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Congress’ housing bill isn’t enough to fix California’s problems

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This weekend, the most substantive housing bill in decades took effect without President Donald Trump’s signature.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act has been described as the most ambitious federal housing legislation in a generation. Everyone understands that housing is too expensive in many places today because we don’t build enough of it. But the bill does little to fix that.

It ignores the thicket of federal (and federally-inspired state) environmental rules that have effectively outlawed building new, large suburban neighborhoods in areas of the country with the greatest undersupply of new homes.

Until the early 1970s, when an American metro area gained substantial population, developers built a suburb or new town for them. Levittown opened on Long Island in 1947 with 17,000 houses. Phoenix, Houston and Las Vegas mostly still grow outward year after year. Real prices stayed relatively flat, because the perimeters of major cities were permanently under construction.

That stopped almost completely in most of the cities identified today as “unaffordable” and suffering from a lack of homes. Not because we ran out of land — there is still abundant developable land within commuting distance of every congested American metro.

The reason is that, between 1969 and 1980, Congress and many state legislatures enacted a stack of environmental statutes that together function as an effective ban on greenfield development.

The National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) together form an iron cage around the perimeter of many American metros.

The........

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