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
Let’s say you’re a public health expert investigating why a certain town experiences far more lung cancer deaths per capita than any of its neighbors. One possible factor is that many of the town’s residents don’t have good health insurance, so they miss out on the regular screenings that might catch lung cancer when it is still treatable. Or maybe the town’s one hospital is itself inadequate, with an understaffed and under-resourced oncology department that is incapable of providing effective cancer treatments to most patients. That would certainly contribute to a higher-than-average mortality rate for cancer patients. But it wouldn’t explain why so many town residents get cancer in the first place.
Clearly, you would need to get to the bottom of that question. And it would be strange—in fact, it would be grotesquely negligent—to try and explain the town’s high cancer rate without considering environmental factors. Especially if there were a massive industrial plant in the center of town that constantly belched chemical byproducts out of its smokestacks. If you tried to account for the town’s rate of cancer deaths without closely scrutinizing the plant’s emissions, your colleagues would rightly chalk the elision up to either extreme incompetence or a bribe from the plant’s owners.
And yet ignoring environmental factors is precisely what a shocking number of serious commentators do when they analyze California’s homelessness crisis. In this case, the industrial plant is the state’s land use system, which has, over the past several decades, locked the state into a massive housing shortage. And the toxic contaminant released by this land use system is housing cost inflation, which has forced millions of Californians into chronic housing instability and a smaller subset of that unlucky group into chronic unsheltered homelessness.
The subhed to economist Lee Ohanian’s “How Los Angeles Lost the War on Homelessness,” published last week by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, nods at the persistent haze shrouding the city: “high housing costs share the blame” for LA’s homelessness epidemic, according to Ohanian, or at least according to his editor. But apparently they don’t share much of the blame, because the essay itself has nothing to say about the housing market. Instead, to return to our earlier metaphor, Ohanian’s sole focus is on blaming the oncologists.
Or, rather, it’s on blaming the usual litany of conservative bugbears. Housing First, harm reduction, corruption, and inadequate policing all take their licks. Not everything Ohanian says is wrong (it is true that building permanent supportive housing in California is far more expensive than it should be and that proper oversight of homeless services contractors is severely lacking), but most of it is.
The problems start with how Ohanian understands the state’s Housing First strategy—or how he fails to understand it. He writes that Housing First-aligned agencies prioritize “placing the homelessness [sic] in permanent supportive housing,” which is mostly false. The HF model emphasizes moving homeless people into permanent housing, but permanent supportive housing refers to a category of subsidized housing reserved for individuals with particularly severe behavioral and/or physical health conditions. An effective Housing First program is going to make a variety of housing options available, ranging from permanent supportive housing on one end of the spectrum to a simple rental subsidy on the other.
The looseness with which Ohanian deploys concepts like “Housing First” and “permanent supportive housing” is our first indication that he hasn’t done his homework. He also betrays no familiarity with the existing academic literature on Housing First, let alone the model’s track record in any city other than Los Angeles. Further, he gets the relationship between homelessness and mental illness wrong: while it is true that homeless people tend to suffer from mental health disorders or addiction at a higher rate than the general population, that is not because these conditions are a major cause of homelessness; as demonstrated in the book Homelessness is a Housing Problem, there is no correlation between an area’s rate of homelessness and its rate of addiction or mental illness. The stress of homelessness is as likely to induce mental illness or drug dependency as it is to be induced by them.
I’ve written about Housing First’s actual track record many times before. So instead of repeating myself here, I’ll direct curious readers to my 2022 report comparing Houston’s remarkably successful Housing First implementation to Los Angeles’s and San Francisco’s failures to substantially reduce homelessness. I also wrote a piece for MS NOW last year (back when it was MSNBC) that describes how the Department of Veterans Affairs was able to achieve substantial reductions in veteran homelessness using the Housing First model.
Both of the above pieces make the same point: Housing First is highly effective on a client-by-client basis, but it is not designed to address the structural factors that generate mass homelessness. So while there is a lot I would change about how Los Angeles implements Housing First, blaming LA County’s homeless services agency for the homelessness crisis is like blaming the oncology department for high cancer rates. There is a lot our hypothetical oncology department can do to improve the quality of care for its patients. But it can’t prevent people from getting cancer in the first place, and it can’t save everyone who does get it. The real solution is further upstream.
It’s odd that Ohanian doesn’t understand this, because he has written at length about California’s housing shortage. In a 2021 paper for the Cato Institute, he blamed the shortage for California’s extraordinarily high cost of living and urged the state to reform local zoning, cut construction costs, and overhaul its environmental laws. I didn’t agree with everything in the paper, but it was at least a serious effort to grapple with the housing crisis. High housing costs, he wrote, are “exacerbating homelessness and poverty and are squeezing household budgets to the point that they are significantly lowering the quality of life, particularly for low- and middle-income households.”
So why the disconnect between Ohanian the housing policy analyst and Ohanian the homelessness policy analyst? In part, it might be because he falls into the standard conceptual trap of treating housing policy and homelessness policy as two discrete domains of practice. This is a pervasive fallacy, and not just on the right; most cities, including Los Angeles, deal with land use policy and homeless services as if they have nothing to do with one another. (Which is why Mayor Karen Bass, for example, can talk a good game about reducing homelessness in Los Angeles while simultaneously doing everything in her power to halt multifamily housing construction in single-family neighborhoods.)
But I suspect the larger issue is a matter of ideology and moral intuition. It’s all well and good to say in the abstract that high housing costs lead to more homelessness. But when a lot of people see the actual fruits of the housing shortage up close—the homeless encampments and rough sleepers, the mental health crises and evidence of addiction—they instinctively default to individualist explanations for what’s in front of them. Surely this sort of thing wouldn’t happen to just anyone. And surely if I did somehow join the ranks of the chronically unsheltered, I would be able to keep my wits about me and resist the temptation to self-medicate with hard drugs. I’d be one of the good, deserving homeless people who seek out shelter, relocate to a cheaper area, and work hard to get back on my feet.
That’s a common enough illusion, and for a good reason. It’s comforting to think that the guy on Skid Row hunting for a usable vein is in a fundamentally different category of person from you and me. It’s less comforting to realize that, until Los Angeles finally starts taking the housing shortage seriously, Skid Row will remain a live possibility for any Angeleno who suffers enough bad luck.