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The reality of housing development doesn’t track along such neat ideological lines. Kuttner says that eliminating zoning restrictions and making it easier to build multifamily housing would make only a modest difference in our problems. He does not provide any evidence for this claim, but there is evidence against it. Houston has no zoning rules at all, though it does have some land use regulations.10 As a result, it is dramatically easier to build in Houston than to build in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle or Boston. In 2023, the San Francisco metro area issued about 7,500 new housing permits. The Boston metro area issued 10,500. New York City, Newark, and Jersey City—together—issued slightly fewer than 40,000. The Houston metro area issued almost 70,000.11 This divergence is decades old, and its consequences are clear. Houston has the lowest homelessness rate of any major US city. Officials estimate that it costs $17,000 to $19,000 to house a homeless resident of Houston, with about $12,000 of that going to housing and the rest to wraparound services.12 In San Francisco, the cost is between $40,000 and $47,000 annually, with about $35,000 going to housing costs alone.
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