Cities like New York and San Francisco give massive contributions to the nationās overall economy, with 380 U.S. metro areas generating 90% of the total GDP in 2012.
But a new study found that these cities can actually be making much moreāa heftyĀ $1.6 trillion more, to be exact. So why isnāt this money being generated? The answer is the lack of affordable housing inventory in urban areas.
Economists Chang-Tai Hsieh from the University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of the University of California at Berkeley have placedĀ a price tag on restrictive urban land use policies, The Atlanticās CityLab reports.
According to CityLab, Hsieh and Morettiās research is the first of its kind to develop a ādefensible estimateā of the costs constrained development, such as antiquated zoning and building codes, have on the U.S. economy.
The $1.6 trillion figureĀ wasĀ extrapolated from an analysis on the economic contribution of 220 metros to the overall U.S. economic growth over more than five decades, supplemented with data on the characteristics of workers from the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey.
What they found was that ātoo much of Americaās urban economic power is simply being wasted on higher housing bills.ā
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