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Working Paper
Is the Rent Too High? Aggregate Implications of Local Land-Use Regulation
Highly productive U.S. cities are characterized by high housing prices, low housing stock growth, and restrictive land-use regulations (e.g., San Francisco). While new residents would benefit from housing stock growth in cities with highly productive firms, existing residents justify strict local land-use regulations on the grounds of congestion and other costs of further development. This paper assesses the welfare implications of these local regulations for income, congestion, and urban sprawl within a general-equilibrium model with endogenous regulation. In the model, households choose ...
Discussion Paper
Unlocking Housing Supply: What Can We Learn About Recent Construction and Permitting Patterns in Our Region?
Since 2020, housing has become increasingly unaffordable for many families throughout the United States. Nationally, home prices have risen more than 40 percent, on average, and rent has increased by around 22 percent. While heightened demand likely fueled the rapid buildup in home prices since the COVID-19 pandemic, a chronic undersupply of housing from underbuilding in the 2010s also contributes to current housing affordability challenges.Recent rates of new residential construction have varied considerably across communities due in part to differences in the availability and cost of ...