# Land use restrictions and upward mobility

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com) · 2017-12-08

california, chicago, cities, cleveland, detroit, development, housing, housing-affordability, land-use, land-use-restrictions, los-angeles, new-york, real-estate-development, san-jose, uncategorized, urbanism

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Throughout US history, economic growth has typically spurred an “[enormous reallocation of population](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/upshot/what-happened-to-the-american-boomtown.html).” Here is a graph from a recent New York Times article called: [What Happened to the American Boomtown?](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/upshot/what-happened-to-the-american-boomtown.html)

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/26c5562218b23a176f3e0d48c55fd6fe.png)

The argument, here, is that restrictions on development have made it so that the most prosperous cities are actually the slowest growing cities in terms of population. Here is a chart, from the same article, comparing population growth to average annual pay:

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/3474b9d000a60638a5109f8b48abec34.png)

And here is an excerpt:

> _But these productive places aren’t growing as fast now as economists believe they should — and as they would if they didn’t_ [_impose so many obstacles_](http://www.nber.org/papers/w12601) _on new development. Since the 1970s,_ [_land use restrictions_](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674015951) _have multiplied in coastal metros, making it harder to build in, say, San Jose, Calif., than in Phoenix. And the politics of development have become tense, too. In the_ [_Boston suburbs_](http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/11/28/region-housing-growth-mostly-boston-suburbs-hardly-building-any-units/pqi6xCJ0HTOLWQBjVaNlbN/story.html)_,_ [_the Bay Area_](http://beta.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-small-city-controls-big-housing-project-20170728-story.html)_,_ [_Brooklyn_](https://ny.curbed.com/2015/7/31/9934960/nimbys-come-out-in-full-force-to-fight-pier-6-towers) _and_ [_Washington_](https://ggwash.org/view/41876/a-court-ruling-on-a-brookland-development-could-imperil-future-housing-near-metro-stations)_, people who already live there have balked at new housing for people who don’t._  

We often talk about the impact of land use restrictions on supply and overall housing affordability. But here is an argument that it could also be impacting upward mobility.

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/land-use-restrictions-and-upward-mobility)*