In a state the size of Texas you'd think affordable housing wouldn't be an issue. Not so. Housing prices in Dallas-Fort Worth, formerly a beacon of affordability, overtook the national average in 2016.

Yes, the market has cooled recently, but the metro area still suffers from a self-inflicted housing shortage due to zoning laws that violate consumer choice and Texans' principles of property rights.

Even as pro-growth economic policies have drawn millions of new residents to North Texas and other Texas metro areas, anti-growth land-use regulations have kept most urban areas, including residential areas that are close to growing job centers, looking much the same as they did decades ago.

As I document in a new report for the Manhattan Institute, many of the younger professionals who've swarmed to Texas in search of jobs prefer to live in apartment buildings in downtown areas.

In all of Texas' largest cities — Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin — areas close to downtown have seen the largest increases in average incomes and residents with college degrees. Not surprisingly, those areas have also seen the largest increases in property values.

But if you want to profit off of this demand by building a small apartment building on your land, you're probably out of luck. No municipality in North Texas allows multi-family housing, even three- or four-unit buildings scarcely different in appearance from single-family homes, on more than a tiny portion of its land area.

Zoning regulations throughout North Texas prohibit not only apartment buildings but also small single-family houses that working-class families could afford. In some parts of Dallas, for example, it is illegal to build a house on a parcel of land smaller than a half-acre. Big suburban job centers like Plano have seen the near-disappearance of entry-level houses for young workers, with the result that more workers than ever before have to commute in, creating huge backups on local roads.

Policies that require large amounts of car parking also hold the region back. Any builder of new houses or two-bedroom apartments in Dallas, for example, has to provide two parking spaces per dwelling. Parking minimums for businesses are even higher. Restaurants in Dallas, for example, must provide parking lots three times the size of the restaurant itself.

As I point out in my report, regulations in Texas metro areas and others often require far more parking than the market demands, and this can raise the costs of new apartments by a sixth or more. These policies make residents who rarely drive subsidize the driving of others: Almost 1 in 10 Dallas households does not own a car, and a quarter of households with four or more people owns one car or none.

These figures will only increase as services such as Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar — not to mention the possibility of driverless cars — make the expense of private car ownership harder for many Texans to justify.

Texas courts, meanwhile, have repeatedly declined to protect landowners' rights from even clearly unnecessary land regulations. In one especially egregious case, a town in Ellis County encouraged one developer to buy a large parcel of land, then immediately cut in half the number of houses he would be allowed to build on it. The Texas Supreme Court ruled the town's actions were legal.

The good news is that new housing developments in the exurbs have kept North Texas relatively affordable so far, especially when compared to cities like Los Angeles.

But by not allowing redevelopment of central areas, North Texas cities risk making housing ever more expensive and pushing jobs out to ever more remote parts of wealthy suburbs, far from places where the working class can afford to live.

Without policy changes, large swaths of the Dallas metro area, like much of suburban California, may soon be too expensive even for many middle-class — not to mention working-class — residents.

Texas has long been a beacon of opportunity for people from all around the country. It's time for North Texas officials to take a long, hard look at their land-use regulations to ensure that it stays that way.

Connor Harris is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute and author of the new report "Lone Star Slowdown?: How Land-Use Regulation Threatens the Future of Texas." He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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