Moving to the country: Understanding the effects of Covid-19 on property values and farmland development risk

•Land use change projections are important tools for land use planning and the implementation of farmland protection policies as they identify agricultural lands that are most at risk of being developed and help inform conservation priorities. However, these projections are highly dependent on their underlying assumptions and market trends. Since socioeconomic shocks can alter market trends, it is critical to assess the need to projections if these underlying assumptions and trends no longer hold. The goal of this paper is to assess how the COVID-19 pandemic may have altered land use projections, particularly housing demand at the urban-agricultural interface.•This paper uses ZTRAX program U.S. housing transaction data and novel, nationwide land-use projections to conduct a national hedonic difference-in-difference analysis to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic has altered development pressure at the urban-agricultural margin. The analysis includes state-level analyses for 33 states and a national analysis with a sample of 3.7 million property transactions that occurred outside of highly developed areas.•We use the land use projections to define treatment and control groups, such that treated parcels are those in an area that is projected to be developed by 2040 (“high-risk”), and control parcels are all other parcels in our sample.•We find evidence that following the pandemic onset development pressure has decreased in areas projected to be developed. We also find evidence that this pattern holds in areas of high development risk around cities larger than 50,000 people, but around small cities, with less than 50,000 people, we find evidence that development pressure has increased in these areas projected to be developed.•Updated land use protections provide vital information for land-use planners and policy makers at state and local levels, where the majority of land use planning and policy decisions occur, which motivates our state-level analyses, which is the focus of our paper.