Economists from the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley have put a price tag on restrictive urban land use policies, The Atlantic’s CityLab reports.
That price is $1.6 trillion, extrapolated from an analysis on the economic contribution of 220 metros to the overall U.S. economic growth over more than five decades, supplemented with data on the characteristics of workers from the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey.
What they found was “too much of America’s urban economic power is simply being wasted on higher housing bills.”