Look, I came across some interesting research from Zillow that really highlights one piece of the puzzle in our housing shortage conversation. They found that there are over 300,000 empty lots five acres or smaller currently listed for sale across the country. If developers were to build just one home on each of those lots, it would chip away at America's overall housing deficit by roughly 6 percent, bringing it down to around 4.44 million homes short.
What caught my attention is that the average lot they're looking at is pretty modest in size, less than an acre. That means, in theory, many of these properties could actually support more than one home, so that 6 percent figure is probably on the conservative side. The real bottleneck isn't the availability of land, it's the complexity and cost of actually getting something built on it. Zillow points out that zoning restrictions, the permitting process, and financing challenges are what really slow down construction.
The data shows some interesting regional patterns. California ranks third nationally with over 18,000 empty lots for sale, behind Florida and Texas. When you look at rural areas versus suburbs versus cities, rural markets have the highest share of empty lots as a percentage of all listings. Those rural lots are also significantly cheaper per acre, which makes sense, but suburban and urban land commands a real premium.
What I am seeing locally is that the Bay Area and East Bay face a different challenge than much of the country. Our empty lots are fewer and our land costs are higher, which means we need to be even more focused on addressing zoning and permitting barriers if we're going to add meaningful housing supply. The state and local work on streamlining development approvals and rethinking our zoning rules isn't just nice to have, it's essential to making more of our available land actually buildable.
