In a new report with the Cato Institute, Randal O'Toole takes off the gloves and lays the blame for the housing crisis squarely on urban planners.
O'Toole argues that because the housing crisis happened in places like California and Florida that have growth management policies, and didn't happen in places like Texas and Georgia where they do not, urban planning is the true cause of the housing crisis.
From the report: "Urban-growth boundaries and greenbelts not only drive up the cost of new homes, they make each additional new housing unit more expensive than the last. In other words, they steepen the supply curve.
Once growth boundaries are in place, cities no longer need to fear that developers will simply build somewhere else. This gives the cities carte blanche to pass increasingly restrictive rules on new construction. In places like Houston, such rules would drive developers to unregulated land in the suburbs. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the nearest relatively (with emphasis on 'relatively') unregulated land is in the Central Valley, 60 to 80 miles away."
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