Why Can’t We Get Cities Right?
It turns out that America’s big metropolitan areas are pretty sharply divided between Sunbelt cities where anything goes, like Houston or Atlanta,
and those on the East or West Coast where nothing goes, like San Francisco or, to a lesser extent, New York.
Where Houston has long been famous for its virtual absence of regulations on building, greater San Francisco is famous for its NIMBYism —
that is, the power of “not in my backyard” sentiment to prevent new housing construction.
Put it this way: Greater Houston still has less than a third as many people as greater New York,
but it covers roughly the same area, and probably has a smaller percentage of land that hasn’t been paved or built on.
The median monthly rent on a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is more than $3,000, the highest in the nation
and roughly triple the rent in Houston; the median price of a single-family home is more than $800,000.
The point is that this is one policy area where “both sides get it wrong” — a claim I usually despise — turns out to be right.
And while geography — the constraint imposed by water
and mountains — is often offered as an excuse for the Bay Area’s failure to build more housing, there’s no good reason it couldn’t build up.
So is Houston’s disaster a lesson in the importance of urban land-use regulation,
of not letting developers build whatever they want, wherever they want?
