{"id":46619,"date":"2026-08-15T12:19:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T07:19:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=46619"},"modified":"2026-08-15T12:19:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T07:19:22","slug":"how-washington-made-affordable-housing-an-endangered-species","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=46619","title":{"rendered":"How Washington made affordable housing an endangered species"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script>\r\n  atOptions = {\r\n    'key' : '644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6',\r\n    'format' : 'iframe',\r\n    'height' : 90,\r\n    'width' : 728,\r\n    'params' : {}\r\n  };\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script src=\"https:\/\/www.highperformanceformat.com\/644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F2%2F2026%2F08%2Fpostinhouse-nypostinhouse-white-house-white-102914744-e1786757514147.jpg?quality%3D90%26strip%3Dall\" \/><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>In my childhood, the concept of \u201cendangered species\u201d evoked beautiful, threatened creatures in desperate need of saving \u2014 your pandas, whales or all-American bald eagles.<\/p>\n<p>Today, it\u2019s become synonymous with <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2026\/07\/16\/opinion\/congress-housing-bill-isnt-enough-to-fix-californias-problems\/\">development projects held up<\/a> over some obscure frog no one cares about.<\/p>\n<p>In one particularly hilarious reversal of fortune for the environmental movement, scientists recently discovered that the snail darter, a small fish that controversially delayed a major dam project in the 1970s, isn\u2019t even a unique species.<\/p>\n<p>Now we\u2019re learning that the <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2025\/12\/25\/world-news\/thousands-of-new-species-being-discovered-every-year-faster-than-ever-before\/\">ever-expanding list<\/a> of species that America considers endangered has helped drive the <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2026\/08\/06\/real-estate\/the-6-figure-income-needed-to-afford-the-average-us-home\/\">bedeviling problem of affordable housing<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In a\u00a0new paper\u00a0for the\u00a0Journal of Public Economics, economist Maxwell Tabarrok traces how the federal Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, affects housing permits.<\/p>\n<p>He found a substantial impact: \u201cSpecies listings reduce annual permit flows by . . . about 10% of the average annual flow.\u201d<\/p>\n<aside class=\"single__inline-module aligncenter wp-block-nypost-editor-primary-tag\">\n<\/aside>\n<p>That\u2019s somewhere around 9 million housing permits affected in total since 1980 \u2014 most of which appear to have been lost, not merely moved elsewhere, in Tabarrok\u2019s estimation.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, the ESA is one factor <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2026\/08\/14\/real-estate\/the-worst-time-to-sell-a-home-is-right-now-data-shows\/\">constraining housing supply<\/a> \u2014 having cost us perhaps 4% of the total stock at this point \u2014 and <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2026\/07\/23\/real-estate\/socal-region-named-the-most-unaffordable-housing-market-in-us\/\">driving up prices<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The act, Tabarrok explains, makes it illegal to \u201charm\u201d or \u201charass\u201d a listed animal.<\/p>\n<p>This can include not just paving over its territory, but even light pollution and stormwater runoff.<\/p>\n<p>When a species is listed, building projects in areas where it lives can require modifications, be called off entirely, or never get off the ground to begin with.<\/p>\n<p>To quantify the effect on building permits, Tabarrok combined permit data from a census survey with data on species listings and habitats \u2014 a large undertaking that involved matching different types of geography and jurisdictions.<\/p>\n<p>In 1970 there were only 82 endangered species; two decades later the number was getting close to 500.<\/p>\n<p>Last year it reached nearly 1,500.<\/p>\n<p>Endangered-species habitats now cover most of the United States, often overlapping with each other, and they especially blanket California and Florida.<\/p>\n<p>That might be bad news for development, but it also facilitates the use of modern statistical methods.<\/p>\n<div class=\"single__inline-module inline-module inline-module--newsletter aligncenter inline-module--nypostbusinessunit aligncenter wp-block-nypost-editor-newsletter\" data-source-unit=\"Inline Newsletter Module Post Opinion\">\n<div class=\"inline-module__inner\">\n<div class=\"inline-module__title-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"inline-module__unsubmitted-title-wrapper\">\n<h3 class=\"inline-module__title headline headline--combo-sm-md\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet opinions and commentary from our columnists\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h3>\n<p class=\"inline-module__cta\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><h3 class=\"inline-module__title headline headline--combo-sm-md\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\t\t\t\t\t<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Each time a new species listing affects some parts of the country but not others, it creates a sort of natural experiment \u2014 did permitting trends suddenly change in the affected places relative to others?<\/p>\n<p>Focusing on the 1980-2024 period, Tabarrok implemented this basic concept in a few different ways, with similar conclusions.<\/p>\n<p>His various approaches make different technical tradeoffs and vary in how they try to address the study\u2019s biggest limitation \u2014 namely, that endangered-species listings might\u00a0<em>not<\/em>\u00a0be a random shock to development that can be analyzed as an experiment.<\/p>\n<p>For example, previous development might have <em>caused<\/em> a species to become endangered, or it could have prompted lobbyists to push for or against new listings (though this decision isn\u2019t\u00a0<em>supposed<\/em>\u00a0to involve consideration of economic impacts).<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s also possible that places that are home to endangered species might simply be different, in important ways, from places that don\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>Tabarrok also dug into a few smaller questions: For example, he found no effect from species listings that are merely proposed and not yet enforced \u2014 and a reversal of the effect when a species is de-listed.<\/p>\n<p>And when he added satellite data on land use to his dataset, he found similar impacts on \u201cgreenfield\u201d projects proposed to be built on undeveloped land and on \u201cinfill\u201d projects, new construction in already-developed areas.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s significant, because an \u201cinfill\u201d project will generally mean less change to the overall habitat \u2014 suggesting that the letter of the law, not the real-world impact on endangered species, is the constraining factor.<\/p>\n<p>There is, of course, a real tradeoff between building enough housing where people need it and protecting species we\u2019re in danger of losing.<\/p>\n<p>But with endangered-species habitats blanketing the country and millions of housing projects lost, perhaps we\u2019ve let environmentalists win some battles they should not have.<\/p>\n<p><em>Robert VerBruggen\u00a0is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/cityjournal.substack.com\/p\/has-the-endangered-species-act-killed\"><em>Adapted from City Journal on Substack<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<script async=\"async\" data-cfasync=\"false\" src=\"https:\/\/pl30214220.effectivecpmnetwork.com\/9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<div id=\"container-9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\"><\/div>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my childhood, the concept of \u201cendangered species\u201d evoked beautiful, threatened creatures in desperate need of saving \u2014 your pandas, whales or all-American bald eagles. Today, it\u2019s become synonymous with development projects held up over some obscure frog no one cares about. In one particularly hilarious reversal of fortune for the environmental movement, scientists recently&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46620,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/08\/postinhouse-nypostinhouse-white-house-white-102914744-e1786757514147.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pics-news"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}