Where we build homes helps explain America's political divide - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Zoning, NIMBYism and regulations — “all those things matter” when you’re trying to build housing, Herbert said. But land scarcity is the most important.
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So what’s happening now “is a lot more infill of single-family housing in closer-in communities, where you’re not going to have room for large-scale developments and where the land is going to be worth a lot more,” Herbert said. Single-family land scarcity, he said, “has been a big factor keeping the supply down.”
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In a blockbuster 2010 paper, Albert Saiz, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analyzed satellite data to estimate how much land was actually available for development within a 50-kilometer (31-mile) radius of each major U.S. city. He found that available land, when combined with measures of land-use regulation, could go “very far to explain the evolution of prices” from 1970 to 2000.
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Saiz even took it a step further, showing that a lack of land can cause stricter regulation. If a place has less room to build — due to mountains, wetlands or oceans, for example — each square foot of dirt costs more. Homeowners also may push local officials to regulate the land more aggressively in an effort to protect their investment and safeguard a scarce resource.
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From 2013 to 2018, zoning and related restrictions added about $410,000 to the cost of a quarter-acre lot in the San Francisco metro area, $199,000 in Los Angeles, $175,000 in Seattle and $152,000 in greater New York
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The comparable figure for Phoenix sat at $22,000. Atlanta was $15,000. Dallas was a mere $2,000. Not coincidentally, perhaps, many such Sun Belt metros have produced floods of new housing.
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But why do blue cities tend to have less land available for development? Perhaps it works the other way: Perhaps land-restricted places tend to evolve into Democratic strongholds.
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We don’t have data for this, but logically higher home prices and regulation in land-light cities should make much of their housing accessible only to educated, well-compensated professionals, right? In this simple mental model, coastal cities have less room and thus, by definition, attract the elite. And in American politics right now, Democrats dominate the professional classes.
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We’ve long heard Democrats derided as the “coastal elite,” but we never stopped to wonder why all those blue counties hugged the coasts in the first place. Exceptions are easy to find, but the subtle effects of coastal land shortages, over time, could help explain that most prominent feature of America’s political geography.
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That effect could be compounded, Saiz told us, by the simple truth that coastlines, lakes and other natural obstacles to construction make cities more beautiful, and thus more desirable to those who can afford such amenities, as his research with Gerald Carlino of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia shows. And the presence of an educated workforce will cause the city’s economy to grow faster, further expanding economic divides.
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“High-amenity areas are more desirable and tend to attract the highly skilled,” Saiz said. “These metros tend to have harder land constraints to start with, which begets more expensive housing prices which, in turn, activate more NIMBY activism to protect that wealth.”