If You Can't Build It, They Can't Come: Why the Housing Crisis Affects All of Us
Excessive building regulations are restricting the supply of affordable housing in areas with the strongest job markets — and that hits national growth.
Field of Dreams is one of my favorite movies. The 1989 film, based on the novel Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, tells the story of fictional Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, who hears a whisper in his cornfield: "If you build it, he will come."
Ray takes a leap of faith. He builds the field. And eventually, he does come.
It's a simple line. But it isn't really about baseball. It's about belief in the power of building — the idea that when you create something tangible in the real economy, people, capital and opportunity follow.
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For most of our history, that idea felt deeply American. Today, it's worth asking a harder question: What happens when you can't build it?
Not because there's no demand. Not because there's no capital. But because the regulatory environment makes building so slow, uncertain and expensive, supply can't respond.
When that happens, they don't come. Not the workers. Not the young families. Not the businesses looking to expand. And over time, not the growth.
Nowhere is this more visible than in housing.
Guardrails have become roadblocks
We spend an extraordinary amount of time debating housing through the lens of interest rates, mortgage spreads, investor activity and demographics. Those factors matter, but they're cyclical. The deeper issue is structural: In many of our most productive regions, we simply do not build enough homes.
The U.S. housing market is short of millions of units relative to household formation over the past decade. That gap didn't emerge because Americans stopped wanting homes. It emerged because in many parts of the country, especially where job growth is strongest, adding supply has become a regulatory marathon.
While federal tax policy and financing conditions influence housing demand, land-use rules, zoning decisions and permitting timelines are overwhelmingly controlled at the state and local levels — meaning the binding constraint on national housing supply is often municipal.
Zoning restrictions, multilayered approvals, environmental reviews that stretch for years, litigation risk and discretionary public-comment processes have shifted housing from a construction problem to a permission problem.
Most of these rules began with reasonable goals: Protecting neighborhoods, preserving environmental standards, and ensuring safety and quality. But over time, layers accumulated. What were once guardrails became roadblocks.
The predictable result: Higher prices
In many metro areas, zoning effectively prohibits density near transit and employment centers. Even compliant projects can be delayed or derailed through extended review. The cost of time becomes the cost of capital, and in capital markets, time risk commands a premium. That premium ultimately shows up in the final sale price or rent.
Smaller builders often can't carry multi-year entitlement risk. Larger, better-capitalized developers can, but they must underwrite higher return thresholds to justify the uncertainty. The result is predictable: Less supply, concentrated at the top of the housing market.
Affordability never had a chance against that math.
Over the past 25 years, home prices nationally have far outpaced median household income. Land constraints and financing conditions play a role. But regulatory costs, both direct fees and indirect delays, are now embedded in development pro formas in many high-demand markets.
When entitlement risk stretches timelines, equity demands higher returns, and debt becomes more expensive to service. Prices adjust upward to compensate.
The bigger picture: National growth
Housing is not just shelter. It is economic infrastructure.
When supply is constrained, labor mobility declines. Workers can't easily move to an opportunity. Employers face tighter labor pools and wage pressure unrelated to productivity. Regions that should be engines of upward mobility risk becoming enclaves of incumbency.
We often discuss inequality in abstract terms. In housing, it's concrete. Limiting new supply in areas with the strongest job markets effectively rations access to those markets. Teachers, nurses and early-career professionals aren't being priced out because they lack ambition. They're being priced out because supply cannot respond to demand.
From a macroeconomic perspective, this matters.
Housing shortages contribute to rent inflation, which feeds directly into the Consumer Price Index and Personal Consumption Expenditures. They influence household formation, consumer spending and geographic labor allocation. Capital and opportunity gravitate toward regions where growth is permitted… not perpetually litigated. Over time, restrictive markets risk exporting both talent and investment.
Some cities have recognized this.
Austin, Texas, for example, has leaned into growth rather than resisting it. By allowing more multifamily housing and density, supply responded more quickly to demand. Prices surged during the pandemic migration wave, but subsequent construction helped ease pressure.
It's not perfect, but it demonstrates a fundamental principle: When supply can respond, volatility moderates. When supply is constrained by process, price swings intensify and affordability deteriorates.
This isn't an argument for eliminating standards. Safety codes matter. Environmental protections matter. Infrastructure planning matters. But predictability matters too.
Capital can price risk. What it struggles to price is indefinite delay. A clear two-year permitting timeline is very different from a five-to-seven-year discretionary process vulnerable to shifting political winds. The latter raises hurdle rates, reduces competition and skews projects toward the high end.
Complexity becomes a barrier to entry. And barriers to entry, while often framed as protective, frequently entrench scarcity.
The consequences compound over time. Regions that make building difficult risk slower population growth, weaker labor-force gains and diminished entrepreneurial dynamism. Regions that enable responsible, efficient building tend to attract human capital and long-term investment.
Housing may feel like a local zoning issue. It isn't. It's a national growth issue.
A stark choice
In Field of Dreams, the real risk wasn't building the baseball field. The risk was refusing to act — and watching the farm fail anyway. America faces a similar choice.
We can equate preservation with progress and treat every new project as a threat. Or we can acknowledge that an economy built on opportunity requires physical capacity, homes, infrastructure and the ability to expand where growth occurs.
If you can't build it, they can't come.
Not the workforce. Not the next generation of homeowners. Not the businesses deciding where to deploy capital.
Housing is not speculative tech. It is foundational infrastructure. And infrastructure only works if the rules allow it to be built within a reasonable time frame and at a predictable cost.
The lesson of Field of Dreams wasn't magic. It was courage — the willingness to build in the face of uncertainty.
We don't lack demand. We don't lack capital. In many places, we simply lack permission.
And until that changes, affordability will remain constrained, mobility will remain limited and growth will remain below its potential.
Sometimes the most pro-growth policy isn't complicated. It's clearing the infield.
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