Soaring Rents Are a Policy Choice

Economists have been growing increasingly concerned that restrictive urban land-use regulations, engineered by a strange alliance between environmentalists, wealthy NIMBYs and grassroots left-wing activists, are driving up rents and choking job-creation by making the workforce less mobile.

And new report from the real estate database Zillow suggests that they are right to worry: Since 2011, cities with onerous zoning laws have experienced much steeper rent increases than their less-regulated counterparts: