The Preserving the American Dream conference in Houston this past weekend was a lot of fun, but also pretty exhausting. I’ll have more detailed reports in upcoming posts, but for now here is an article about Houston’s housing market by a Federal Reserve Bank economist.
“Given that Houstonians had access to the same new types of mortgages as the rest of the country and that Houston has had greater population growth than other large metros, we might expect price appreciation to be stronger in Houston than elsewhere,” says the article. “However, the opposite has been true.”
The reason? Houston’s lack of zoning and its large supply of land available for development allowed builders to respond to easy credit by increasing the pace of construction. Slow and unpredictable permitting processes prevented builders in many other regions, including Florida and the Pacific Coast states, from similarly stepping up production.
