Why Have Housing Prices Gone Up?

摘要

Over the past 30 years, housing prices have risen regularly, and the dispersion in housing prices across American markets has increased even more substantially. Since 1970, U.S. Census data show that the standard deviation of prices across metropolitan areas increased by 247 percent, compared with 72-percent appreciation in average prices. This growing dispersion has occurred mainly in the upper end of the distribution. In many parts of the country, new housing units still are abundant, and housing prices remain relatively low. In a small, but increasing number of metropolitan areas (primarily, but not exclusively, on the coasts), housing prices have soared, and new construction has plummeted. Because rising prices have been accompanied by large reductions in residential development in these places, the natural explanation for these changes in metropolitan-area housing markets is that housing supply is limited. These constraints do not appear to be caused by a declining availability of land, but rather they are the result of a changing regula-tory regime that makes large-scale development increasingly difficult in expensive regions of the country (Glaeser and Gyourko, 2003; Glaeser et al., 2005a).