The Antiplanner is flying to the East Coast today to help some local activists fight a proposed urban-growth boundary. Coincidentally, the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, released his annual international survey of housing affordability today.
As the Antiplanner has done for American states and urban areas, Cox shows that, among international urban areas, there is a high correlation between urban containment policies–whether through growth boundaries, greenbelts, or other tools–and unaffordable housing. Simple supply and demand says that when you restrict supply in the face of rising demand, prices will go up–and that’s exactly what we see all over the world.
Cox supplements data he has gathered himself from eight countries (plus Hong Kong) with additional data for urban areas in China and Malaysia. With a little work, it should be possible to add urban areas in non-English-speaking Europe. Perhaps we can have this done in time for the 2018 survey.
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Urban containment does more than just make housing expensive. As the Antiplanner has shown in a recent paper, it also makes housing prices more volatile, increasing the risks of homeownership and driving down homeownership rates. It worsens, and may even be a primary cause of, income inequality, and increases unemployment by making it more difficult to move to find new jobs. Finally, it probably violates the Fair Housing Act because its effects tend to fall hardest on minorities whose incomes tend to be lower than average. For all of these reasons, cities and counties should not adopt growth restrictions and should repeal the ones they already have.
Using Hong Kong as an example is rather pointless. It’s a smidgen of land on the edge of China. The real reason for it’s urban growth is due in part to mainland Chinese buying up the real estate, and just about everything else. Mainlanders swoop in to buy the up all the products of grocery stores in bulk then leave leaving virtually nothing on supermarket shelves. I’m guessing they don’t trust the mainland communist party’s food. They flock to Hong Kong hospitals to give birth in HK hospitals (the equivalent to anchor babies) then rush to send them to HK schools. You can only use Weechat in China, Hong Kong permits access to the rest of the world. Gmail is not available in China, HK you can use anything.
Actually Antiplanner, I was wondering, do you have any data on how much federal subsidies go into US metro transit. Example how much federal money keeps the NYC subway moving.
LazyReader,
The National Transit Database lists taxpayer support to every transit agency by transit mode from federal, state, and other sources. The above link goes to the 2015 table; you can find earlier tables at the NTD site by selecting “Annual data tables (Excel)” and choosing a different year.
One could just as easily write a piece on the evils of urban non-containment. Rampant annexation by less than competent municipal governments led to defensive incorporation of area that really didn’t need a municipal government and eventually to the Poundstone amendment to the constitution which prevented annexation without approval of the victims.
Yet even Henry David Thoreau said that there should be land set aside and not built upon. :$