Washington put animals over people and made affordable housing an endangered species

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.He found a substantial impact: “Species listings reduce annual permit flows by ..

.about 10% of the average annual flow.”That’s somewhere around 9 million housing permits affected in total since 1980 — most of which appear to have been lost, not merely moved elsewhere, in Tabarrok’s estimation.In other words, the ESA is one factor constraining housing supply — having cost us perhaps 4% of the total stock at this point — and driving up prices.The act, Tabarrok explains, makes it illegal to “harm” or “harass” a listed animal.This can include not just paving over its territory, but even light pollution and stormwater runoff.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.To quantify the effect on building permits, Tabarrok combined permit data from a census survey with data on species listings and habitats — a large undertaking that involved matching different types of geography and jurisdictions.In 1970 there were only 82 endangered species; two decades later the number was getting close to 500.L...