geographic and income convergence started to slow in the 1960s, when rich people in rich places started constraining land use through regulation. This limited the housing supply in those places, which forced prices up, and started to squeeze out those with lower incomes.Housing prices have always been more expensive in high-income places, but the difference now is unbridgeable. The result is that people can’t get on the upward mobility ladder, thus increasing the inequality that these same elites bemoan. But they don’t see or understand the connection between this income divergence and their own regulations and restrictions.

home ownership limits people’s ability to move to a better place, and with zoning laws and other barriers in place, it can no longer be the foundation of middle class wealth. government policy behaves as if we are perpetually stuck in the 1960s, and we are spending a lot of money to create an illusion.
Zoning is the real liberal guilt. zoning laws are the root cause of a surprisingly large number of problems. they seem largely anachronistic from a time when it made sense to keep smoke stacks and residential building separate. now they are driven by NIMBY and it is time to blow most of them up.

Rent regulation can keep some existing residents in their homes, and affordable housing programs can bring a small number of middle-income people into wealthy neighborhoods, but neither can change the fundamental laws of supply and demand. If desirable neighborhoods don’t start shouldering more of the burden of increased urban demand, American cities will soon end up like their counterparts in Europe, where everyone except the rich and the tourists are shunted off to the suburbs.

And yet more examples how liberals are full of shit on housing:

Throughout, Astorino speaks of his commitment to affordable housing. He notes with pride the county’s diversity. He delivers part of his address in Spanish. And year after year, he pledges to protect the county’s exclusionary zoning against federal efforts to expand affordable housing.

NIMBYism is never about race, except when it is

It’s hard enough to build new market-rate housing in the cities that need housing most. In Washington, D.C., the zoning commission just decreased the maximum height on “pop-up” additions and construction in the parts of the city growing most rapidly. Homeowners in D.C. say that they want to protect the character of their neighborhood and the quality of construction during this boom time.

Even at the most granular level, NIMBYism can take the form of an entitled localism that sounds positive. A hyperlocal petition started by a condo-owner to keep a 7-Eleven out of a nearby storefront is a crypto-case of There Goes the Neighborhood–ism.

if you have insane zoning laws, this happens:

For the love of god, keep adding homes. Keep adding homes so things don’t get any worse and you’re not trapped in a lose-lose-lose shitstorm like San Francisco.

zoning is one of the most evil things preventing the changes we need to survive climate change

The zoning strait-jacket binds a large majority of urban land in the United States. Los Angeles and Chicago, 2 of the nation’s densest central cities, permit the building of only a detached house on, respectively, 75% and 79% of the areas they zone for residential use. In suburban areas, the percentage typically is far higher. In a companion study of zoning practices of 37 suburbs in Silicon Valley, Greater New Haven, and Greater Austin, I found that, in the aggregate, these municipalities had set aside 91% of their residentially zoned land (71% of their total land area) exclusively for detached houses.

Zoning also makes Transit unworkable:

large swaths of desirable, close-in areas with relatively short buildings are highlit. Rich inner Brooklyn neighborhoods like Park Slope and South Brooklyn are currently built to missing middle density, with a floor area ratio of ~1.5 away from corner lots. A more appropriate floor area ratio in these neighborhoods is 12, corresponding to tapering buildings in the 20-30 story range, as on the avenues on the Upper East and West Sides. Park Slope is 30 min from Midtown by subway, and less than that from Lower Manhattan. The population of these neighborhoods is perhaps 150k, and should be more than 1m given their proximity to job centers.

Speaking of climate, lack of shade is also due to zoning:

Is it too hot to walk around the block? Sure, blame global warming, but in many parts of the country there is also a noticeable absence of shade. Why? One reason is that shade has been zoned out.

NYC could look a lot more like a real city:

Manhattan would look more like Sao Paulo, with a true forest of skyscrapers instead of the current puny and indeed embarrassing line-up.

Instead, we’re stuck with the embarrassing skyline we have:

Most people (even residents) never realize how New York City’s iconic skyline has been shaped by the city’s zoning codes. The variety in architectural styles is as much related to trends in design and technology as it has to do with changes in the zoning code over time. Moreover, certain key buildings themselves inspired the zoning resolutions of 1916 and 1961. On the 50th Anniversary of the 1961 New York City Zoning Ordinance, here’s a look back.

why staten island is a hell hole, in a nutshell. and if planning regulations were lifted entirely, NYC would reach 40m people. Output per person would rise by 5.7%. A similar study finds that zoning lowers GDP

We study how growth of cities determines the growth of nations. Using a spatial equilibrium model and data on 220 US metropolitan areas from 1964 to 2009, we first estimate the contribution of each US city to national GDP growth. We show that the contribution of a city to aggregate growth can differ significantly from what one might naively infer from the growth of the city’s GDP. Despite some of the strongest rate of local growth, New York, San Francisco and San Jose were only responsible for a small fraction of US growth in this period. By contrast, almost half of aggregate US growth was driven by growth of cities in the South. We then provide a normative analysis of potential growth. We show that the dispersion of the conditional average nominal wage across US cities doubled, indicating that worker productivity is increasingly different across cities. We calculate that this increased wage dispersion lowered aggregate US GDP by 13.5%. Most of the loss was likely caused by increased constraints to housing supply in high productivity cities like New York, San Francisco and San Jose. Lowering regulatory constraints in these cities to the level of the median city would expand their workforce and increase US GDP by 9.5%. We conclude that the aggregate gains in output and welfare from spatial reallocation of labor are likely to be substantial in the US, and that a major impediment to a more efficient spatial allocation of labor are housing supply constraints. These constraints limit the number of US workers who have access to the most productive of American cities. In general equilibrium, this lowers income and welfare of all US workers.

2022-06-02: Zoning kills opportunities for advancement

A janitor in New York, for example, used to earn more than a janitor in Alabama even after adjusting for housing costs. As a result, janitors moved from Alabama to New York, in the process raising their standard of living and reducing income inequality. Today, however, after taking into account housing costs, janitors in New York earn less than janitors in Alabama. As a result, poor people no longer move to rich places. Indeed, there is now a slight trend for poor people to move to poor places because even though wages are lower in poor places, housing prices are lower yet. 25% of the increase in the college wage premium between 1980 and 2000 was absorbed by higher housing costs. Moreover, since the big increases in housing costs have come after 2000, it’s very likely that an even larger share of the college wage premium today is being eaten by housing. High housing costs don’t simply redistribute wealth from workers to landowners. High housing costs reduce the return to education reducing the incentive to invest in education. Thus higher housing costs have reduced human capital and the number of skilled workers with potentially significant effects on growth.

2022-07-27: Florida is leading the way. These kinds of penalties should be applied to all permits. Of course it would be much better if the pointless permits weren’t required in the first place.

Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill that fundamentally changes the state’s permitting process for home building. It requires local jurisdictions to post online not only their permitting processes but also the status of permit applications. The transparency takes a good amount of mystery out of what can be an inscrutable branch of bureaucracy.

More important, the reforms also created a system that strongly incentivizes cities and counties to approve new home permits in a timely way. When a builder or property owner submits an application to build a new home, cities and counties have 30 business days to process it or request corrections.

If the government offices fail to respond in that time frame, the locality must refund 10% of the application fee for every additional business day of silence. Application fees can vary widely by locality, but the average cost in Florida is $1000. If officials request corrections to the application, they have 10 business days to approve or disapprove of the resubmitted application. Blowing past that deadline leads to an automatic 20% refund, with a further 10% added for each additional missed day, up to a 5-day cap.

The point of this policy is to put government on the hook for holding up new housing construction. Today in Florida, 1000s of new home permits are being processed faster under this law by bureaucracies faced with paying a penalty for foot-dragging.

2024-01-22: How Houston got denser

Houston is commonly thought to be a clumsy success in affordability, brought about by its lack of zoning. The truth is more interesting. The city’s planning authority implemented reforms that gave landowners automatic permission to build new townhomes, subject to certain conditions; alongside an opt-out system for local residents who do not want these changes to their area. This policy changed the face of the city, for the better. And yet this has largely gone unnoticed by the rest of the world, even those that are struggling with the same problems that Houston has overcome. Houston may have something to teach us on land use planning after all.