A Nevada mayor is battling one of the worst housing shortages in the US. Her solution: looser construction regulation. [Video]

The mayor of Reno, Nevada, argues that the single best thing city leaders can do to help solve one of the country’s worst housing shortages is to loosen regulations on housing construction.

In recent years, Mayor Hillary Schieve has launched a multi-pronged approach to do just that.

“Sometimes government needs to get out of the way,” she told Business Insider in a recent interview. There’s no quick solution, said Schieve, who isn’t a member of either major party and has made housing and homelessness a top priority.

With the election approaching, Nevada voters cite the economy as among their top concerns. Rising home prices and rents, which have hit the Sunbelt state particularly hard, are a big part of that. Since January 2017, home prices have risen 90% and rents are up 53% in Nevada, far outstripping national growth rates, Alex Horowitz, the director of Pew’s housing-policy project, told Business Insider.

Greasing the wheels for housing

Nevada had one of the highest rates of …