Arguably, land use controls have a more widespread impact on the lives of ordinary Americans than any other regulation. These controls, typically imposed by localities, make housing more expensive and restrict the growth of America’s most successful metropolitan areas. These regulations have accreted over time with virtually no cost-benefit analysis. Restricting growth is often locally popular. Promoting affordability is hardly a financially attractive aim for someone who owns a home. Yet the maze of local land use controls imposes costs on outsiders, and on the American economy as a whole.
From The Brookings Institute comes an excellent description of the insidiousness of land use regulations. There’s a tremendous amount of negative that has trickled down from these regulations, and what benefit there has been accrues overwhelmingly to the large landholders and real estate development companies that either have the political clout to influence them or can sustain the overhead necessary to navigate them.
HT @jimmyardis
Geoffrey Graham 