Smart Growth Can Deliver Affordable Housing

Smart Growth's critics — particularly homebuilders — claim that any policy that discourages the ever-outward march of new subdivisions will make new houses more difficult to build and more expensive to buy. They also say that revitalizing inner city neighborhoods drives the poor out of the only housing they can afford. Neither assertion is true.Accumulating academic evidence shows that it is competition for homes in great places — in other words market forces not land use restrictions that are the primary factor in driving housing prices up. And those who insist that Smart Growth exacerbates the affordable housing shortage have no idea what they are talking about.