It’s time to build

Housing, and prisons

Publication note 12/3/2025: This essay was my entry into the Boyd Institute’s housing policy essay contest. It will be published in its entirety on the Boyd Institute substack later this month. Paid subscribers can read it now. Enjoy.

Just ask any right-wing masculinity expert on Twitter and they will be happy to prove to you that America doesn’t have a housing shortage. They’ll show you dozens of affordable real-estate listings in flyover country that today’s young people are too lazy and entitled to live in. These spoiled college graduates have the gall to look you in the eye and complain they can’t find a house they can afford when falling-down 2-bedroom ramblers in dying factory towns are going for under $200k. And some of these starter homes are less than a 45-minute drive from a meat packing plant or fertilizer distributor, where a general manager can earn in excess of $65,000 per year.

To left-wing accounts there is an acute housing crisis affecting everyone making the objectively correct choice to crowd into one of the dozen desirable metros every other college graduate of working age wants to live in. But not to worry, there are still great deals to be found, so long as you aren’t racist. You aren’t racist, right? Simply choose from among a generous handful of beautifully diverse neighborhoods where housing is almost suspiciously affordable, many of them a short walk to a bus line or train station. Complaints about the safety and orderliness of these neighborhoods and the public transportation serving them are either overblown, white nationalist propaganda, or both.

Both of these accounts get things right in their arrogance, and both are determined to ignore important economic and social realities that confront a new generation of Americans seeking to enter the housing market.

America doesn’t have a housing shortage. But it does have a shortage of desirable housing, in good neighborhoods, close to good jobs. Efforts to spread concentrated demand for desirable metros more broadly, by changing the preferences of home seekers, are doomed to failure. Our current trend of urbanization is hundreds of years old, driven more by changes in technology than by changes in culture. Treating the problem as one of mere personal preference ignores how long in the making the agglomeration of technocapital has been. You will not convince any critical mass of young people to forego the perks of urban living — proximity to other ambitious young people, cultural amenities, and of course access to professional jobs. Nor will you convince anyone outside of a dedicated cadre of true believers to discount the evidence of their own eyes and move to an urban neighborhood where rent is depressed by crime and disorder, where public transit is haunted by the same. Not if they can afford another option. Not if they can afford a car and a commute from a more orderly place.

Nor can you lure young professionals from their urban and suburban enclaves by artificially bolstering the economic prospects of flyover territory. The well-meaning idea to re-locate federal department offices to slowly dying former factory towns may save those particular towns for a time, but will not create new desirable metros, only new second-tier towns one small step above the ones young people are dying to escape. And with the possible exception of Starbase, company towns are a dead letter, for the same reason: a person uprooting their entire life to relocate for a job prospect will, all else being equal, choose a destination with other options if this one doesn’t pan out. You can get incredibly mission-driven people, like those who dream of colonizing the solar system, to move to your special economic zone. And people with few other prospects, like our massive federal bureaucracy, will suffer as they must to remain employed. But normal, middle-of-the-road college educated professionals will keep choosing New York and San Francisco, and they’re right to. That’s where their peers are, and that’s where the jobs are.

Where does that leave us? If a few dozen desirable metros continue to capture most of the new job prospects and therefore new residents, why won’t their housing prices continue to inflate ever higher? This is the path most major metros are currently on, and they all have two things in common: they refuse to build enough new housing, and they refuse to adequately police their bad neighborhoods. Both of these are policy decisions, and the federal government must break them of both, at the same time, with the same legislation.

For decades, housing policy at every level of government has served to subsidize demand: housing vouchers; sweetheart loans to certain privileged classes; new homebuyer credits; the mortgage interest deduction. All of these policies send more dollars chasing the same scarce supply of housing, driving up prices in the metros where population growth clusters. All of them are counterproductive to making housing affordable. It’s time for a new approach. It’s time to subsidize supply.

It’s time to build, and it’s time for the federal government to help.