NIMBY zoning is killing us

From The Studies Show:

How much is [restrictive zoning] costing the US economy as a whole? A famous paper (Hsieh and Moretti, 2019) estimates the US economy would be almost 3.7% larger if only San Francisco, San Jose, and New York City had zoning laws that were less restrictive1. Amazingly, 40 percent of Manhattan buildings standing today would now be illegal to build, hinting at the vast extent of our zoning problems.

So why aren’t zoning laws less restrictive? Existing homeowners have no incentive to increase housing stock. In fact, they benefit from exclusionary zoning laws that increase the value of their real estate. But while existing homeowners profit, everyone else loses.

The United States, long a country famed for internal migration, has in recent decades had the lowest rate of migration since record keeping began in 1948. Fewer people are moving—which means they aren’t following jobs to the most productive areas of the country. Staying put in dying towns or unproductive regions has big consequences. While mortality has dropped across the developed world, middle-class American whites, many of them stuck in moribund rural areas, have been dying at accelerated rates.