Key points:
- A housing crisis exists when supply doesn’t meet demand in desired neighborhoods.
- Housing affordability shouldn’t be assessed across entire metropolitan areas, but individual neighborhoods.
- Increasing housing supply is a necessary condition for achieving affordability.
We’re in a housing crisis. Say it again until it sinks in. And while that may sound like a slogan, it’s a measurable, definable fact.
For example, according to The YIMBY Manifesto, a housing crisis exists “when there is a shortage of housing in the places where people would like to live.”
It’s a simple concept with enormous consequences: when housing supply doesn’t meet demand in the neighborhoods people need or prefer to live in, prices rise and access shrinks—particularly for low- and moderate-income renters.
Some have pushed back against this framing.
For example, in the often cited counter-example, Schwartz and McClure (2024) argued that housing affordability should be assessed across entire metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), rather than individual neighborhoods or submarkets.
They suggest that, because cheaper housing exists somewhere within most MSAs, the crisis is overstated. Their claim rests on the idea that affordability concerns are largely a result of preference—people wanting to live in expensive neighborhoods—rather than a structural failure of supply.
They’re right about one thing: you could move to those cheaper areas.
They’re wrong that people will.
There is a reason for that that seems to go unrecognized here: the suggestion ignores real and present constraints.
Many people live where they do out of necessity—not completely by choice. If you don’t own a car, or if you’re already rent-burdened, moving far away from work, services, or public transportation isn’t just inconvenient—it’s impossible.
The market may offer “affordable” options far from job centers, but that affordability evaporates when you factor in long commutes, auto expenses, or the social and emotional costs of dislocation. And it evaporates because the fact of the matter is that jobs and housing are largely inseparable.
More importantly, Schwartz and McClure’s paper misses a key point: a surplus of housing in one area doesn’t offset the shortage in another, particularly when the shortage is in high-opportunity, transit-rich, or job-dense neighborhoods.
The underlying theory—that aggregate affordability across a region is enough—has been debated and largely rejected by other housing scholars.
As Alexander Hermann and Whitney Airgood-Obrycki at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies pointed out in their 2024 analysis, a failure to fully account for household formation has contributed to underestimating the true demand for housing.
They note that an increasing share of younger adults are continuing to live with their parents well into adulthood, not by choice but because of affordability constraints. When people can’t afford to move out and form new households, it suppresses demand on paper while hiding the true scale of unmet need.
It’s not about preference but rather actual structural barriers.
Estimates vary, but some studies now indicate that the U.S. may be short as many as 20 million homes nationwide. That figure comes not just from population growth, but from the cumulative effect of decades of underbuilding—especially in cities and neighborhoods where demand is strongest.
The YIMBY Manifesto outlines what happens when supply fails to keep up: “When we don’t build enough housing, we drive up prices and push people out.”
In markets like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and increasingly smaller cities like Sacramento and Austin, the consequences are visible every day—teachers, service workers, nurses, and city employees commuting from hours away because they can no longer afford to live near their jobs.
The research backs this up.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) noted in a recent evidence review that “increasing housing supply moderates price pressures.”
While no one claims new construction alone will solve every housing problem, the academic consensus has coalesced around the basic truth that increasing supply is a necessary—if insufficient—condition for achieving affordability.
Yet some local debates still hinge on whether a housing crisis exists at all.
In conversations over the past year, we’ve encountered variations of the same argument: that high rents are simply a matter of demand, that if people just moved to less popular areas or settled for less space, the problem would resolve itself.
But this mindset fails to address the structural forces of exclusion: zoning rules that prohibit apartments in wealthy neighborhoods, parking mandates that drive up costs, minimum lot sizes that restrict density, and regulatory delays that block shovel-ready housing.
In short, people aren’t priced out by accident—they’re priced out by design.
If we want to address the crisis, cities must take bold and evidence-based action. That starts with streamlining permitting for housing in the places where people want and need to live most. It means liberalizing zoning codes, especially in high-opportunity neighborhoods. It requires removing parking mandates and minimum lot size rules that make infill housing financially infeasible. And it means investing in transit and pedestrian infrastructure so that car ownership is no longer a necessity for accessing jobs, schools, and services.
None of this is a silver bullet. Nor is it in opposition to social housing initiatives. In fact, these reforms complement public investment by reducing land and construction costs and expanding access to more types of housing across income levels.
Too often, energy is wasted litigating whether the crisis exists—rather than organizing around solutions. That only delays progress and fractures coalitions that should be working together to build better, fairer cities.
It’s time to move beyond that. We have the tools. We have the research. And, increasingly, we have the political will.
Let’s build it all. Build because it’s what the evidence demands. Build even more because the people who need it most are still waiting.
Categories:
Breaking News Housing Opinion State of California
Tags:
Affordability Affordable Housing Housing Crisis housing policy Housing Supply Yimby zoning reform