Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus Part 5: A Housing Shortage? Evaluating the Evidence

The YIMBY explanation for the country’s housing affordability crisis rests on three premises: that the country faces a severe housing shortage, that this shortage is driving up costs, and that those cost increases have made housing unaffordable. These premises have become so widely accepted that they have become starting points for policy, rather than theories to evaluate. But what does the evidence actually show?

In next installment of this ongoing Village Preservation series, Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus, we speak with Kirk McClure (University of Kansas) and Alex Schwartz (The New School) about new research that challenges these premises. After looking at housing production, vacancy rates, and household formation across decades and hundreds of metropolitan areas, they find ample reason to question the commonly held housing shortage assessment. More provocatively, their research shows that even unrealistically steep reductions in market rents and home prices would do surprisingly little to reduce the affordability problem for those who need the help most — a problem ultimately rooted in wage stagnation and inequality.

Join us as we discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the affordability crisis and the appropriate strategies for confronting it.