Why No Home Is An Island

Unpacking Fallacies and Realities in the Housing Affordability Debates

NOTE: This article is part of a series of discussion posts leading to the 63^rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference, July 6-10 in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia.

The housing debate in the USA, and to some extent in other countries, has a dominant refrain: build more homes, and prices will fall. That basic supply-and-demand logic animates the so-called Yes In My Back Yard or YIMBY movement, which has captured headlines and legislative momentum across the USA. But a recent Washington Post article, titled Are YIMBYs winning the housing wars? Not so fast, these people say, lays out a contrasting perspective. It cites scholars who argue that supply alone is not a magic bullet for affordability.

Underlying this debate is a fundamental disagreement -- and perhaps misunderstanding -- about what causes unaffordable housing and, consequently, what solutions will actually work. Misdiagnosing the problem leads to policies that might build more units, but do little to actually increase affordability. Not only could the specific cost of the units remain out of reach for too many, but the actual cost of living there (utilities, commuting, accessing daily needs) could reduce bottom-line monthly affordability for the residents. Worse, a narrow focus on supply risks obscuring broader social and urban needs, including social interaction, economic opportunity, ecological living, and overall quality of life. An "affordable" house in a remote, fragmented or unlivable locale is not an acceptable solution.

In its survey of the current housing affordability debate, The Washington Post underscores the rise of “supply skeptics” — analysts and academics who find evidence that simply deregulating land use and building more housing won’t materially lower costs for most. The article highlights research from Michael Storper, an urban planning professor at UCLA and the London School of Economics, who has become one of the most visible critics of the conventional YIMBY framing.

A recent paper by Storper and colleagues, titled, Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis, unpacks the fallacies of current supply-side thinking. First, they find that the “deregulationist” supply narrative is empirically weak. While high-cost regions are often more regulated, the authors show that this correlation does not translate into a strong causal relationship between zoning rules and overall housing supply. Across regions, housing construction has generally kept pace with household formation, even in supposedly “supply-constrained” metros. Upzoning may shift where housing gets built within a city, but the evidence does not support the claim that deregulation reliably increases regional supply enough to improve affordability. Selling deregulation as an affordability fix, they argue, is simply not supported by the data.

Second, the authors show that even when new market-rate housing is built, its impact on prices and affordability is modest and slow. The relationship between added supply and lower prices is far weaker than commonly assumed, with most credible estimates showing that prices respond only slightly to increases in housing stock. The popular idea of “filtering”—where new luxury units eventually become affordable to lower-income households—turns out to be sluggish, uneven, and in many high-demand cities, reversed altogether. Housing prices depreciate very slowly, land values often rise, and in many cases older units “filter up” to wealthier residents. The net result is that new construction does little to ease rent burdens for households already struggling.

Third, to test the strongest possible version of the supply argument, the paper simulates an extreme construction boom—and finds it still fails. Even under highly optimistic assumptions—sustained, above-historic growth in housing supply, generous price elasticities, and fast filtering—it would take decades for rents in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York to become affordable to non-college workers. More realistic assumptions push that timeline into the better part of a century, requiring implausibly large expansions of the housing stock. The takeaway is stark: we cannot plausibly deregulate and build our way out of the affordability crisis with market-rate housing alone, at least not on any timescale relevant to today’s households.

Fourth, the authors argue that housing markets are not “broken” on the supply side at all—they are responding normally to demand shaped by inequality. Over the past forty years, housing costs have tracked average income growth remarkably closely across all kinds of regions, from superstar coastal cities to Sunbelt metros and even shrinking Rust Belt areas. The problem is that income growth has been radically unequal. Wages for college-educated workers—who increasingly cluster in large, high-amenity cities—have surged, while wages for non-college workers have stagnated. As prices follow average incomes upward, a widening wedge opens between housing costs and the earnings of those at the bottom. In this view, today’s affordability crisis is best understood not as a failure to build enough housing, but as the predictable outcome of rising interpersonal and spatial inequality in the American economy.

Toward a Holistic Housing Strategy

If we accept that housing affordability is a multidimensional problem, then our solutions must be multidimensional as well.

• Increase Diverse Supply: Yes — but not just more units. We need a range of housing types targeted to different income levels and life stages, from affordable rentals to starter homes to adaptable multigenerational units. And we need them in the right places.

• Rationalize Regulations: Streamline processes that add cost without adding value, eliminate arbitrary barriers such as excessive minimum parking, and prioritize predictable timelines.

• Land and Infrastructure Strategies: Public acquisition of strategic land, tax policies that discourage land speculation, and investment in infrastructure (especially transit) can unlock areas for more equitable development.

• Construction Strategies: Exploit (and incentivize) economies of construction, including manufacturing and mobile homes (yes, they still have a place, when well-designed).

• Finance and Subsidies: Expand programs that subsidize low-income housing, support first-time buyers, and enable community land trusts and shared-equity models.

• Engage Communities: Build consent and collaboration through genuine public engagement, equitable planning processes, and respect for community voices.

• Think Regionally: Housing markets are regional, not local. Solutions must consider labor markets, transportation networks, and demographic trends beyond municipal borders.

What does this mean for policy and practice? The first implication is not that housing supply is irrelevant—but that it has been dramatically oversold as a cure-all. Storper and colleagues are careful to say that supply does matter: adding housing can slow price growth, improve access to opportunity-rich places, reduce emissions, and support regional productivity. But the evidence makes clear that supply alone—especially market-rate supply unlocked through deregulation—is not a silver bullet for affordability. When demand is driven by deep income inequality and spatial sorting, prices will continue to outrun the incomes of many households no matter how many units we permit. Treating zoning reform as the solution risks mistaking a contributing factor for the core disease.

The deeper lesson is that housing affordability is a systemic problem, not a single-variable one. It sits at the intersection of labor markets, income distribution, land prices, construction costs, finance, infrastructure, and governance—and it is amplified by geography. If rising inequality is pushing demand faster at the top than incomes can grow at the bottom, then affordability cannot be restored without either changing those income dynamics or insulating households from them. That means bringing housing policy back into conversation with wage policy, workforce development, tax and transfer systems, and long-term public investment in non-market and permanently affordable housing. Supply reforms can play a role—but only as part of a broader system reset.

This is where upstream action becomes essential. Rather than framing housing as a zero-sum battle between NIMBY obstruction and YIMBY deregulation, an upstream "QUIMBY" approach -- short for QUality In My Back Yard -- focuses on building shared value structures earlier in the process: aligning residents, developers, cities, and institutions around win-win outcomes. That includes well-located housing tied to daily needs, mobility, and services; building types that reduce construction cost rather than escalate it; regulatory streamlining paired with clear public benefits; and mechanisms that stabilize land costs and expectations before speculative pressures take hold. Upstream buy-in, predictable rules, and pattern-based implementation are not obstacles to affordability—they are prerequisites for it.

Conclusion: No Home Is an Island

The impulse to reduce housing affordability to a silver-bullet solution — from supply alone, or deregulation alone — is understandable but misplaced. Market dynamics, regulatory frameworks, community values, and public policy all intersect in shaping housing outcomes. As The Washington Post article and Storper’s research remind us, simplistic narratives can mislead and marginalize the people most in need of real solutions. We need systemic, toolkit approaches -- not silver bullets, but what some have called "silver buckshot".

Just as no house stands apart from its neighborhood, no policy succeeds in isolation. It’s time for a more holistic, evidence-informed, and humane conversation about housing — one that acknowledges complexity, respects people’s lived experience, and pursues affordability not as an end in itself, but as a necessary component of vibrant, equitable, livable cities, towns and suburbs.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: The 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) will be held in the beautiful cities of Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026. For more information or to submit an abstract -- on housing affordability, or other topics of livability, sustainability and quality of life, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.

Learning from Europe’s Resilience: Practical Lessons About Successful Urban Regeneration After Disruption

The 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) will study new innovations as well as timeless lessons, in beautiful Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026

ABOVE: Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, the locales of the 63rd International Making Cities Livable.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This post is an introduction to some of the themes of the next IMCL conference in the long-running and venerable series begun in 1985.

Cities today are facing a wave of potentially unprecedented disruptions. Climate change, geopolitical instability, housing crises, social polarization, technological upheaval, and economic volatility are commonly cited as novel and overwhelming forces—conditions that require entirely new frameworks of response. Yet from a longer historical perspective, disruption is not an anomaly in urban life: it is a recurring condition.

European cities, in particular, offer an instructive reminder of this reality. Over the past century alone, many have endured war, occupation, ideological reconstruction, forced (and often unwelcome) modernization, economic disruption, and rapid political transition. Entire districts have been erased and rebuilt multiple times, often under externally imposed systems that bore little relationship to local culture or civic life. And yet, many of these cities have not only survived, but recovered in ways that restored identity, vitality, and long-term functionality.

The central question, then, is not whether cities can withstand disruption—but how they recover, and what kinds of recovery lead to enduring urban health rather than fragile equilibrium. This is an especially relevant question today for city leaders, academics and practitioners from around the world.

Beyond “Bouncing Back”

The concept of resilience has been the dominant framework for responding to disruption over the past two decades. Resilience has clear value: it emphasizes robustness, adaptability, and the capacity to absorb shocks. But resilience also carries an implicit assumption that the goal is to return to a prior state—often a state that was already socially inequitable, economically brittle, or environmentally unsustainable.

European urban history suggests a different lesson. Successful recovery is rarely a simple act of restoration. Instead, it is a process of regeneration: the rebuilding of underlying capacities that allow a city to evolve, adapt, and flourish over time.

This distinction matters. A resilient city can survive repeated shocks; a regenerative city becomes stronger because of them. The Lebanese-American scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb has called this condition "antifragile" - a structure that actually gains from disorder. We might ask, then, what an "antifragile urbanism" would look like -- and we could find many clues on the continent of Europe, and in the Baltic states in particular.

Europe as a Living Laboratory of Recovery

Consider the post-war reconstruction of European cities after 1945. In many cases, the initial response prioritized speed, efficiency, and ideological clarity over local complexity. Large-scale modernist reconstruction—often driven by centralized planning doctrines—produced housing and infrastructure quickly, but frequently at the cost of urban coherence, social life, and long-term adaptability.

In subsequent decades, many cities were forced to confront the unintended consequences of those choices: isolated housing estates, disconnected street networks, weakened local economies, and a loss of civic identity. Recovery, in these cases, did not come from another round of wholesale replacement. It came from incremental repair—re-stitching street networks, reintroducing mixed uses, restoring public space, and supporting small-scale, locally embedded development.

The tools of incremental repair are not mysterious -- but they require careful study, assessment and deployment. They are available to all cities and towns across the globe, as we face a new wave of disruptive change.

The lessons can be found across Europe, from historic cores damaged by war to peripheral districts shaped by ideologically driven planning. The lesson is consistent: cities recover not by imposing new universal solutions, but by rebuilding the relationships that make urban systems work.

Cities as Complex Networks

One way to understand this process is to recognize cities as complex adaptive networks, rather than static physical artifacts. Streets, blocks, buildings, public spaces, institutions, and social practices form interconnected systems that shape how people move, interact, and invest meaning over time.

This networked view has a useful analogy in neuroscience. Just as the human brain functions through a dense web of connections—where cognition emerges from relationships rather than isolated components—cities function through what might be called an urban connectome: a network of places, pathways, thresholds, and interactions that collectively produce urban life.

Damage to a city often disrupts these networks. Streets are severed, public spaces lose their role as social condensers, and institutions become disconnected from everyday life. Recovery, therefore, is not merely a matter of replacing buildings or infrastructure, but of restoring connectivity—spatial, social, and economic.

European recovery efforts that have succeeded over time tend to share this characteristic. They focus less on singular “iconic” projects and more on repairing the fine-grained connective tissue of urban life: walkable streets, active edges, mixed-use neighborhoods, and accessible public spaces.

ABOVE: Riga, Latvia, including its spectacular Central Market, located within five former zeppelin hangars.

Latvia: Recovery Under Pressure

These themes will be central to the 63rd International Making Cities Livable Conference, to be held July 6–10, 2026 in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia. The country offers a particularly instructive context for examining these dynamics. Latvian cities experienced devastation during the Second World War, followed by decades of reconstruction shaped largely by Soviet planning doctrines. The result was a built environment that often prioritized industrial efficiency and ideological symbolism over local urban traditions.

Since regaining independence, Latvian cities have faced the dual challenge of repairing physical damage and reclaiming civic identity—all while navigating new economic realities and contemporary geopolitical pressures. This has required not only technical expertise, but careful negotiation between heritage and adaptation, memory and innovation.

What makes Latvia especially relevant today is that its challenges are not unique. Many cities across Europe and beyond are grappling with inherited urban forms that no longer serve contemporary needs, while facing external pressures that limit available choices. Latvia’s ongoing recovery thus provides insight into how cities can regenerate under constraint—by strengthening local networks rather than relying on imported solutions.

From History to Implementation

One of the most important lessons from Europe’s experience is that implementation matters more than aspiration. Grand visions, whether modernist or technocratic, have repeatedly faltered when they failed to engage the complexity of urban systems.

Regenerative recovery, by contrast, tends to proceed through:

• Small, coordinated interventions rather than megaprojects

• Reinforcement of existing social and spatial networks

• Adaptation of inherited structures rather than wholesale replacement

• Governance processes that allow learning and adjustment over time

Pattern Languages as a Tool for Regeneration

What are the specific tools for implementation? We will examine many of them in detail. One example is the pattern language methodology -- used in software and many other fields today, and proven to be particularly useful. Pattern languages are not stylistic prescriptions, but are better understood as relational tools—frameworks that describe recurring solutions to recurring problems within complex systems. They are exceptionally well-suited to dealing with cities as complex adaptive networks.

In the context of urban recovery, pattern languages offer several advantages:

• They operate at multiple scales, from regional structure to street design to building detail.

• They encode historical learning without freezing it into rigid templates.

• They support incremental, context-sensitive implementation rather than one-off interventions.

• They provide a shared vocabulary that can align planners, designers, officials, and citizens.

  
  

European cities have repeatedly demonstrated that regeneration works best when it follows recognizable patterns of human settlement—patterns that support social interaction, economic diversity, and civic identity. These patterns already exist, whether named in the formal methodology or not. The methodology only allows them to be identified as a means to guide successful recovery: small blocks, permeable street networks, mixed uses, robust public spaces, and buildings that shape streets rather than retreat from them.

ABOVE: Patterns created for new challenges, including resilience planning and climate adaptation.

Pattern languages help make this tacit knowledge explicit and transferable, without reducing it to external or top-town formulas that ignore local conditions.

Pattern languages and network-based thinking provide practical ways to support this kind of implementation. They help cities ask better questions: Where are connections broken? Which patterns are missing or weakened? How can incremental change produce real cumulative transformation, and meet our critical needs?

ABOVE: New pattern languages include digital forms such as this wiki created by wiki inventor Ward Cunningham.

A Springboard for Effective Change

This and other topics will be central to the 63rd International Making Cities Livable Conference, to be held July 6–10, 2026 in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia. Through comparative case studies, site-based workshops, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, the conference will explore how cities can move beyond resilience toward regenerative forms of recovery, grounded in history, attentive to place, and capable of enduring change. The conference will serve as a springboard for further collaboration, projects, research, and other initiatives to push forward with transformational change in making cities livable.

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The International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference series is a premier interdisciplinary, cross-border gathering of city leaders, researchers and practitioners established in 1985. Our last conference in Potsdam, Germany in October 2025 included cross-sector leaders from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Attendee comments included “An absolutely fantastic event, with amazing speakers and extremely well organized,” “Wonderful conference!”, “Such rich content!”, “Excellent… High professional level and warm atmosphere”, “I left brimming with ideas and contacts for a great cohort of new colleagues.” For more information about the conference and how to participate, please visit the IMCL conference website at https://www.imcl.online/latvia.

Plans Are Set for a Spectacular IMCL 2026 Conference in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia

The theme is “Regenerative Architecture and Urbanism: Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption”, set for July 6-10, 2026

ABOVE: A video by the team as we made preparations for the conference in beautiful Latvia, showing conference and hotel venues, and other features we will visit. (Click to play.)

JELGAVA, LATVIA - The 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference is set to occur this summer in this city, and in nearby Riga, the capital of Latvia.

The conference will begin in Riga on July 6th, featuring tours of the city's architectural beauty and poignant history. On July 7th, transfers will be provided to the nearby city of Jelgava, where we will gather for the formal conference events, as well as tours of that city. We will examine "regenerative architecture and urbanism" with a focus on recovery and resilience following a period of disruption.

The topic is certainly timely. Cities and towns across the globe are experiencing unprecedented new disruptions from social, political and environmental forces that are straining our ability to respond effectively. However, ours is far from the first time in history that disruptions have required new responses and new forms of resilience. What can we learn from history, and in particular, European history, that will be applicable to other parts of the world? There are timeless lessons as well as new strategies that cities and towns can employ to cope with stresses and seize opportunities, balancing adaptive innovations with the continuity of heritage and local identity. The conference will examine these issues.

Latvia is a fitting place to do so. As a European leader at the forefront of current geopolitical tensions, the country has also come through enormous past disruptions, including the devastation and regeneration of its cities in World War II and the years of occupation that followed. In the process, Latvians have sought to build on their own local identity and culture. Today that work continues, as it does in other parts of the world.

The video above shows the venues for the conference, as well as some of the splendid architecture and thought-provoking museums we will visit. The conference location in Jelgava is the Jelgava Palace, and the hotel is the Hotel Jelgava. In Riga, the hotel is the Radisson Old Town Riga, and we will visit a number of other venues while in town. Both cities offer many other excellent hotel choices at a range of prices.

July is an ideal time to travel in Latvia, with typically beautiful summer weather. Riga is easily accessible from other European airport hubs or by rail, and the country is remarkably affordable. There are excellent opportunities for side trips to other parts of Latvia, the Baltic States and Europe as a whole. Transfers are also very convenient from the Riga airport or train station to the hotel and venues, as are the transfers in Jelgava.

For more information, please visit: https://www.imcl.online/latvia

To submit a no-obligation abstract, please visit: https://www.imcl.online/cfa26

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The International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference series, a premier interdisciplinary, cross-border gathering of city leaders, researchers and practitioners established in 1985, invites you to submit an abstract for its upcoming 2026 conference.  Our last conference in Potsdam, Germany in October 2025 included cross-sector leaders from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Attendee comments included “An absolutely fantastic event, with amazing speakers and extremely well organized,” “Wonderful conference!”, “Such rich content!”, “Excellent… High professional level and warm atmosphere”, “I left brimming with ideas and contacts for a great cohort of new colleagues.”