Coastal Housing Crunch

It's old news that there exists a housing-affordability problem--if not crisis--throughout much of the wealthier parts of the world. This most certainly includes coastal metropolitan areas in the United States, such as Southern California. While much of the blame might be assigned to a "housing bubble" of some type, fueled by loose monetary policy and a sluggish stock market, there also is a lot of evidence suggesting that tight supply is a significant part of the problem. In short, metro population growth has been proceeding at a much faster rate than new housing construction. The August 22 Christian Science Monitor provides a nice summary of this issue--something that promises to be one of the biggest issues facing urban planners (and voters) well into the foreseeable future. Specifically, the article quotes Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser in describing the highly restrictive zoning environment that now exists. Glaeser says the old "growth machine" of Baby Boom era has yielded to new "homeowners' cooperatives" creating a housing market now defined by "man-made scarcity." This isn't the whole story, but it does raise questions about the challenge society faces in trying to navigate a path of socially progressive environmental conservation: controlling growth while promoting economic opportunity for the masses. One option, of course, is to build up, and the August 21 Arizona Republic discusses exactly such a scenario for Phoenix-region community of Tempe. All of this echoes my previous post about the dense population concentrations that increasingly define the allegedly sprawling cities of the West.