In housing circles, Jerusalem Demsas has emerged as a critical voice for supply-side policy. As a staff writer for The Atlantic, she argues that lawmakers should address housing unaffordability by focusing on a severe shortage of homes. She has distinguished herself within the supply-side camp by zeroing in on the unlikely way that communities landed themselves in a housing crisis in the first place: From sea to shining sea, Americans voted for it.
On The Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy is a collection of reported essays by Demsas that explores the role that democratic structures play in perpetuating a housing shortage. Writing with plain yet authoritative language, she tackles the difference between such thorny economic concepts as shortage denialism and supply skepticism, showing how they manifest in real communities. Yet she also writes from the ground level to explore the toll of hyperlocal overdemocracy, connecting rational decisions by neighborhoods to reject development to an irrational picture of a country that can no longer build.