Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is January 29, 2020.

My guest is Jenny Schutz, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings.

She writes extensively on land use regulations, zoning, and other runissues.

And those are our topics for today.

Jenny, welcome to Econ Talk.

Good to be here. Thank you.

I wrote in a recent essay, The Process of Building New Homes is full of uncertain day and unexpected obstacles.

Regulatory barriers make it riskier, longer, and more expensive, which has consequences for housing affordability.

Let's talk about that. What are some of those regulatory barriers?

So the procedural barriers are one of the parts that I think don't get talked about enough.

When you own a piece of land, you can't go out and just build a house or an office building on top of it.

You have to go to the local government that controls it and ask them for permission to build something.

Particularly if you think about, say, a subdivision on the edge of a city, a developer may buy a piece of farm land.

They then have to get the land re-zoned from its current use, which is agriculture, to residential.

And there is a negotiation process that happens.

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