My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.
Here is a chart I think about a lot:
I like to whip out this chart (and the research it’s based on) whenever I’m trying to make the point that America’s homelessness crisis is the result of structural conditions in the housing market, not a mass epidemic of mental illness or fentanyl abuse. Homelessness, as the book says, is a housing problem.
But if we’re going to be hyper-pedantic for a moment (something I would never do unless I absolutely had to), then we might tweak the above formulation to say that homelessness is, more specifically, a housing affordability problem. There are many extremely high-cost suburban enclaves that have virtually zero homelessness. Similarly, there are many American cities with very high poverty rates but comparatively little homelessness. It’s not high housing costs or low incomes that produce homelessness on a large scale, but the interaction between those two phenomena. That’s the main reason an expensive metropolitan area’s anchor city (say, San Francisco in the Bay Area) is almost always going to have considerably more homelessness than its outlying suburbs: the original architects of those suburbs generally designed them to lock out low-income households. The anchor city may have caught up with or even surpassed many of its exclusive suburbs when it comes to housing costs, but it’s still where much of the metropolitan area’s low-income population resides.
Another way to put this is to say that the housing shortage is the result of a broken housing market, and widespread chronic homelessness is what happens when a broken market and a broken income distribution collide. I’ve pilfered this framing from Becky Chao and Mike Konczal’s Affordability Framework, which they wrote last year for the Economic Security Project. The interaction between broken markets and broken incomes structures their entire framework; I found it pretty clarifying, and not just when applied to housing.
So it was a real pleasure to work with Becky and Mike on a follow-up report that does tackle housing specifically. Last week, ESP published “Building Affordability: The Policy Agenda for America’s Housing Crisis,” our attempt at developing a comprehensive housing policy agenda that can fit within Becky and Mike’s affordability framework. Here’s a brief summary of where we landed:
On the “broken markets” side of the ledger, we incorporate the standard YIMBY land use reform toolkit. But we also look at how the public sector can take a more active role in financing housing production—especially housing targeted at low-income households, and especially countercyclical financing that can keep production humming along during economic downturns. (On both fronts, our report owes a debt to the work of Paul Williams and the rest of the team at the Center for Public Enterprise.)
On the “broken incomes” side, we focus on directly lifting the incomes of the low-income households who, even in a well-functioning housing market, would not be able to access decent market-rate housing without some kind of subsidy. We also call for stronger tenant protections that can act as a bulwark against sudden price shocks and predatory landlords.
Our recommendations will be broadly familiar to people who closely track housing policy discourse. They would reflect an emerging progressive consensus that the optimal housing platform combines aggressive pro-supply YIMBY policies with strong tenant protections, income supports for low-income renters, and public investments in new housing to be offered at below-market prices. Mike, writing for his own Substack, notes that our approach rhymes with Zohran Mamdani’s housing philosophy; he might have added that Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman has adopted a very similar posture as well. And they’re just two of the more prominent faces in a swelling crowd of progressive and democratic socialist politicians who now subscribe to an all-of-the-above left-YIMBYism.
That said, I think our report makes a couple of important contributions to this discourse. One is that it situates left-YIMBYism inside the broken markets/broken incomes framework—and therefore within the broader, national conversation about affordability of all types. The left-YIMBY agenda is probably least developed at the federal level, and we also discuss a few ideas for how a future Congress might put it into action. Two, I think it’s important that we put so much emphasis on interventions specifically for very low-income households—precisely the households that our current housing policy regime is pushing into homelessness at an astonishing clip.
The most important contribution probably has to do with the audience we’re addressing in the report. The Economic Security Project is not the Center for Public Enterprise or the Metropolitan Abundance Project; we didn’t produce this report for the urbanism nerds who by and large already agree with us. Nor is ESP like the Bipartisan Policy Center or the Searchlight Institute; we are pitching our ideas at a decidedly progressive audience that includes some advocates and policymakers who are not already bought into left-YIMBYism as a program. My hope is that this report speaks to their concerns and interests in language that they recognize, and that it can play a role in strengthening the consensus that has already powered Mamdani and Raman’s political careers.