“To help solve this problem, we used publicly available zoning and land use information to build the National Zoning and Land Use Database (NZLUD). This process, which we describe in a new paper published in Urban Studies, involved downloading and processing the text of municipal codes containing zoning and land use policies. Rather than do this by hand, we used tools from computer science to automate the process. To make sure that these methods produced reliable results, we then replicated zoning and land use measures from previous studies for over 2,600 municipalities across the U.S., yielding very similar conclusions.”