The recovery from the housing market crash came faster in Phoenix. Today the city enjoys healthy population growth, a robust jobs market and rising real estate values. Surprisingly, however, development isn’t easy in Phoenix. Land prices are skyrocketing, and there’s a continuing shortage of construction workers, since many left town during the crash and are yet to return.

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Retail developers beware. Three anti-development bills were passed by California’s state legislature in May 2013, and their effects are now being felt by developers:

• AB 667 is a groceries union-sponsored bill that prohibits approval of superstores that sell groceries unless it can be found that the store would have no material adverse economic impact on a surrounding five-mile area. The nonprofit League of California Cities (LCC) opposed the bill upon the principle that land-use decisions should be made at the local level, and finds the bill’s real effect is to “create additional grounds for litigation.”
• AB 562, sponsored by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, requires local governments to track and maintain data on all expenditures or losses of revenue for economic development purposes valued at more than $100,000. Plus, the measure requires additional public hearings, biennial reports and publication of information online, all of which the LCC believe will make local economic development efforts “more cumbersome.”
• SB 673, supported by the California Professional Firefighters and the California Labor Federation, halts development of any retail or commercial facility project that benefits substantially from financial assistance “including but not limited to” state or federal grants, low-interest loans, land donations or acquisitions or remediation or environmental cleanup activity until an exhaustive analysis of the project is completed.

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If you’re a multifamily developer that supports the inclusion of parking lots, avoid Boston, where city planners are leaning in favor of a car-free city. Boston requires .75 parking spaces per unit for large residential developments, which translates to plans for large-scale housing complexes with few or zero parking requirements in neighborhoods that have multiple public transit options.

City planners say the number of registered vehicles has fallen by 14 percent over the past five years, and that Boston’s burgeoning population of Millennials prefer public transportation, bicycling, walking and Zipcars. But Boston Globe columnist Lawrence Harmon says residents of the suburb of Charleston are angry over a 54-unit apartment building for the Navy Yard that was approved with only 43 parking spaces. Although Portland, Ore., “went down this slick road” by letting developers build apartment buildings with no parking, Harmon writes, the Portland City later Council amended its zoning code to reintroduce minimum parking spaces in future developments. Why? Because Portland’s young singles began buying cars once they settled down and started families.

Chicago’s long-suffering South Side currently has a glut of vacant buildings—estimated to be between 500 and 600 by the nonprofit Southwest Organizing Project—located between Western and Kedzie avenues and between 51st and 74th streets. Those buildings are ripe for redevelopment by entrepreneurs who can envision the South Side finally coming to life. The problem is, nobody, not even city officials, seems to know where the properties are or what conditions they’re in.

In 2011, the Chicago City Council amended the city’s vacant property ordinance to require an expanded class of owners—mainly banks, investors and management companies—to follow the city’s existing rules on registering and maintaining their vacant properties. The city's intention was to make it more expensive for building owners to let vacant properties sit indefinitely and prevent such properties from lowering the property value of entire neighborhoods.

But today, thousands of Chicago’s properties are still unregistered. Not only is it possible that building owners—along with lenders and investors—are escaping paying taxes, it’s certain that developers are being denied the chance to make a go of things on the South Side.