Housing supply laws across the country

Mercatus Center’s fourth annual state YIMBY legislative tracker is out: 350 housing supply bills introduced across 40 states in the past year, 89 enacted in 28. The headline wins are familiar: California’s SB 79, New York’s SEQRA reform, North Carolina’s parking minimums, Virginia’s YIGBY package. But Mercatus also covers a long tail of state reforms: Idaho passed one of the strongest minimum-lot-size reforms in the country plus ADUs, single-stair, and third-party trade inspections in a single package. Kansas capped residential lot size mandates at 3,000 sq. ft with bipartisan support. One striking trend is geographic diffusion: the YIMBY legislative frontier has moved into moderate-cost states (Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Pennsylvania) where postpandemic price increases turned housing from a coastal problem into a local one, and there’s some tractability argument for acting before prices get too far out of control. On the minus side, Connecticut repealed its single-stair law, the first outright repeal of a YIMBY-era reform. Hawaii, Minnesota, and Illinois all stalled despite high costs or strong gubernatorial pushes.