Why? Almost all the evidence points to this. And it makes intuitive sense. Take builder financing costs and add 2 years of reviews (super optimistic!) and you’ve added tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost per unit.
> it may be a primary driver of rising prices in some areas
Value or population weight your data. Nobody is complaining about a housing shortage in rural New Mexico.
for example standard reference/model/template plans should not require long permitting over and over and over and over again.
(and, yes, of course this is a fundamental problem of the extremely fucked up overly-procedural lawsuit-prone US regulatory regime, zoning, NEPA, etc. see also vetocracy, tragedy of the anticommons.)