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.