WHY THE WEST STOPPED MAKING LAND

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Around 8% of the land in the major coastal cities in the US was underwater in the 1890s. Some cities, like Boston and Charleston, have doubled in size by reclaiming land. The demand for land is now higher than ever, but the country has virtually ceased to reclaim any at all. Regulations introduced in the 1970s made it enormously expensive to reshape the landscape. Lifting these legal barriers could mean hundreds of thousands of new homes near the centers of the country's most valuable cities.