Anti-sprawl legislation has successfully limited or prohibited this sort of growth in much of the country. Consider the trajectory of California. In the 1960s and ’70s, when the state added eight million residents and fruit trees were being ripped out to make space for ranch houses, its Legislature passed a flurry of land-use and environmental laws aimed at preserving agricultural land and containing development to major metropolitan areas. Those laws were celebrated for saving farming regions like Napa Valley and wild spaces like the Marin Headlands, but they also have made building so difficult that even environmentally friendly projects, like a small apartment building next to a commuter rail line in San Francisco, can be tied up in years of lawsuits that can add millions of dollars to the final cost.
Similar laws throughout the country have slowed the pace of construction and made housing far more expensive, contributing to one of the worst affordable housing crises in the nation’s history. After two decades of underbuilding, economists estimate the country’s housing shortage at somewhere between four million and eight million units. Last year was among the most difficult on record to buy a home; a quarter of tenants now spend more than half their income on rent and utilities; and the most recent homeless count, at about 770,000, was up nearly 20 percent from the previous year.Editors’ Picks‘S.N.L.’: Trump Celebrates 100 Years (Oops! Days) in OfficeCan My Co-op Charge Me Extra for Renting Out My Unit?36 Hours in BerlinImage
Source: America Needs More Sprawl to Fix Its Housing Crisis – The New York Times
