For the last half-century, America’s population growth has been concentrated in the sweltering, equal parts bone-dry and waterlogged, yet ever-sprawling Sunbelt. Undeterred by the limits of hydrology or climate, metro areas from Las Vegas to Miami have gotten one thing undeniably right. They have long led the country in housing construction, resulting in a relative plenitude and affordability that shames coastal cities in California and the Northeast, as well as a booming industry of takes imploring blue cities to learn from red states on housing.

But that abundance is already becoming a thing of the past. Across Sunbelt metros like Phoenix, Dallas, and Atlanta, housing supply growth has actually plummeted since the early 2000s, to rates almost as low as in hyper-expensive coastal cities, according to a new working paper by the leading urban economists Edward Glaeser and Joe Gyourko. Housing costs in these metros, while still lower than major coastal cities, have surged as a result.

Gyourko, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who decades ago documented slowing housing growth in superstar cities like New York and San Francisco, told me he was surprised to find the same pattern again unfolding, as if on a 20-year lag, in a region known for its lax regulations and enthusiasm for building things. Looking at the data, he thought, “Wow, Phoenix and Miami look like LA did as it was gentrifying in the ’80s.”

Although metro Phoenix, to unpack one example, is building a similar absolute number of homes as it did in the early 2000s, its population has grown by more than 58 percent since the turn of the century, so as a share of its current housing stock — the number that most matters, Gyourko says — it’s now building far less. If that trend continues even as demand to live in the Sunbelt remains undimmed, he said, “you would expect them to start to look more and more like Los Angeles.” By 2045, Arizona might be facing unaffordability and population loss crises much like those choking California today.

For many years, suburbs and exurbs have been the leading drivers of housing growth in Sunbelt cities, capturing most of the new population moving to the region. “The concepts ‘Sunbelt city’ and ‘suburb’ are nearly synonymous,” as historian Becky Nicolaides put it. But the slowdown in new housing builds across the region, Glaeser and Gyourko found, has been especially pronounced in well-off, low-density suburbs with desirable amenities like good schools. These suburbs have plenty of room to densify and welcome more neighbors — they just aren’t doing it.

“America’s suburban frontier,” the authors warn, “appears to be closing.”

The findings suggest that the fundamentals of housing in Raleigh, Orlando, or Miami are not so different from every other hot real estate market in the country. In most parts of the US with a growing economy and good jobs, the housing market has become badly broken to a degree that transcends the usual explanations, like regional differences in construction licensure rules or environmental review requirements — although those factors, without a doubt, matter.

So what’s really going on? Housing markets are complicated, and economic shocks like the Great Recession and the recent spike in interest rates have surely played a role. But the downturn in housing builds predates both those things, Glaeser and Gyourko found, suggesting a deeper cause. The Sunbelt may be confronting the same obstacle that has paralyzed growth elsewhere. It’s one of the most taken-for-granted facts of modern American life: the suburban model itself, and all its attendant political, regulatory, and financial problems.

Since the end of World War II, housing supply growth in the United States has overwhelmingly been driven by suburban sprawl radiating ever outward from city centers. Instead of building up, with density, we largely built out. But that engine may be running out of steam — and as a strategy for filling our national housing shortage, it’s failing spectacularly.

“It hasn’t been working in the supply-constrained coastal markets for four decades. What’s new is it looks like it’s starting not to work in the Sunbelt,” the country’s fastest-growing, most economically dynamic region, Gyourko said. “That changes the nature of America.”

The strangeness of housing policy in the US can be summed up like this: On a national level, we long for growth. On a local level, we do everything possible to smother it. That contradiction stems, in part, from our dependence on sprawl.

America is a nation of suburbs — that’s certainly not changing any time soon. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with suburbs, a housing arrangement as old and varied as human civilization. But to solve the housing crisis that is at the root of so many national problems, Americans will have to fundamentally rethink what the suburb is, and what it could become.

American suburbia, briefly explained

If you, like me, are too online for your own good, perhaps you’ve seen some version of this meme.

That image is a pretty accurate reflection of what American cities used to look like by default. Our suburbs, too, once looked much like this — remnants of the pattern can still be seen in places like Oak Park, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), University City, Missouri (outside St. Louis), or Brookline, Massachusetts (neighboring Boston). Derived from the Latin word “suburbium,” meaning the area under or near a city, suburbs are so old that if you’ve ever thought about them, congratulations, you’ve been thinking about the Roman Empire.

Of course, what dense, older suburbs like Brookline or Oak Park have in common is that, like the cities they neighbor, they were largely laid out before mass car ownership. It was only relatively recently that suburbs became synonymous with a specific, car- and sprawl-oriented development style.

If the Western frontier defined American optimism in the 19th century, the suburban frontier defined it in the 20th. It’s a story you may already know in broad strokes: Before World War II, only a small share of Americans lived in suburbs, with the bulk living in rural areas and central cities. After the war, a complex alchemy of factors — including a national economic and population boom, federally backed mortgages that favored suburban homes, a Great Depression- and war-era........

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