🏠 👶 Birth-rate worriers should care about housing deregulation

If you want more babies, you have to make it easier to build

My Up Wing interest in housing policy shouldn’t be surprising to regular Faster, Please! readers: Land-use rules are severely constraining America's coast-to-coast economic engines. Regulatory costs in homebuilding itself have risen by half over the past decade, adding nearly roughly $100,000 to new single-family home prices. Whereas high-productivity cities like San Francisco ought to house more like 25 million — there’s your 21st century techno-Florence, tech bros — restrictive regulations have capped its population at a third of that.

The economic costs are high and pervasive: Urban wage and GDP growth have been halved over 50 years, say economists. Reform housing rules in just three cities—New York, San Jose and San Francisco—to average American levels, and GDP would rise by 4 percent. Better yet, the average worker would pocket an extra $4,000. (More on this in my 2023 book.)

But people come at issues from all sorts of perspectives. Different strokes for different folks. Not everyone is a go-go, pro-growth accelerationist. And to get big changes in public policy, you often have to take your friends where you can find them.