Why Can’t We Get Cities Right?<br />It turns out that America’s big metropolitan areas are pretty sharply divided between Sunbelt cities where anything goes, like Houston or Atlanta,<br />and those on the East or West Coast where nothing goes, like San Francisco or, to a lesser extent, New York.<br />Where Houston has long been famous for its virtual absence of regulations on building, greater San Francisco is famous for its NIMBYism —<br />that is, the power of “not in my backyard” sentiment to prevent new housing construction.<br />Put it this way: Greater Houston still has less than a third as many people as greater New York,<br />but it covers roughly the same area, and probably has a smaller percentage of land that hasn’t been paved or built on.<br />The median monthly rent on a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is more than $3,000, the highest in the nation<br />and roughly triple the rent in Houston; the median price of a single-family home is more than $800,000.<br />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.<br />And while geography — the constraint imposed by water<br />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.<br />So is Houston’s disaster a lesson in the importance of urban land-use regulation,<br />of not letting developers build whatever they want, wherever they want?
