Long before the COVID-19 pandemic made supply chain snags a topic of dinner table conversation, the U.S. was already struggling with broken production systems in a key industry: housing.

The U.S. has failed to build enough homes to meet the demand created by population and job growth since the Great Recession—and even earlier in some parts of the country. The shortfall is particularly apparent in metro areas with an abundance of well-paying jobs and amenities; the places where many people want to live consistently build too little housing. For instance, the San Francisco Bay Area added only one home for every seven new jobs created between 2010 and 2015, while rents increased more than 40% during the same period. Similar patterns are observable within cities: Affluent, high-amenity neighborhoods such as Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Greenwich Village in New York City, and Hancock Park in Los Angeles have added minimal amounts of housing over the past 30 years.

In my new book, Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems, I show that anemic housing production in high-opportunity places is not primarily due to container ships with lumber backed up outside ports or a “Great Resignation” among construction workers. Rather, the policies that regulate land use and housing production make it extremely difficult to add more homes in desirable locations. In every state across the country, it is illegal for a landowner or developer to build new homes (or alter or tear down existing homes) without explicit approval from the local government. And the people who already live in those places wield a variety of legal and political tools—zoning laws, historic preservation, environmental regulations, and direct lobbying of elected officials—to block attempts to build more homes.

Read the full article about America’s housing supply by Jenny Schuetz at Brookings.