"Don't hobble Houston with land control"

Cato:

Cities with strong planning authority, such as Portland, Ore., and San Jose, Calif., almost invariably have the least affordable housing, the fastest growing traffic congestion and growing taxes and/or declining urban services. In the long run, these problems tend to suppress urban growth and job creation.

The national real estate firm Coldwell Banker reports that, in 2007, a Houston family could buy a four-bedroom, two-and-one-half bath, 2,200-square foot home for $170,000. The same house would cost more than twice that much in Portland and more than eight times as much in San Jose.

Such huge variations in the cost of housing from city to city did not exist 50 years ago. Today, they are mainly due to artificial housing shortages created by heavy regulations and land-use planning.

Planning also imposes huge costs on businesses. The same land shortages that drive up housing costs also increase the costs of retail, commercial and industrial developments. Congestion increases the costs of delivering freight and other goods to and from businesses. Higher taxes and more government regulation also make heavily planned cities less growth-friendly.

The result is that growth once attracted to places like California and Massachusetts is now attracted to less heavily planned states like Georgia and Texas. Between 2000 and 2006, California's population grew by 7 percent — mostly foreign immigration — while Georgia and Texas populations grew by 12 to 14 percent.

As Harvard economist Edward Glaeser observes, "places with rapid [housing] price increases over one five-year period are more likely to have income and employment declines over the next five-year period" because the rules that drive up housing prices also drive away employers.

Government planning spins out of control when it attempts to be comprehensive, prescriptive and long term. Comprehensive planning attempts to account for all of the impacts of any government action.

Prescriptive planning attempts to control how private landowners use their land. Long-term planning attempts to look decades into the future. No one can really predict the future, so such plans do far more harm than good.