Key points:
- The United States is missing 15 million homes due to lack of housing supply.
- Homebuilding has slowed in suburban areas, despite abundant land, due to zoning regulations.
- Local land use regulations, including minimum lot sizes, limit housing supply and exclude working families.
According to a major new study released this spring by economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, the United States is missing 15 million homes. Had the housing stock continued growing from 2000 to 2020 at the same pace as it did between 1980 and 2000, we’d be in a very different place today—one with less rent burden, less displacement, fewer tent encampments, and more pathways to middle-class stability.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, homebuilding slowed to a crawl—even in the sprawling suburbs of Sun Belt metros like Phoenix, Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta, long considered the nation’s “building superstars.” This slowdown is not confined to coastal enclaves with tight land constraints or famously anti-growth politics. It’s happening in the very places that once exemplified housing abundance. And in a strange twist, it’s happening most in areas with open land, where building should be easiest.
The new study—titled America’s Housing Supply Problem: The Closing of the Suburban Frontier?—offers a sobering and urgent diagnosis: America’s housing markets no longer respond to demand. And the biggest culprit isn’t lack of land or even lack of capital. It’s regulation. Zoning codes, permitting delays, and political resistance have functionally closed off the suburban growth engine that built America’s middle class in the 20th century.
This marks a dramatic reversal. From 1950 to 1980, U.S. metropolitan areas added over 50 million homes. Builders responded to rising prices by adding new supply. Sprawling suburbs, aided by interstate highways and permissive zoning, absorbed millions of families. When housing demand surged, construction followed. That’s how America used to work.
But sometime after the year 2000, that dynamic broke down. Glaeser and Gyourko’s data show that the annual housing growth rate across major metro areas declined and converged—meaning that diverse markets with wildly different geographies, demographics, and economies began building homes at the same sluggish pace. In the 2010s, Sun Belt metros like Phoenix, Dallas, Miami, and Atlanta all hovered around an anemic 1.2% annual growth rate.
That kind of uniformity is not what you’d expect from a functioning market. It signals the presence of systemic barriers overriding local variation and consumer demand. And the data suggest that these barriers are strongest in the very places where building should be easiest: low-density, land-rich suburbs.
Back in the 1970s, a doubling of home prices in a Dallas suburb would have triggered a 72% increase in construction. By the 2010s, the same price spike yielded just a 7% increase. In Phoenix, supply elasticity fell from 65% to 10%. In other words, prices can go through the roof and builders still won’t—or can’t—respond. That’s a broken feedback loop, and it helps explain why the cost of housing is now one of the biggest threats to economic stability in the U.S.
Critically, this decline in housing production isn’t about running out of space. If that were true, we’d expect dense urban cores to stop growing while suburban and exurban areas picked up the slack. But the opposite is happening. Glaeser and Gyourko show that by the 2010s, dense neighborhoods were seeing more new housing relative to their land area than the suburbs. In the 1970s, 44% of new Miami housing was built in low-density areas. By the 2010s, that number had dropped to 12%. The suburban frontier—once vast and open—is functionally closed.
Why?
The researchers point to the rise of land use regulation, particularly in affluent suburban jurisdictions. These include minimum lot sizes, maximum height limits, discretionary review processes, and environmental or historic preservation rules that make building new homes slow, expensive, or impossible. These policies are often justified in the name of community character or environmental protection, but they have the effect—whether intentional or not—of excluding working families, people of color, renters, and anyone not already lucky enough to own property.
The Wharton Land Use Restriction Index, which measures the intensity of local regulatory constraints, correlates strongly with the breakdown of housing market responsiveness. Cities with higher Wharton Index scores see far less building when demand increases. That’s not just an academic finding—it’s an indictment of the political choices made by local governments.
And it’s not just a blue-state or California problem. This pattern of regulated stagnation is visible in red-state suburbs, Sun Belt cities, and across the country. The deeper truth is that local control—when exercised without accountability—has allowed well-organized, often wealthier residents to veto housing growth that would benefit the broader region.
The consequences are massive. Young people priced out of homeownership. Teachers and service workers forced into multi-hour commutes. Seniors trapped in homes they can’t afford to maintain because there’s nowhere else to go. Homelessness creeping into every corner of American life. And deepening inequality as wealth accrues to those lucky enough to own while everyone else pays the price.
California YIMBY, the pro-housing advocacy group, highlighted these findings in a recent blog post. They point out that the solution isn’t just to build more homes—it’s to rebuild the mechanisms that once allowed our society to respond to housing needs. That means zoning reform. It means enforcing fair housing laws. It means aligning infrastructure investment with infill and density. And, most of all, it means confronting the political economy of scarcity that too many local jurisdictions have embraced.
The federal government has a role to play here. Just as the postwar housing boom was aided by federal highways, GI Bill loans, and mortgage finance reform, we now need federal leadership to incentivize housing abundance. That could mean tying transportation funding to zoning reform, penalizing exclusionary practices, or simply setting stronger national standards for housing equity.
But state governments, too, must act. California, Oregon, and Washington have all passed laws in recent years to allow more duplexes, triplexes, and accessory dwelling units by right. That’s a start. But more is needed—particularly in suburbs and unincorporated areas where anti-growth policies go unchecked.
We need a political view that sees housing not just as shelter but as infrastructure—as essential to our economy and democracy as roads, schools, or clean water. Because right now, the American dream is being rationed by ZIP code, and the ladder of opportunity is missing too many rungs.
Fifteen million missing homes. That’s the cost of two lost decades and a policy regime that prioritized preservation over people, wealth protection over inclusion, stasis over growth.
It’s time to reverse that trend. Not just in California. Not just in coastal cities. But everywhere.
Let’s reopen the suburban frontier—not by paving over every field, but by allowing our neighborhoods to evolve, welcome new people, and build the homes our future demands.
