I visited Utah recently and saw the incredible sprawl of new housing and construction cranes that stretch across the Salt Lake City valley to the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. According to the U.S. Census, the state led the nation in new housing units between July 2020 and July 2021, outpacing fast-growing areas of Texas and Idaho, among the places that drew new residents during the Covid pandemic. While single-family homes top the building boom statewide, new multifamily apartments are leading the way in Utah’s capital city. Still, construction is not keeping up with demand, and, as in most parts of the country, home prices and rents continue to soar, tempered only somewhat by rising mortgage rates.

And the high prices of new dwellings should be measured not only in dollars but in environmental costs. The alarming consequences of growth include Arizona suburbs that are running out of water and millions of new homes in California being built in so-called “wildland-urban interfaces,” with a high likelihood that, ultimately, they will burn down in wildfires, says new research by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Forest Service. Other kinds of natural disasters now present “a moderate threat of annual losses” for more than 50 million households, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. That includes 11.6 million low-income households, whose occupants find it much harder to rebuild or relocate.