It’s become orthodoxy in most urban planning to advocate denser development and less sprawl – but an expert at a housing affordability forum on Wednesday in Charlotte contended that those policies risk driving up costs and hurting people’s ability to buy a home.

Wendell Cox goes against the grain on a lot of planning matters. A principal at St. Louis-based Demographia, he’s a Los Angeles native and author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

Sprawl is one of a bad word now in urban planning. People point to increased, soul-sucking commute times, disjointed suburbs where neighbors don’t know each other and have to drive to everything and a Restbet cookie-cutter sameness. While Cox isn’t exactly a sprawl advocate, he sees the benefits.

Cox’s basic thesis is pretty straightforward: He points to the West Coast cities that have enacted strict zoning rules and rules about where growth can happen, and the corresponding increases in housing prices vs. median incomes. Limits on where we can build large tracts of single-family, mid-priced housing on a city’s fringe hurts everyone by driving up the cost of all housing – exacerbating the strain on low-income housing as well.

“One of the reasons we’re so rich in this country is because we have cheap housing on the fringe of our cities,” Cox said of the U.S. post WWII. He pointed to Levittown, where an $11,990, four-bedroom house cost about twice the area’s median income.

The forum at UNC Charlotte’s uptown campus was sponsored by the Charlotte-based Real Estate & Building Industry Coalition, a lobbying group that sees the easing of regulations as a way to reduce housing costs.

In Charlotte, the median home price is roughly 3.9 times the area’s median income. That’s up from 2.9 times the median income in 1995 – a significant increase, but less than area’s such as San Jose, where the median home price is now 9.7 times the median income. And while urban planners have tended to focus on encouraging denser developments, especially near transit lines, Cox sees the urban fringes – think Union, Cabarrus and other neighboring counties – as a “safety valve” where cheap housing can easily be built.

“The fact is, sprawl happens everywhere,” said Cox. “They think it’s bad...I don’t think it’s particularly good...Wherever people have money for cars, they’re going to buy them.”

In addition to favoring easy land use regulations to allow more building, Cox also said cities such as Charlotte need to watch out for burdensome permit and zoning processes that add time and cost to developments. Eventually, he said, such lower costs will trickle down from the middle-income to low-income housing markets.

“The things that you need to do to make sure you don’t make the affordable housing worse are things that increase the cost of housing,” said Cox.

Ely Portillo: 704-358-5041, @ESPortillo

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