
Every year Wendell Cox of Demographia (United States) and Hugh Pavletich of Peformance Urban Planning (New Zealand) publish their International Housing Affordability Survey (IHAS). This year’s survey is the eighth edition.
The IHAS includes a wealth of graphs and charts all structured to explain and illuminate the impact of land use policy on housing and homeownership. This year’s survey is introduced Robert Bruegmann and he succinctly explains why this matters: “Nothing in the world today affects citizens more directly than the home in which they live.”
Bruegmann, who wrote the concise and critical book Sprawl: A Compact History, goes on to identify the tension surrounding housing policy.
“At one end of the political spectrum have been societies in which land is owned in common and is supposed to be allocated to individuals and families on the basis of merit or need. Such has been the case with many Utopian and Socialist societies. At the other end of the spectrum have been societies where individual ownership of land and homes is considered a bedrock condition of a democratic society, where ownership is widely dispersed, and individual rights and preferences have been zealously safeguarded from all but the most necessary intervention.”
Of course, housing policy is not at the extremes but somewhere within that continuum. However, the International Housing Affordability Survey convincingly shows that the closer policy moves toward the Utopian/Socialist ideal, the less affordable housing becomes for people. Smart Growth planning policies move the needle toward the Utopian/Socialist end while a less regulated housing market is championed by people who believe in property rights and individual freedom.
As Bruegmann concludes, “Whether [Smart Growth] policies were intended to enhance the environment or limit sprawl, they clearly had an effect on the price of housing,” adding that “land use policies in places like coastal California, Vancouver, Britain and Australia, have dramatically driven up the cost of housing, and that the less intrusive policies of places like Atlanta and Houston has kept prices down.”
I hope we’re entering a No Excuses era when local policymakers can no longer get away with claiming they simply had no idea that restrictive land use regulations artificially increase housing costs to the point that low and middle income Americans are priced out of homeownership.