Hasnain says:

“But that displacement happens only because building dense housing is illegal in many rich neighborhoods, and because cities build so little of it overall. “If you want to build enough to really help low-income people, you’re talking about doing a lot of building,” Rick Jacobus, an expert on inclusionary housing and the principal of Street Level Urban Impact Advisors, told me.

As it turns out, two economists had, in a way, answered my question. Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley and Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago wanted to know how much GDP and productivity the United States gives up by throttling the housing supply in its biggest cities. In a blockbuster 2019 paper, they found that if New York, San Jose, and San Francisco—just those three cities—had the permitting standards of Atlanta or Chicago over the previous several decades, the U.S. economy would have been roughly $2 trillion bigger in 2009. American households would have earned an average of $3,685 more a year.”

Posted on 2022-11-23T14:58:25+0000