Smart-growth land-use controls are creating a generation of renters and result in “social and housing apartheid,” say economists Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub. Writing from and about Auckland, New Zealand, they note that, since 1995, the cost of developable land has risen 73 percent faster than incomes (p. 52).

They admit that demand has played a role in housing prices, but not the principle role. “Over time, house prices can fluctuate considerably, but, in the normal scheme of things, only in a transitory way,” they write. “Prices will rise to signal the market to make more houses and then fall back when supply matches demand. But house prices can rise continuously, relative to incomes and rents, if there are physical or regulatory constraints that stop supply” (p. 51).

Like many other coastal cities, Auckland cannot expand in all directions. But that doesn’t mean there is a physical shortage of land. The problem is “not that land is in limited supply, but that we hardly use any of the land that is already there” (p. 52).

“The scarcity of land is entirely artificial,” they point out (p. 52). “Rules and principles originally designed to make cities better places by stopping bad things from happening have now become the shackles that are preventing cities from reaching their potential” (p. 53). New Zealand is slightly larger than Oregon and has a few more people so its density is less than 44 people per square mile compared with 40 in Oregon. Oregon is less than 1.5 percent urbanized, so New Zealand’s degree of development is probably comparable.

Is there anything wrong with Millennials becoming a generation of renters? According to Reid Cramer of the centrist New America Foundation, Millennials who don’t buy homes fail to build wealth and short-change not only themselves but the economy as a whole.

The bad news is that Cramer advocates something called “shared-equity homeownership” in which someone subsidizes their home purchase and then, when they sell, they must share the capital gain with the subsidizer. This reduces the buyer’s long-term wealth and effectively enables the kind of land-use regulation that makes housing unaffordable in the first place. The good news is that, despite media claims, Millennials really do want to buy homes, and they’ll probably do it conventionally, not through shared-equity.

In any case, the Eaqubs’ book shows that the problems faced in California, Oregon, Washington, and other states with smart-growth laws are found in other countries as well. More important, there are people in those countries who recognize the problems and are fighting against them.