This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 8th, 2022. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's easy to look at crazy housing restrictions in a state like New York or California and say that it's a product of bad policy,

but what about a growing state like North Carolina?

Michael Tanner's new paper on housing in North Carolina reveals that many of the bad policies we associate with high housing costs are just as present and will soon pose many of the same problems as elsewhere.

You spend a lot of time steady in California and a lot of the problems that exist in California.

Why was the next state that you looked at North Carolina?

Well we are undertaking this as a joint project with the John Locke Foundation, but North Carolina seems to be heading down much the same route as California when it comes to housing.

This is a state that has seen significant growth. It has good climate, it has

a tolerable tax and regulatory policies attracting new business, retirees are

flocking there. So you're seeing a population growth,

but they're not building the housing to keep up with it.

In many ways it resembles California of a couple decades ago.

They were seeing people flock to the west coast, but they made it difficult to build the housing

necessary to support those people.

You get simple law of supply and demand driving up prices, and housing is becoming increasingly

unaffordable in North Carolina.

North Carolina and California have pretty dramatically different tax bases,

like they tax different things.

But both have a regulatory environment that makes it very difficult to build new housing.

In fact, many of the rules that I encountered in California, I'm also encountering in North Carolina. That is limits on whether or not you can

build multifamily housing, even duplexes in most of the state are difficult to build. Rules on minimum lot sizes in terms of parking requirements

in terms of setbacks from the road, height requirements. Just about anything that can be done

...