Not often do Rush Limbaugh and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman agree on anything but recently both of them pointed out the same pattern in the prices of housing -- and both were correct.

 The pattern is this: Despite hysteria over high home prices, in most parts of the United States housing is quite affordable. But in some places housing prices are astronomical -- three times the national average in much of California, for example.

 Despite the old rule of thumb that housing should cost no more than one fourth of your income, there are parts of California where tenants and new home buyers pay at least half their incomes for housing.

 This can be a serious problem in such places because it means that only the other half of people's income is available to pay for such frills as food and clothing.

 These dire situations are more likely to be featured in the media, partly because bad news sells newspapers and gets higher television ratings. Moreover, media elites are more likely to be living in the places where housing prices are out of sight -- places like Manhattan, coastal California, and the posh suburbs around Washington or various other cities.

 It is a very different story in most of the rest of the country. A scholarly study published in the October 2005 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics concluded: "In the sprawling cities of the American heartland, land remains cheap, real construction costs are falling, and expanding supply keeps housing costs low."

 In some cities, housing prices have actually declined as the housing supply has expanded. None of this is rocket science. It is supply and demand.

 Why then are there particular places where housing costs have skyrocketed?

 In those places, much of the land is prevented by law from being used to build housing. These land use restrictions are seldom called land use restrictions.

 They are called by much prettier names, like "open space" laws, laws to "preserve farmland" or prevent "sprawl," "greenbelt" laws -- or whatever else will sell politically.

 People who already own their own homes don't worry about whether such laws will drive housing prices sky high. Somebody else will have to pay those prices while existing homeowners see the value of their property rise by leaps and bounds. Continued...