I’m pointing to the New York Times again today. Paul Krugman, who is generally seen to be the leading economist of the left, wrote a column making a not so liberal point — or at least a point that I make all the time over and against the dominant lefty paradigm in Seattle — overregulation makes housing more expensive:

Living in the city isn’t like living on the beach, because the shortage of urban dwellings is mainly artificial. Our big cities, even New York, could comfortably hold quite a few more families than they do. The reason they don’t is that rules and regulations block construction. Limits on building height, in particular, prevent us from making more use of the most efficient public transit system yet invented – the elevator.

Now, I’m not calling for an end to urban zoning. Cities are rife with spillovers, positive and negative. My tall building may cut off your sunlight; on the other hand, it may help sustain the density needed to support local stores, or for that matter a whole city’s economic base. There’s no reason to believe that completely unregulated building would get the balance right.

But building policies in our major cities, especially on the coasts, are almost surely too restrictive. And that restrictiveness brings major economic costs. At a national level, workers are on average moving, not to regions that offer higher wages, but to low-wage areas that also have cheap housing. That makes America as a whole poorer than it would be if workers moved freely to their most productive locations, with some estimates of the lost income running as high as 10 percent (emphasis mine).

It’s a solid article and balances out Tim Egan’s bad performance in the pages of the same paper. And Krugman has made similar points before, agreeing in that when it comes to high housing prices,

Land-use restrictions are the most likely culprit. Yes, this is an issue on which you don’t have to be a conservative to believe that we have too much regulation.

And it isn’t a libertarian idea either to suggest that less is more when it comes to housing regulation. The need to use the eraser end of the pencil isn’t a radical idea: it just makes common sense. And as I have started regularly pointing out, even if housing were an entitlement and government provided a certain amount of it for no cost for anyone who wanted it, we would still need to build lots more housing. It always helps to have Paul Krugman on our side to help make this point.