Smart growth was one of two necessary but, by themselves, insufficient conditions for the housing bubble that led to our current economic crisis, says the Antiplanner’s faithful ally Wendell Cox. Cox’s fully narrated PowerPoint presentation (23.8 MB) at last weekend’s Preserving the American Dream conference shows that housing bubbles in states with smart growth were worse than the Japanese bubble of the 1980s, while bubbles in markets with what Cox calls “responsive zoning” were barely noticeable.
A French economist named Vincent Benard concurs. His presentation (1.9 MB) shows that France also had a housing bubble and that its bubble was also due to land-use regulation. In particular, Benard observed that it can take six years for builders to get approval to build homes. When demand for housing grew in 2000, builders began applying for permits but only received them when the market began to tank in 2006.
