Housing markets have been established as fundamental to our understanding of business cycles, financial market stability, labor mobility, household wealth accumulation, individual portfolio allocation, and urban dynamics. Housing supply is a key element to explain housing price levels and fluctuations, yet we have only a partial understanding of it. Recent literature argues about the extent to which residential land regulations drive housing price changes. However, research has mostly failed to treat regulation as endogenous to the housing market equilibrium, and to local attributes that have an independent impact on housing supply. In this paper I introduce and exploit new data about the local extent of restrictive housing development regulations and a wealth of institutional and demographic variables for the metropolitan areas of the United States.