TPR invited economist, urban geographer, and Distinguished Professor of Regional and International Development in Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin, Professor Michael Storper to respond to the Atlantic's recent coverage of the housing affordability debate. Here, Storper, along with Max Buchholz (UC Berkeley), Tom Kemeny (University of Toronto), Gregory Randolph (Georgia Tech) challenge what they call the “deregulationist-upzoning groupthink” increasingly echoed by mainstream media and bipartisan policymakers alike. Instead, the authors argue that structural issues—rising land costs, spatial inequality, and decades of under-regulated sprawl—are the true drivers of unaffordability, and call for more rigorous, evidence-based discourse on what progressive housing policy should actually look like.
The Atlantic continues to run pieces, written either by its own staff journalists, or in this case, invited contributors, that endorse the deregulationist-upzoning groupthink about our housing affordability crisis. The fundamental claims of this view are that (1) land use/zoning restrictions are principally to blame for the housing affordability crisis; (2) reducing those restrictions will induce a boom in market-rate housing construction; and (3) such a supply shock would lower prices through trickle down and achieve widespread affordability. These assumptions were not even articulated by Ron Davis in his recent piece for The Atlantic. They are so deeply entrenched in narratives surrounding the affordability crisis that serious journalistic outlets no longer see fit to name, let alone investigate, them.
Deregulationism now holds sway across the political left, right, and center. It has shown up in both Biden and Trump administration statements and policies on housing. In Congress, it is one of the rare areas of bipartisanship. Unity here is not simply a function of a common policy goal; the political instrument for its achievement is also an area of broad agreement. It is argued that legislation at state and national levels should be enacted to reduce or override the role of localities in controlling the use of their land, and specifically by eliminating procedural reviews of construction and requiring higher densities or no limits at all on use of a parcel. For example, in a recent New York Times op-ed, the influential Harvard urban economist Ed Glaeser (2024) contends that to make housing affordable, “the goal should be to nudge state legislatures to reduce the ability of communities to zone out change.”
Davis argues that local land use laws reflect and support the interests of the "landowning elite," while casting the deregulationist movement as "antitrust policy." Pause to consider this rhetorical move: overriding local democracy is "trust busting?" And all such communities are "elite?" It's a bit shocking to see respected journalistic outfits such as The Atlantic sink to using loaded, weaponized language to discuss complex policy questions such as housing. A self-declared YIMBY housing activist, Davis uses emotionally-charged political and economic language to make his case that his ideas are progressive. It would be better if he used analysis and facts. And as for the charge that non-YIMBYs are "elites," he conveniently overlooks the fact than many of the groups in opposition to the California YIMBY legislation are working class communities, and communities of color. And it is simply irresponsible to label local community authority to set rules over land use with the same term, "trusts," that was invented to describe private corporate power over markets for tradeable commodities.
The core purpose of Davis's piece in The Atlantic is to push back on many housing scholars and activists who have identified YIMBYism as a "conservative" movement. This apparently hurts their self-image. But we must consider: what do the policy prescriptions of the YIMBY movement conserve? They would conserve the nation’s existing housing development system, certainly the most conservative in the developed world. They fall far short of advocating for the progressive reform of this system, instead concentrating on the removal of perceived obstacles to their imagined efficient functioning of the market.
Thus, the deep conservatism of the YIMBY movement rests on its unwillingness to consider any cause of the housing affordability crisis beyond regulation. The idea that regulation influences housing costs is internally consistent, logical, and relevant to some degree. But it doesn't stand up to external scrutiny. Is it the key cause of the housing crisis? Research underlying this assertion fits into the category of “keys under the lamppost" scholarship, an inside joke in which economists search in the best-lit and most convenient areas ('low hanging fruit' as most people would say), rather than where the deeper answers lie. Indeed, the idea that regulation influences costs is not the same as saying that cutting regulation would yield meaningfully more supply and lower housing costs across different income groups. For that premise to hold, we must answer the following key question: is regulation the main driver of costs, or is it the key under the lamppost, with the big causes left in the dark?
A growing body of serious research—which mainstream journalists at The Atlantic, The New York Times and many other outlets either do not know or do not care to consider and cite —shows that the roots of a deepening affordability crisis lie outside of regulation, in the rising cost of land. Developable land in desirable places is being exhausted as 170 million new Americans have been housed in sprawl in the past few decades, leading new housing construction to shift to infill development, which is more expensive for structural more than regulatory reasons (Orlando and Redfearn, 2024). A second big source of the crisis is income inequality, which deprives much of the population from real income growth needed to cope with rising land costs in housing prices. When the academic work that purports to show the causal role of regulation is confronted with these additional factors, their empirical results collapse (Louie et al, 2025).
Ironically, many of the journalists that uncritically echo deregulationist claims are considered “liberal,” whereas the original meaning of that term implies reasoned, scientific debate built on critical and open-minded evaluation of evidence. This is precisely what mainstream journalism on the housing affordability crisis has abandoned. Instead, it adopts a moralizing tone to try and paint any opposing viewpoint as NIMBYist, elitist, and yes, conservative. In light of the contested terrain in academic circles, in which rigorous but different models, results, and conclusions can increasingly be found, this language, and the selective use of academic work that supports it, is indefensible. Outlets such as The Atlantic should carefully require those whom they publish to adhere to the bedrock principle of liberalism, which is reasoned consideration of the full range of evidence over blind adherence to groupthink and polemic. On such an important economic, political and social question, we should demand nothing less of our most trusted media outlets.
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