The Housing Market Isn't Broken. It Works Exactly as Designed.

Every political cycle produces a fresh wave of concern about housing affordability, accompanied by proposals to address it, accompanied by determined opposition from the people who benefit from expensive housing. Cycle after cycle, housing becomes more expensive.

Homeowners as an Interest Group

American homeowners have been organized as an interest group whose primary financial interest is the appreciation of their homes. Local zoning decisions are made by elected officials who are disproportionately homeowners responding to constituent pressure from other homeowners. The NIMBYism that blocks housing construction is rational — it is a defense of an asset class that for many middle-class families represents the majority of their net worth.

What Has Actually Worked

Several American cities have made meaningful progress through upzoning, reducing permitting timelines, and public construction of non-market-rate housing. Minneapolis eliminated single-family-only zoning citywide in 2019. The lesson is not that housing reform is impossible. It is that housing reform requires building political power in different configurations than the ones that produced the current system.