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
Does the academy have a pro-YIMBY bias? That’s the argument of financial analyst Aziz Sunderji, who published this chart last week to illustrate the point:
In a Substack post accompanying the chart, Sunderji explains: “Of the 61 papers in my compilation, only a third can be classified as YIMBY. But these have outsized influence: the average YIMBY paper has been cited 6x more than the average paper that comes to alternative explanations for the high price of housing.”
One possible interpretation of this finding is that the YIMBY papers are simply more credible and of higher quality. And indeed, several of the anti-YIMBY papers in Sunderji’s dataset are seriously flawed; see Salim Furth’s response to the Louie, Mondragon, and Wieland paper, for example. Similarly, this Yonah Freemark paper (which is often cited by anti-YIMBY pundits, if not academics) is fatally flawed as a test of YIMBY policies because it focuses solely on zoning in Chicago without acknowledging the unchecked veto power that local aldermen have over development in their districts.
Sunderji anticipates this objection by citing other research that finds a tenuous (at best) relationship between research quality and how often a given paper gets cited. Fair enough. It may be the case that researchers are responding to external cues—simple "momentum” may be one of them, as Sunderji suggests, although I don’t think we should dismiss the possibility that economists and planning academics are noting the more tentative, observational data coming out of cities like Austin, Texas and factoring the evident success of YIMBY policies in those places into how they evaluate the academic literature.
But as I dug deeper into Sunderji’s dataset, I began to suspect that his findings were largely an artifact of how he coded various papers. For example, two papers—one by Jenny Schuetz, and another by Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan—get categorized as “bridge” literature which acknowledges the insufficiency of boosting housing supply on its own. I think Jenny would be a bit surprised to find herself placed in the non-YIMBY camp; she currently leads housing programs at Arnold Ventures, which is a big institutional funder of YIMBY organizations. Been, Gould Ellen and O’Regan have written extensively in support of the argument that building more housing is good for housing affordability.
But the oddest coding decision Sunderji makes, in my view, is to place political scientist Jessica Trounstine among “the realists” who think inequality and demand-side factors, not limited supply, are to blame for the housing crisis. Trounstine’s work does indeed focus on how wealthy, disproportionately white homeowners work to enhance their own property values and limit outsiders’ access to housing and public amenities. But, in Trounstine’s telling, restrictive land use rules are one of the key tools they use to accomplish this goal. Her work does not provide a rebuttal to the YIMBY narrative but an important complement to it.
Sunderji’s effort to draft Trounstine into the anti-YIMBY cause points to a larger intellectual limitation embedded in the supply-skeptic position. Anti-YIMBYs of the left love to argue that YIMBYism ignores questions of power or economic inequality. See Alexander Ferrer arguing that YIMBYism has always functioned as “a promise that we didn’t need to redistribute anything.” Or Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan observing that the “surge in inequality over the past forty years is one driver of the housing crisis about which YIMBYs have little to say.” (I also show up in the piece that quotes Ferrer, and Callaci and Vaheesan were replying to me as part of a public debate.)
In fact, YIMBYs have plenty to say about power relations, inequality, and redistribution; it’s just that the anti-YIMBYs of the left haven’t been listening. In my own view, wealth inequality is both a cause and a consequence of the housing shortage. The “consequence” part should be relatively easy to grasp: housing shortages benefit incumbent landowners and rentiers, who see their property values soar and discover they can demand increasingly exorbitant rents from prospective tenants. Meanwhile, those of us who can’t afford to purchase homes see a greater share of our income disappearing into our landlords’ bank accounts instead of growing through savings.
There’s another layer to this inequality story as well: the really pronounced housing shortages are in “superstar” cities like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, which have high-wage local industries. Access to those industries can help some people ascend the class ladder, but high housing costs in those cities are just as likely to prevent them from ever getting their foot in the door.
As for how inequality causes housing shortages, Trounstine’s work—as well as the work of Richard Rothstein, Yoni Appelbaum, and others—helps point the way. In this case, the key point is that America’s land use system is a direct product of its twentieth-century racial caste system. White property owners deliberately restricted housing construction in their cities in order to ensure that prices and rents would stay above what most non-white families would be able to afford, guaranteeing that racial segregation would persist in fact even when racially restrictive covenants and other more explicit de jure tools of segregation fell out of favor. Maintaining racial segregation in these communities was only partly an end in itself; it was also a way of maintaining the economic power of exclusive white communities by protecting their monopoly on well-funded schools and other key amenities.
And there’s another angle on the relationship between inequality and housing supply: while many local governments started radically downzoning their cities in the 1960s and 70s, many of these cities didn’t start experiencing real shortages until the 80s or 90s. That’s because demand for housing in places like New York was relatively low during the era of white flight and the urban crisis, when professional-class families took off for the suburbs, the resulting urban tax base proved inadequate to fund even basic municipal services, and violent crime spiked across urban America. The housing shortage in these cities only emerged when the yuppie generation returned to the city and started bidding up rents on a relatively fixed supply of housing.
This is also, not coincidentally, when street homelessness first became a widespread phenomenon in American cities. There’s a good paper on the relationship between housing supply, inequality, and homelessness that I turn to often; it finds evidence that “inequality affects homelessness … by crowding out low-income households from the rental market,” which is particularly likely to happen in areas where the rental market is inelastic.
I suspect that the problem with this argument, at least from a left-NIMBY perspective, is what it suggests about the nature of inequality. Economic populists tend to implicitly frame the American class system as a two-tiered affair: there are the elites and the billionaires, and then there is the 99 percent. Taking the relationship between housing supply and inequality seriously complicates that dichotomy. Most of the high-wage tech workers who bid up the rents in San Francisco are not billionaires; if they were, then they would own mansions in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, or Silicon Valley suburbs like Los Gatos or Atherton. Instead, they are high-wage renters from the professional-managerial class who have more in common with anti-YIMBY journalists and nonprofit employees than with the tech industry’s billionaire masters. By the same token, the homeowners who often put up the biggest fight to preserve exclusionary zoning are lowly millionaires, not multi-billionaires. (Marc Andreessen is an exception.) Taking housing supply seriously forces us to think about inequality in fractal, not manichean, terms.
But thinking about inequality in fractal terms is an discomfiting prospect because it risks exposing divisions within the economic-populist coalition. What do you do when the actual obstacle to housing affordability in a city like Berkeley looks less like Sam Altman and more like Robert Reich? (To be clear: Sam Altman sucks for other reasons.) How do you approach class conflict when it turns out that the offending class is, in this case, both far larger and much closer to home than populist rhetoric would suggest? YIMBYism does not dodge the subject of power, but instead raises questions about power well outside the economic populist comfort zone.