Sorry for the delayed response.

1. You are right it takes a long time to get development through the approval process, and our area has that reputation. Just a hypothesis, I don’t know if it’s true or not. My Uncle is a contractor over in the Emerald Coast area and I worked for a contractor/developer for two years while in school. As you probably know most area contractors are small to medium sized businesses. They can only build soo many houses at a time. True any busisness can expand to meet increased demand but only if they have the resources and lobor to do so, and can do it while maintaining quality control. What many contractors do when besiness is booming isn’t expand their company greatly rather they operate at peak production and build a client list and contracts for the future. I didn’t hear anybody complianing during the boom that we have demand to build more houses we just can’t get them approved. Most builder were plugging along building as much as they could (key phrase as much as they could).

2. Yes if supply had risen proportinately to demand then you would expect prices to have followed their traditional patterns. However, that is if you isolate supply as the only variable affecting price. The underlying theme to the article was that growth management limited supply thus causing the prices to rise. I don’t believe that underlying theme. While that may have played a small part, I believe all the other things we’ve mentioned, easy money, low interest rates, out of normal demand from investors/flippers etc, had a much larger impact on the market and pricing than growth management.

3. Yes Texas has more relaxed zoning regulations than Florida. In fact on some streets in Houston you may find a Church, Gas Station, Houses, and a School in the same area. Euclidian Zoning where you isolate land use types such as exculsive residential neighborhoods really became popular after WWII. Many in planning are starting to realize the shortfalls of this stricter type of zoning. There is a movement even in Florida to return to more traditional zoning and the allowance of mixed use areas. As for the Future I don’t know. I can however offer two cities that demonstrate the good and bad from both excessive planning and a lack of planning. Portland Oregon is held by planners as a poster child of good planning. By all accounts it is a very nice place to live but it’s also very expensive. On the other hand Atlanta is relatively cheap to live in but has horrible traffic and a growing problem of water shortage.

4. Again, I just see other things at play and perhaps a spurious relationship in his study. There are many other variables that determine how states develop and the pricing of real estate in those states. Florida has always relied on three main economic engines, tourism, agricluture, and development. One of the attractions people always listed when moving to Florida was cheap housing. This was after we instituted Growth Management and before this last real estate boom and bust.

1. Look at the graph the I included in the blog: Note how supply failed to meet demand in the graph from 2003 through 2005 (three years). Prior to 2003 going back to I believe 2001 was similar. So, does this mean that our builders in Tallahassee are stupid/ignorant? I don’t think so. I think getting land through the development process takes too long. I have some personal experience with this issue as well. It takes too long.
2. If during the boom our supply had been higher, don’t you think prices would have gone up a the same rate that they did for the previous 15+ years? At a rate of about 3.5% per year?
3. Houston, Texas is sited throughout his paper as the “correct” way of growing. They do not apparently have a similar process as we have here in Florida. Are they going to be suffering through a poorly planned, highly congested city at some point, or is there something that we could learn from them?
4. I agree with you on statistics, we can interpret things in generously different ways at times. But do you see this in his results of areas with Growth Management versus areas with less stringent Growth Management?

Thanks again TS for a very informative reply.