Washington Put Animals Over People — and Made Affordable Housing an Endangered Species
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In my childhood, the concept of “endangered species” evoked beautiful, threatened creatures in desperate need of saving — your pandas, whales or all-American bald eagles.
Today, it’s 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 discovered that the snail darter, a small fish that controversially delayed a major dam project in the 1970s, isn’t even a unique species.
Now we’re learning that the ever-expanding list of species that America considers endangered has helped drive the bedeviling problem of affordable housing.
In a new paper for the Journal of Public Economics, economist Maxwell Tabarrok traces how the federal Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, affects housing permits.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The New York Post
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he provides policy research, writes for City Journal, and contributes to special projects and initiatives in the president's office.