And once a project is approved, it faces an endless series of appeals and lawsuits that can add years of delay. Appeals are remarkably easy and affordable to file and can be done anonymously. This basically gives every neighbor a veto over every new project, regardless of how desirable the project might be. It’s as if BlackBerry had veto power over whether Apple should be allowed to sell a new iPhone.

In the case of the Treasure Island housing project in San Francisco — a model of sustainable development that took over 15 years of planning review and community engagement to secure approval — one lawsuit halted progress for three years.

To make things worse, well-intentioned regulations are often used by neighborhood groups to further delay projects. The California Environmental Quality Act, for example, was written to protect green areas from pollution and degradation from large industrial projects, like new refineries or power plants. Its main effect today is making urban housing more expensive. It has added millions of dollars of extra costs to a sorely needed high-rise on an empty parking lot on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.

The Bay Area’s hills, beaches and parks are part of the area’s attractions, but there is enough underused land within its urban core that the number of housing units could be greatly increased without any harm to those natural amenities. To be clear, we are not advocating unconstrained suburban sprawl like Houston’s, with all its negative environmental consequences. We are talking about building on existing parking lots or on lots with single-story buildings near transit, not in Golden Gate Park.

Similar constraints exist in other economically vibrant cities. The Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index indicates that America’s strongest economies are also those where it is most difficult to build new housing.

More housing in a region like Silicon Valley or Boston would raise the income and standard of living of American workers across the nation. The cost for the country of too-stringent housing regulations in high-wage, high-productivity cities in forgone gross domestic product is $1.4 trillion. That is the equivalent of losing New York State’s gross domestic product.

Because of the prohibitive cost of housing caused by these regulations, innovative companies in Silicon Valley and Boston do not grow as much as they could, and new businesses do not get created. This means slower economic growth, fewer jobs and lower wages across the nation.