Although the Sun Belt continues to build far more housing than the coasts in absolute terms, Glaeser and Gyourko find that the rate of building in most Sun Belt cities has fallen by more than half over the past 25 years, in some cases by much more, even as demand to live in those places has surged. “When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,” Gyourko told me. This explains why home prices in the Sun Belt, though still low compared with those in San Francisco and New York, have risen so sharply since the mid-2010s—a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, as the rise of remote work led to a large migration out of high-cost cities…
The Sun Belt, in short, is subject to the same antidevelopment forces as the coasts; it just took longer to trigger them. Cities in the South and Southwest have portrayed themselves as business-friendly, pro-growth metros. In reality, their land-use laws aren’t so different from those in blue-state cities. According to a 2018 research paper, co-authored by Gyourko, that surveyed 44 major U.S. metro areas, land-use regulations in Miami and Phoenix both ranked in the top 10 most restrictive (just behind Washington, D.C., and L.A. and ahead of Boston), and Dallas and Nashville were in the top 25. Because the survey is based on responses from local governments, it might understate just how bad zoning in the Sun Belt is. “When I first opened up the zoning code for Atlanta, I almost spit out my coffee,” Alex Armlovich, a senior housing-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, told me. “It’s almost identical to L.A. in the 1990s.”
These restrictive rules weren’t a problem back when Sun Belt cities could expand by building new single-family homes at their exurban fringes indefinitely. That kind of development is less likely to be subject to zoning laws; even when it is, obtaining exceptions to those laws is relatively easy because neighbors who might oppose new development don’t exist yet. Recently, however, many Sun Belt cities have begun hitting limits to their outward sprawl, either because they’ve run into natural obstacles (such as the Everglades in Miami and tribal lands near Phoenix) or because they’ve already expanded to the edge of reasonable commute distances (as appears to be the case in Atlanta and Dallas). To keep growing, these cities will have to find ways to increase the density of their existing urban cores and suburbs. That is a much more difficult proposition. “This is exactly what happened in many coastal cities in the 1980s and ’90s,” Armlovich told me. “Once you run out of room to sprawl, suddenly your zoning code starts becoming a real limitation.”
Glaeser and Gyourko go one step further. They hypothesize that as Sun Belt cities have become more affluent and highly educated, their residents have become more willing and able to use existing laws and regulations to block new development. They point to two main pieces of evidence. First, for a given city, the slowdown in new housing development strongly correlates with a rising share of college-educated residents. Second, within cities, the neighborhoods where housing production has slowed the most are lower-density, affluent suburbs populated with relatively well-off, highly educated professionals. In other words, anti-growth NIMBYism might be a perverse but natural consequence of growth: As demand to live in a place increases, it attracts the kind of people who are more likely to oppose new development, and who have the time and resources to do so. “We used to think that people in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix behaved differently than people in Boston and San Francisco,” Gyourko told me. “That clearly isn’t the case.”
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