Not Just Economists

A few months ago, the Antiplanner listed more than a half-dozen papers by economists showing that growth constraints make housing less affordable. Yet many planners still deny that relaxing those constraints will make housing more affordable.

Now a paper by law professor Michael Lewyn makes exactly the same point, and responds directly to arguments made by advocates of growth constraints. Lewyn is far from a free marketeer, having written articles about controlling sprawl, encouraging walkability, and supporting infill development. But he apparently puts affordability above the fuzzy environmental goals of smart-growth planning.
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Lewyn’s paper uses different terms than I would use, blaming land-use regulation on NIMBYs instead of urban containment. I think that NIMBYism is a result, not a cause, of the kind of comprehensive planning that leads to unaffordable housing. But that’s merely a quibble; the significance of Lewyn’s paper is that more people–and not just economists–realize that urban containment is a morally unacceptable policy.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

3 Responses to Not Just Economists

  1. OFP2003 says:

    I just love, love, love Manhattan and Boston, where you can walk and see so much so easily by foot. Love it!
    .
    But it is so painfully obvious to me that something like that is so terribly much more expensive to construct than little wood-frame, vinyl-sided, houses on virgin land. I find it hard to believe that anyone would try to support the fantasy that preventing the least expensive construction option (sprawl) is somehow not going to drive costs up. You have to be seriously deluded by something to think that.

  2. ahwr says:

    > I find it hard to believe that anyone would try to support the fantasy that preventing the least expensive construction option (sprawl) is somehow not going to drive costs up.

    The paper was about how letting zoning laws restrict the supply of housing in cities drives up housing prices, not about zoning laws on the fringe. From the paper.

    But if demand alone explained high housing costs in expensive cit- ies, increases in housing prices would lead to new construc- tion, as developers decide to build more housing in order to benefit from increased demand. In Manhattan, this was the case in the 1950s and 1960s: increases in housing prices were followed by new construction. 19 Between 1955 and 1964, the city permitted 11,000 new housing units per year in Manhattan. 20 But in the 1980s and 1990s, this correlation disappears: evidence that some other factor (possibly regula- tion) is preventing housing supply from responding to higher prices. 21 Between 1980 and 1999 permit grants averaged only 3120 per year. 22 This diminution of housing supply began to occur not long after New York City institutional- ized NIMBYism by creating neighborhood review boards, which have the right to comment upon new development projects. 23 Thus, it seems that when government uses zoning to limit housing supply, prices do in fact increase

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