the combination of lack of fiscal incentives and development control has created a vicious circle leading to an unprecedented housing shortage and severe housing affordability crisis to provide an order of magnitude of the effects of the development control system on housing markets hilber and vermeulen estimate that housing prices would have increased less between and in the absence of any regulatory constraints these requirements usually consist in attributing land use type residential commercial industrial or mixed to plots of land zoned for new construction and in defining the development intensity in the form for example of floor to area ratios