"To Put Down Roots and Then Oppose New Development"

"Glaeser and Gyourko go one step further. They hypothesize that as Sun Belt cities have become more affluent and highly educated, their residents have become more willing and able to use existing laws and regulations to block new development. They point to two main pieces of evidence. First, for a given city, the slowdown in new housing development strongly correlates with a rising share of college-educated residents. Second, within cities, the neighborhoods where housing production has slowed the most are lower-density, affluent suburbs populated with relatively well-off, highly educated professionals. In other words, anti-growth NIMBYism might be a perverse but natural consequence of growth: As demand to live in a place increases, it attracts the kind of people who are more likely to oppose new development, and who have the time and resources to do so. 'We used to think that people in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix behaved differently than people in Boston and San Francisco,' Gyourko told me. 'That clearly isn't the case.'"

Rogé Karma at The Atlantic writes that "[t]he Sun Belt, in short, is subject to the same antidevelopment forces as the coasts; it just took longer to trigger them.