[yonran]

The Bay Area’s environmentalists have decided to put the mountains off limit to development. Here’s one map: (https://www.greenbelt.org/uncategorized/bay-area-policy-prot...). Randal O’Toole claims that urban growth boundaries are a major cause of the housing crisis in his book American Nightmare (https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermi...), and Issi Romem corroborates this thesis (https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/cities-expansion-slowing is currently in a 301 redirect loop; see archive https://web.archive.org/web/20181207215721/https://www.build...).

I think the question of whether a prosperous region can have both urban growth boundaries and affordable housing is an open question. The Bay Area has not set a good example in this manner; we listen to environmentalists when it’s time to put walls around the region but we don’t listen to them when they call for greater infill development (to their credit, the Greenbelt Alliance has a subsidiary called the SF Housing Action Coalition that promotes infill development, but in SF politics they are often written off as developer shills).