China and U.S. Housing Crises: Failures of Central Planning

Randal O'TooleEvergrande may not be China ’s “Lehman Brothers moment, ” but there are many parallels between the housing crises in China and the United States. Both are due to government control or regulation of land. Both see government planners deflecting attention from their inept policies by blaming someone else. Both have seen resulting remedies fail to do anyt hing about high housing prices.An Evergrande development that was being planned in 2020.More than half of China andnearly half the United States are agricultural lands, and in each case only a  small portion of the total is actually used for growing crops. Data are not yet available for 2020, but in 2010 about4  percent of China and3  percent of the United States were urbanized. Urbanization is no threat to agricultural lands.Despite this, in the 1960s through the 1980s, a  panic over a cropland crisis led several states, starting with Hawaii and followed by California, Oregon, Washington, Florida, and Atlantic states between Massachusetts and Virginia, to pass laws that attempted to save farmlands by curbing low ‐​density suburban development, pejoratively known as sprawl. The laws confiscated, usually without compensation, the rights of rural landowners to develop their lands. In turn, they created an artificial shortage of land for housing.In the 1970s, every county surrounding San Francisco, for example, drew an urban ‐​growth boundary outside of which is off limits to development. Unde...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs