Taking a page from Milton Friedman, Landsburg says government is the problem not the solution to the housing problem

Steven Landsburg is one of my favorite economist/writers. As he sees it, the housing supply problem has been created by government. This might not go over well in Cambridge and Berkeley but Landsburg's on solid ground. It's the zoning laws stupid.

... Housing prices must be driven by something other than fundamentals. Speculators, of either the rational or the irrational variety, are the obvious culprits.

Here's what's wrong with that analysis: Housing prices have to make sense on both the demand side and the supply side. No matter what you do or don't believe about the ability of crazed demanders to bid up prices, you still have to explain why competitive suppliers don't bid those prices right back down. In other words, if the housing market is so tight that builders are making a fortune, they ought to be flooding the market with
new houses—and driving down prices.

In fact, buyers' behavior is relatively easy to explain. Most of the recent explosion in housing prices has been in cities like San Francisco and Santa Barbara—in other words, in really nice places to live. It's not unreasonable to believe that, as Americans grow richer, and as technology makes us more mobile, more and more of us want to move to California.

And it's not unreasonable to expect that this trend will continue, so that even a very expensive house in the Bay Area can look like a good investment.

The great mystery is on the supply side. Instead of the traditional formula "housing price equals land price + construction costs + reasonable profit," we seem to be seeing something more like "housing price equals land price + constructions costs plus reasonable profit + mystery component." And, most interestingly, the mystery component varies a lot from city to city.

Even in cities like San Francisco, where there's little room to build and land is consequently dear (on the order of $85,000 per quarter acre, compared with $2,200 for Dallas), you can't use land prices to explain away housing prices. The mystery component in San Francisco housing—that is, the amount left over when you subtract land prices and construction costs from house prices—is the highest in the country.

Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joe Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania have computed these mystery components for about two dozen American cities. They speculate that the mystery component is essentially a "zoning tax." That is, zoning and other restrictions put a brake on competitive forces and keep housing prices up. (Read one of their papers here.)

When you buy a house, you're not just paying for the land and construction costs; you're also paying for a building permit and other costs of compliance. You've got to get the permits, pass the zoning and historic preservation boards, ace the environmental impact statement, win over the neighborhood commission, etc. If Glaeser and Gyourko are right, that's the mystery component right there.