Existing land use planning systems seem to have failed in regulating land development properly. As a consequence, tradable development rights (TDRs) have increasingly been promoted as a regulatory alternative. This paper clarifies under which conditions TDRs can be a useful instrument to regulate land development. For this purpose, it first of all outlines the reasons why markets and existing planning approaches fail in governing land development. Moreover, it reflects on the experiences from air pollution control which have shown that the implementation of single tradable permits schemes may be neither desirable. Based on these insights, a pragmatic approach for land development control is proposed which embeds TDRs into the existing system of land use planning.