissertation is to bring together two bodies of theory and evidence that are typically considered in isolation from one another: local land use and economic development actions and economic geography. By doing this, it allows consideration of how uncoordinated local actions pertaining to land use and economic development might affect the performance of an industry that functions at a metropolitan scale, and hence reevaluate the actions of local planners in terms of wider regional economic development effects.