Do you know the cost of San Jose? The high cost of low growth.

AuthorDoherty, Brian
PositionCitings - Housing costs

THE DUBIOUS HONOR of fastest-rising housing costs during the last 25 years belongs to San Jose, California. Housing prices there grew 936 percent over that period, beating out even legendarily expensive San Francisco's 821 percent growth.

Housing demand grew because of the city's Silicon Valley location, the center of the computer and Internet industries during their 1990s gold rush. Meanwhile, supply was restricted thanks to the city's rigorous application of growth control planning dating back to 1970.

Randal O'Toole of the Tho-reau Institute, an Oregon-based free -market environmentalist think tank, estimates that urban growth boundaries that limit available land, combined with land use regulations that make building more expensive and time-consuming, have tripled housing costs in San Jose compared to those in similar cities.

After creating the problem--manifest in 50-year-old two-bedroom houses costing $400,000 and 2,200-square-foot four-bedroom houses costing S630,000--the city government applied the traditional government solution: affordable housing subsidies, in San Jose's case costing $180 million. But...

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