Where land-use regulations are driving up housing costs

President Donald Trump has made deregulation a policy pillar for his second term — and housing regulations are up for review.

Homebuilders say that federal rules have driven up the cost of building a home. Many mortgage professionals want to release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from conservatorship. And there were no shortage of complaints about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under the Biden administration.

But as it relates to housing costs, the unfortunate reality is that the federal government has few policy levers at its disposal to directly address the issue. That’s because most of the regulations that drive up costs are administered at the local level.

Restrictive land-use regulations conjure images of aging coastal cities that have environmental or historic preservation concerns that tend to impede new development.

That’s well founded as New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston have some of the most restrictive zoning and construction laws in the country. While these aren’t the only things that drive up home prices, these cities are nonetheless among the most expensive markets.

And just because a city is relatively cheap doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t have regulations around land use.

“While it’s evident that the more restrictive the land-use regulations, the less affordable homes are, it is notable that even lightly regulated communities impose considerable restrictions on housing development,” Altos President Mike Simonsen in his research paper Unaffordable by Design.

Simonsen crossed housing affordability with land-use restrictions to see if there was a recognizable trend. To measure affordability, he used the home-price-to-income ratio. To measure land-use restrictions, he used the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Land Use Regulation Index (WRLURI), which tracks a number of factors regarding land use and distills it into a score.

The trend is fairly clear. San Francisco has by far the highest WRLURI of the markets analyzed and the second-lowest level of affordability. New York has the next-highest WRLURI, but it’s surprisingly more affordable than Seattle, Miami and Los Angeles in terms of price-to-income ratio.

At the other end of the spectrum, Houston has the lowest WRLUSI and is the most affordable major market. Dallas, Charlotte and Atlanta have low WRLURI scores and are also comparatively affordable.

Austin is an interesting exception. Despite a lower WRLURI than Atlanta and Minneapolis, it has a substantially higher price-to-income ratio.