Housing costs

I've told people before that if I were mayor the first thing I would do to address the lack of housing in D.C. would be to get a bunch of developers together and ask them what part regulation plays in driving costs upwards as I suspect it would be significant. Seems that this guy agrees with me.

Almost as a rule, Glaeser is skeptical of the lack-of-land argument. He has previously noted (with a collaborator, Matthew Kahn) that 95 percent of the United States remains undeveloped and that if every American were given a house on a quarter acre, so that every family of four had a full acre, that distribution would not use up half the land in Texas. Most of Boston's metro area, he concluded, wasn't particularly dense, and even in places where it was, like the centers of Boston and Cambridge, there was ample opportunity to construct higher buildings with more housing units.

So, after sorting through a mountain of data, Glaeser decided that the housing crisis was man-made. The region's zoning regulations — which were enacted by locales in the first half of the 20th century to separate residential land from commercial and industrial land and which generally promoted the orderly growth of suburbs — had become so various and complex in the second half of the 20th century that they were limiting growth. Land-use rules of the 1920's were meant to assure homeowners that their neighbors wouldn't raise hogs in their backyards, throw up a shack on a sliver of land nearby or build a factory next door, but the zoning rules of the 1970's and 1980's were different in nature and effect. Regulations in Glaeser's new hometown of Weston, for instance, made extremely large lot sizes mandatory in some neighborhoods and placed high environmental hurdles (some reasonable, others not, in Glaeser's view) in front of developers. Other towns passed ordinances governing sidewalks, street widths, the shape of lots, septic lines and so on — all with the result, in Glaeser's analysis, of curtailing the supply of housing. The same phenomenon, he says, has inflated prices in metro areas all along the East and West Coasts.

So why don't we do something about it then and change the rules? Well, one reason is that so many people have a vested interest in maintaining the current system, namely homeowners. After all, if you make it cheaper to buy new homes the supply will go up and prices will go down.

His other project is both more ambitious and more difficult. He and Gyourko say they know that the country's regulatory environment, and thus the supply of housing, began to change around 1975. But they don't know why it changed. So along with a third researcher, Raven Saks, they have begun to track building permits from hundreds of cities around the country over the past four decades to investigate the nature of the evolution. Glaeser speculates that there may be a viral phenomenon whereby once housing prices reach a certain level, residents become aware of high home values and agitate for restrictions; another possibility is that judges have become much more sympathetic to blocking development for environmental reasons. Still another thought: that homeowners, utilizing skills learned during the civil rights movement and political protests of the 1960's and 1970's, became much more adept at organizing against developers. (There appears to be a reasonable correlation between liberal enclaves, zoning regulations and high housing prices.) In any event, Glaeser says, he doesn't know the answer yet, and it may take years to find out.

I'm not surprised -- you see this all the time in my neighborhood newspaper. As soon as a developer announces plans to build something people come out of the woodwork in opposition. It's gotten so bad that I read last week some people are looking into acquiring a historic designation for a Pizza Hut that a developer wants to turn into condos. Kid you not.

HT: Jane Galt.