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. Here’s what people are saying:
“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center
“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument
“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.” — Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
I can’t find it now, but there’s an old episode of the great, recently concluded podcast Tides of History where host Patrick Wyman and his guest (a fellow historian, whose name escapes me) get into an interesting discussion about counterfactuals. The use of counterfactuals in historical analysis is apparently fairly controversial; a Substack post on the topic from earlier this year notes that the eminent English historian E.H. Carr dismissed counterfactuals as “parlour games.” Serious historians, according to this line of thinking, don’t indulge in speculation about how things might have gone differently. Instead, they focus on what actually happened and why.
Wyman’s point (also argued in the aforementioned Substack post) was that any discussion of historical cause and effect is inherently counterfactual. If I write that the Roman Empire Christianized because of Emperor Constantine I’s conversion to Christianity, then it logically follows that I also believe the reverse: in a world where Constantine had not converted, then the old Roman state religion would have remained in place for at least the duration of his reign. The implied counterfactual can’t be disentangled from any attempt to explain why the Roman state adopted Christianity when it did.
This isn’t just an academic point for professional historians. All causal claims are counterfactual. If I tell you I’m jittery because I had a third cup of coffee, that means I’m not jittery in the hypothetical universe where I stopped at two cups. And if I say that underhanded corporate price-fixing tactics caused the housing affordability crisis, then it follows that there would be no housing crisis in the absence of landlord price-fixing schemes.
That latter claim is implicit in a lot of the recent anti-YIMBY broadsides from the neo-Brandeisian left. For example, in the most recent issue of Dissent, Claire Kelloway and Sandeep Vaheesan write:
In housing markets, landlords have been accused of conspiring to keep units empty and make more money through collectively higher rent with the guidance of software firm RealPage. Private equity firms purchase single-family homes and use bait-and-switch pricing tactics and skimp on property maintenance to boost revenues and cut costs. Business inaction also thwarts housing construction: Homebuilders hold onto undeveloped land when they do not project strong rent growth and sufficient profits. Accordingly, liberalizing land-use controls, in practice, has not necessarily delivered major augmentation of the housing stock.
Kelloway and Vaheesan (the latter of whom I’ve previously debated in Dissent’s pages) are careful not to make an explicit causal argument. They don’t say price-fixing software like RealPage’s YieldStar caused the housing crisis. They just say that RealPage has been accused of driving up rents. And this sort of chicanery, allegedly, explains why “liberalizing land-use controls, in practice, has not necessarily delivered major augmentation of the housing stock.” It’s because unregulated corporate greed, not restrictive land use rules, is the real binding constraint that stops us from solving the housing crisis.
Maybe they relegated the causal claim to a subtextual level because they knew they didn’t have a very strong case. In the above paragraph, Kelloway and Vaheesan link to a legal complaint from Washington, D.C.’s Office of the Attorney General, which sued RealPage and several D.C.-based landlords that made use of YieldStar. The OAG’s complaint notes that “RealPage widely touts the impact of its [Revenue Management] products, advertising revenue lifts of 2-7%.”
Is RealPage’s boast accurate? The empirical research isn’t very clear on this point. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that RealPage has the power to uniformly increase median rents by 7 percent above their “normal level” in any city where YieldStar is in common use.
If we assume that D.C.’s rents are 7 percent higher due to RealPage than they would have been otherwise—which, again, assumes RealPage achieved its self-described maximum possible impact—then how much did RealPage contribute to the city’s housing affordability crisis? Well, RealPage was founded in 1998. Between 2001 and 2018, the median rent in D.C. climbed a whopping 59 percent in real dollars according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. So, without YieldStar, rents would have only gone up by … 52 percent. And again, the real-world effect of this software on citywide median rents is probably quite a bit lower than what we’re assuming for the sake of this thought experiment. In the counterfactual universe where RealPage and similar companies did not exist, D.C. would still have a very severe housing affordability crisis.
If we were to single out the decisive factor that contributed to swelling rents in D.C., I think a mismatch between housing supply and demand is a more likely culprit than cartel behavior on the part of landlords. Between 1996 and 2015, the city’s rental vacancy rate plunged from 13.4 percent to 5.4 percent. That’s a pretty good proxy for how well the rental market in a given area is meeting demand for housing; vacancy rates are higher where there’s a lot of housing to go around, and lower where a lot of prospective tenants are chasing a comparatively small number of available units. So a consistently declining vacancy rate suggests a city where more and more people are looking for housing with each passing year and there are proportionally fewer and fewer homes available. Which gives landlords the market power to hike rents higher than YieldStar alone could ever do.
The YieldStar theory doesn’t pan out in other cities, either. Take San Francisco, which banned “the sale or use of algorithmic devices to set rents or manage occupancy levels for residential units” in 2024. Guess what happened immediately afterward? Median rents skyrocketed; between 2025 and 2026, the median rent on a two-bedroom apartment rose 25.9 percent. That is largely a result of the current AI boom: tech companies are hiring for a lot of high-wage jobs in the city, thereby attracting affluent newcomers who need to compete with existing residents for a relatively static supply of housing. You might argue that rents would have climbed higher if San Francisco hadn’t banned YieldStar and similar apps, but it is a lot harder to plausibly argue that the ban put a significant dent in the city’s housing crisis.
I have my own counterfactual to put forward: if San Francisco had not enacted a major citywide downzoning in 1978, if housing entitlements were based on consistent rules instead of the whims of local officials, and if the California Supreme Court had not ruled in 1972 that CEQA applied to virtually all new construction, then San Francisco would not have a housing crisis today. Successive tech booms in the Bay Area would certainly have raised rents citywide, but they also would have led to a home construction boom that would have substantially mitigated those rent increases. Based on the available evidence, I think my theory is considerably more plausible than the RealPage theory.
In fact, we can find something like a real-world counterfactual to my story of San Francisco if we look southeast. Austin, Texas, experienced a local boom of its own in the 2010s, and saw a corresponding spike in rents. But unlike in San Francisco, Austin policymakers responded to this spike by aggressively liberalizing local land use rules. As a result, Austin grew its housing supply by more than three times the national rate between 2021 and 2024, and saw a 4 percent drop in rents during a period when rents across the U.S. overall rose by 10 percent.
None of the above should be interpreted as a defense of RealPage; I agree that coordinating prices with your supposed competitors is sleazy, cartel-like behavior. You won’t hear me object if other cities decide to follow San Francisco’s lead and crack down on such practices. But doing that won’t get us any closer to solving the housing crisis. San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and their peer cities still need to permit more multifamily home construction.