One version of this argument hinges on a story about the financial sector. Housing construction is funded by investors, and investors won’t fund enough new housing to bring down prices, because doing so would mean financing assets that are declining in value. And the money people, famously, are in the business of making money.1

This is a compelling story, but it rests on a few conceptual errors that confuse the conversation. Let’s walk through the logic.

What we ought to mean by affordability

Before we get into whether deregulation can improve affordability, we need to be clear about what we mean by that term.

In some discussions, affordability is implicitly defined as a decline in the absolute dollar value of existing housing. That framing is misleading. If housing prices were to fall rapidly across the board, it would probably cause a financial crisis (or be caused by one).2 This means that a scenario in which housing prices suddenly plummet entails significant human misery and so, would be bad.

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A more useful definition of affordability is the price of housing relative to people’s ability to pay. In practice, this shows up as rent-to-income or price-to-income ratios. It’s also how subsidized housing programs define “affordable,” using benchmarks like Area Median Income (AMI).

With that definition in place, the question becomes whether removing legal, political, or regulatory barriers to housing production improves those ratios—and if so, by how much?

Where do high housing costs come from?

Houses—specifically the physical structures people live in—are not like wine. They do not become more valuable with age. Roofs wear down. Pipes leak. Kitchen cabinets go out of style. A house is a consumer durable like a car or a refrigerator; it slowly degrades over time.

So, how does real estate become more expensive? The answer is that the location becomes more valuable. (We often describe this as land value, but it’s less about the patch of dirt and more about where the patch of dirt is.)

As land gets more expensive per square foot, developers respond by using less of it per unit. They begin building up instead of out, putting more homes on the same lot, substituting building for land because building is the cheaper input at the margin.3

In places where demand is strong and land values are rising, allowing more density means more homes can be built on the same amount of land—bringing down the relative cost per unit even as land itself becomes more expensive.

So, we’ve established two things. Affordability is about prices relative to incomes, and rising housing costs are largely driven by land values. The next question is what that implies for affordability.

We can trade land for affordability

The price of a home and a developer’s profit are not the same thing. When developers are allowed to build more densely—putting more homes on the same amount of land—they can produce units that are less expensive on a per-unit basis while still maintaining their margins. Lower per-unit prices don’t necessarily mean lower returns.

This is where the financial constraints argument weakens considerably. Investors don’t need housing prices to rise indefinitely; they need to be able to deploy capital at sufficient scale and clear their hurdle for risk adjusted returns. Allowing denser development allows developers to satisfy those criteria while simultaneously providing housing at lower per-unit price points.

We can see this dynamic in practice. In 1998, Houston reduced minimum lot sizes inside the city’s inner loop from 5,000 square feet to 1,400 square feet, later expanding the reform more broadly. The result was a boom in small lot townhome construction—exactly the type of housing the reform made possible.

In a write up on the ‘98 reform, Pew noted that these townhomes had a median assessed value of $340,000, compared to $545,000 for other new single-family homes in the city—a roughly 37% reduction in price.4 In other words, the same underlying land could support housing at significantly lower per-unit prices without requiring a collapse in existing home values or developer returns.

To be clear, this isn’t a claim that Houston has solved the problem of housing costs or that it gets everything about land use correct.5 What it demonstrates is narrower and more important. Even inside the financialized system we have, legalizing denser housing production reduces per-unit prices through a specific, legible mechanism — reducing per capita land consumption.

Toward a more nuanced conversation

The argument above is intentionally narrow. Deregulation moves the needle on affordability, and the finance critique doesn’t negate that. That said, it doesn’t mean deregulation is wholly sufficient, and few serious housing advocates claim otherwise.

Missing middle development remains difficult to finance. Subsidized affordable housing programs have their own financial challenges. Communities with stagnant labor markets need tools that look different from what works in regulation-constrained, high-demand cities. Those challenges are real and they’re worth talking about. But they’re separate from the question of whether simply legalizing more housing production can produce meaningful impacts on price — and the answer to that question is clearly yes.

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is a financial planner and the writer behind Your Brain on Money, a newsletter about the psychology and culture of living through an economy that no longer works the way we say it’s supposed to. I asked her to take my argument the rest of the way; happily, she obliged.

As a financial planner, I spend my days sitting across from clients and helping them make sense of their money. I have never — not once — had a client under 40 tell me they feel on track.

It almost doesn’t matter how much money they make or the number in their bank account. It’s more about this low-grade hum underneath everything: that the math isn’t mathing, and something about the deal they were promised has quietly changed.

And in many ways, it has.

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What happens when an entire generation of kids believe they’ll never be able to afford a home?

Median home prices in the U.S. sit around $410,000, which means you’d need an annual income of around $120,000 to afford it. The median age of a first-time homebuyer is 40. Wages have grown — but not nearly at the rate housing costs have, and not in the places where the jobs are. Layer student loan debt on top (the average Gen Z borrower carries $24,000 to $35,000), and the math completely stops working.

These are also the people who came of age watching their parents lose homes in 2008, graduated into a pandemic economy, and entered a housing market where prices had roughly doubled since 2012. They arrived at pessimism through observation.

Nearly two-thirds of Gen Z believe they will never be able to afford a home in their lifetime.

This is a housing affordability problem and a cost-of-living problem, yes, but it’s also a trust problem. This is a generation that has watched institutions fail — banks, government, the labor market, the housing market — and drawn the reasonable conclusion that the system is not designed to work for them. The financial system doesn’t feel like a ladder to climb. It feels like a game where the rules keep changing and nobody’s telling you.

When the structural conditions are this broken, they reshape how an entire generation sees the world. They reshape what feels worth planning for, what feels worth sacrificing for, what feels worth believing in. The economic environment shapes how you see your reality, and what’s financially possible.

There’s a researcher named Sendhil Mullainathan who spent years studying what scarcity does to the brain, or the cognitive experience of not having enough of something you need.

His finding: When a critical resource feels permanently out of reach, your brain narrows. It stops planning for later and starts optimizing for now. Not necessarily because you’re impulsive or bad with money — because your cognitive bandwidth has been consumed by the emergency of the present. This helps explain consumer trends like “doom spending” or “little treat culture”.

But the scarce resource here isn’t necessarily money. It’s also the belief that the future will be better than the present. And when that belief disappears, your brain does exactly what Mullainathan would predict: it narrows to the present, where effort still produces a result.

There’s a concept in financial psychology called a money script — the inherited, usually unspoken beliefs about money that run in the background of your decisions like the operating system of a computer. Most Americans grew up running the same one: work hard, save up, buy a house, watch it appreciate, build equity, retire. (AKA, the good old American Dream).

When the script stops working but nobody hands you a new one, you get an identity crisis. Your brain resolves the dissonance the way brains do — either by blaming yourself (shame, avoidance, the paralysis) or by rejecting the premise entirely.

The behavior downstream of all this has a name: financial nihilism. It’s a set of rational-feeling responses to conditions that feel irrational. It shows up in a few ways:

• Doom spending. Why skip the $7 fancy donut when the $70,000 down payment is a fantasy? A University of Chicago and Northwestern study found that as someone’s perceived probability of homeownership falls, they consume more relative to their wealth. Remove the incentive to save for a house and people stop saving.

• Gambling. Forty-two percent of Gen Z investors hold crypto. Eleven percent hold a retirement account. Fortune coined “disillusionomics” to describe a generation turning to prediction markets, meme coins, and side hustles. When slow-and-steady can’t get you to a house anyway, a long-shot bet starts to feel like the more rational move.

• Opting out. Some have reduced their effort at work entirely — reasoning that if high performance doesn’t yield long-term financial security, the sacrifice isn’t worth the cost.

• Status games. When the conventional markers — house, career ladder, retirement account — feel inaccessible, people find new (and less financially helpful) ways to communicate status). Looksmaxxing. The obsessive optimization of every micro-decision. These are arenas where effort still connects to outcome — where inputs produce visible outputs in a way that something like the housing market no longer does.

• Comparison spiral. Wealth is relative, and social media has collapsed much of the distance between classes, making everyone feel more behind financially. This is known as positional precarity, and it explains why people making $200K who feel like they’re failing because the life six figures was supposed to buy doesn’t exist at that price point anymore. The feeling of falling behind doesn’t track neatly to income. It tracks to the gap between what you were trained to expect and what the economy actually delivers.

And that gap — between self-concept and lived experience — is doing enormous psychological work. It’s producing a generation-wide cognitive dissonance that looks, from the outside, like nihilism. But from the inside, it’s a rational response to a set of structural conditions that nobody asked for and nobody voted on.

Financial planning is built on the assumption that disciplined behavior over time produces predictable results. But when the biggest line item in the American wealth-building formula is inaccessible to the people being told to be disciplined, the whole framework starts to feel like something I’m selling rather than something I believe.

It is very hard to convince someone to plan for the future when the future has been priced out of their range.

Our current environment produces economic precarity, yes, but also psychological precarity — a rewiring of how an entire generation relates to money, work, risk, and the future. The emotional and psychological fallout of the housing crisis is not a sideshow to the policy conversation. It is the policy conversation, or it should be.

The model is broken and it’s doing more and more damage to each new wave of young people entering adulthood. And the longer we treat a structural failure as a generational character flaw, the longer we delay building something that actually works.

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This characterization is mostly accurate, but it’s also slightly reductive because it implies that the only way to overcome NIMBY sentiment is to directly overpower it. While that’s certainly one tack, there’s more we can do. We can make the fight for housing abundance easier to win not just by renegotiating the political rules of the game, but also by reconfiguring the underlying political economy that creates so much hostility to new housing in the first place. More plainly, we don’t have to beat all the NIMBYs; we can get some to join us. And because I love a good case study, we’ll be taking a look at the example of Falls Church, Virginia.

Why Falls Church turned to land leasing

Falls Church is a two-square-mile community tucked away in the northeast corner of Virginia, just a few miles outside the U.S. capital in D.C. The city traces its origin all the way back to 1734, though it incorporated as an independent municipal entity in 1948.1

In 2017, the town decided to rebuild the local high school. The existing facilities were built in the 1950s, and the cost of maintenance was becoming so high that it was more economical to rebuild the facilities from scratch. The city had two options:

• Option A: increase everyone’s property taxes by $1,050

• Option B: use 10.3 acres of publicly owned land for redevelopment, monetize through land leasing, and only raise everyone’s property taxes by about $280.

After a voter education campaign and a series of public hearings, the council moved forward with option B.

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When the city rebuilt the local high school, they sectioned off a portion of the land (labeled “West Falls” in the image below) and transferred ownership to the newly created West Falls Community Development Authority (CDA), essentially a subsidiary of the municipal government in charge of managing the project on behalf of the city. The CDA was empowered to issue bonds and enter into a lease agreement with a development partner, eventually choosing FCGP Development LLC.

The CDA structured its agreement around two lump- sum payouts, plus a yearly lease fee, and eventual repossession of the land and all improvements at the end of the lease term.

• Phase 1 payment: $25.5 million (roughly 57% of the land’s assessed value) paid out over the first six years of the lease. Grants developer rights to build on most of the property (3 acres held in reserve).

• Phase 2 payment: $10 million or the assessed value of the reserved 3 acres (whichever is greater), payable after the Phase 1 completion. This structure ensures the CDA captures any unanticipated land appreciation.

• Annual lease payments: Annual lease payments starting at $200,000 and increasing 2% annually, with a one-time $25,000 step-up in 2030. Payments starting in 2026.2

• Repossession of land and improvements: The final cherry on top comes at the end of the lease period. Barring renegotiation, everything FCGP Development has built defaults to CDA ownership.3

Arguably, this deal structure’s monetization strategy is less based on the yearly lease payments as it is enabling the city to resell access to the same pieces of land every generation. Details aside, the city retains ownership of the land and is able to monetize increasing land values in perpetuity.

How land leasing made housing popular

Ok, back to buying off the NIMBYs.

At the most fundamental level, NIMBYs are NIMBYs because they prefer the status quo. Individually, that could have to do with banal issues like the aesthetics of their neighborhood or unpriced street parking. It could also include resource concerns like the availability of free street parking or school crowding. More darkly, racial and class animus might also be at play.

So, our problem is twofold: NIMBYs don’t believe change benefits them personally and local government overweights the preferences of the typical NIMBY. While there’s been a lot of work done on the latter part of that problem, the Falls Church land leasing story is a great example of the progress we can still make on the former.

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The West Falls plan includes over 850 units of housing situated within a larger mixed-use development. That’s roughly 100 units per acre as part of a project with a 15-story height limit. For comparison, the typical American suburb is about 3-5 units per acre.

And lest we imagine that Falls Church homeowners are just magically YIMBY, the same underlying concerns, like traffic and competition for public services, were present. That said, proponents of the project in the City Government consistently messaged the West Falls Development as a solution to the financial challenges of rebuilding the school.

At the project groundbreaking, the city’s mayor remarked:

It started with a challenge. How are we going to replace and modernize Meridian High School without burdening our taxpayers? And the answer was bold. Pair the school construction with redevelopment of this 10-acre land so that new private investment could help make possible the financing of a state-of-the-art high school for our students.

The City of Falls Church made the West Falls project politically palatable by making it something that let residents move toward a thing they wanted (a new school) and move away from something they wanted to avoid (significantly higher property taxes).

It’s worth pausing for a moment to imagine the counterfactual. As we mentioned at the top, school crowding is a common reason for residents to oppose new housing. So, turning a desire for school quality from a reason to oppose housing into one to support it is no small feat.

In Falls Church, the city used land leasing to present voters with a set of tradeoffs between housing development, public school renovation, and property tax rates. This “you can only pick two” scenario made the policy choice highly legible and, ultimately, skewed the decision in favor of more housing. Municipal land leasing facilitated this by separating land ownership from building ownership. Instead of selling public land outright, the city retained ownership and leased the land to a private developer (in this case for 99 years). The developer financed and constructed the project, while the city captures value through lease payments and eventual reversion of the property. This allowed the city to efficiently monetize the upside from growth and parlay those resources into a desired public good.

So what’s the takeaway?

The mechanism generalizes, not the specifics — any municipality with publicly owned land and a pending capital expenditure has the raw ingredients for a similar structure. The ingredients here are (a) an effective way to monetize the upside from new development, (b) a tangible, popular public need, and (c) effective messaging to tie (a) and (b) together and present voters with a legible set of tradeoffs.4 Falls Church had a school; another city might have a library, a park, a community center, or deferred infrastructure maintenance. In California, we may even see this take off with underutilized land owned by the state’s two university systems.

Much of the energy behind NIMBY resistance comes from the belief that change threatens the things people value — their parking, their schools, their neighborhood stability. When incentives are structured differently — when development is clearly tied to things residents want or costs they’d rather avoid — that resistance weakens. Municipal land leasing is one way to create that alignment. By enabling cities to better capture the upside from development and connect it to tangible public benefits, it can turn housing growth from a perceived loss into a shared gain. It doesn’t eliminate the politics of housing, but it can make those politics far easier to win.

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The Line is the mega-city of the future, or so Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (aka MBS) would have us believe. Part of the Saudi government’s Vision 2030 initiative, the project originally claimed it could spin up a 9 million-person city in the middle of the desert. 

While cities are great, The Line is, conceptually speaking, asinine. What’s been proposed isn’t so much futuristic metropolis as absurd Potemkin village ineffectually aping the form of a city without understanding what gives rise to its function.

Now, folks have been ridiculing The Line for years (mostly from the perspective of criticizing Petro State Autocrats Doing Petro State Autocrat Things). Those criticisms are fair, but I want to provide an urbanist set of reasons to condemn The Line (and the pseudo-urbanist worldview it represents). 

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So, dear readers, grab your coffee, get comfortable, and in the words of a completely different mega-project loving authoritarian, let the hate flow through you as we explore the nature — and failings — of The Line. 

A Line in the sand

Like it says on the tin, The Line was envisioned as a city in the shape of a 100-mile long line. The development was meant to start in the Red Sea and end at the (actually existing) city of Tabuk. The design for the structure itself resembles two skyscrapers laid side-by-side with an open air space between them forming a kind of angular “u” shape opening up to the sky. Fun features include a vague promise to deploy AI as “the Beating Heart of the City” and also an artificial moon (because why not).

If all this sounds like the dumbest kind of Mckinsey slide deck fever dream, you’re right.1 To date, MBS has failed to convince foreign investors to commit significant levels of capital and, faced with footing the entire $1.5 trillion bill on its own, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is pumping the brakes.  

At first blush, The Line might look like just another ill-conceived mega-project, but it’s actually much worse than all the publicly subsidized sports stadiums that never paid for themselves. The Line represents an authoritarian view of urban development that fails to understand what cities are or where they come from. To appreciate this deeper point about Why The Line Is Bad, we need to start with why the vision it represents is so wrong.

Where do cities come from?

For those who never got the talk from their parents, I’m here to help answer the question that everyone begins to ask at a certain age — “Where do cities come from?”

Spoiler: they aren’t delivered in swaddling by petro state autocrats. 

Cities form gradually over time for some economic reason. Throughout history, that reason has often been trade. More than a few modern cities were originally settled because of easy access to navigable waterways. This was the story for Guangzhou in China, London in the U.K., and basically every major city on the East Coast of the U.S. 

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There are non-trade examples as well like Johannesburg (mining) and basically every capital city ever (public administration), but the pattern remains consistent — human settlements are created for economic reasons and grow into full-fledged cities over time. 

As cities grow economically, their economies also tend to diversify. A harbor supporting shipping eventually gives rise to cargo insurers, rope makers, carpenters, taverns, and a million other businesses built to serve the people working in a city’s initial anchor industry.

If the economy continues growing, those secondary industries inspire ancillary services of their own and so the process continues. Sometimes those original anchor industries wither and die, but they’re always present in the genesis of a city as the reason people begin living together in the first place. 

The built environment develops in a similarly piecemeal way. Wealthier, more productive places tend to see denser development over time. As a local economy grows, it becomes more valuable to be located where the action is. That value becomes reflected in land prices and as land prices get higher, it makes increasing sense to build more buildings instead of buying more land. 

If this is all a bit abstract, just think of New York versus almost anywhere else in the U.S. There’s a lot of economic opportunity in New York and this means there are a lot of people that would love to live and do business there. That demand is reflected in how much the dirt costs, and that cost has resulted in developers building taller buildings with smaller footprints. 

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All that said, the larger point is that cities are fundamentally never-ending group projects, emerging out of the countless plans of innumerable individuals spread across time and space. That's not to say that policy makers don’t exercise an outsized role; it’s just that policy making is more like gardening than it is building with legos. Municipal government can influence (often to a great degree and to terrible effect), but it can never dictate in the way that someone with a more authoritarian bent might like to believe.

Carts leading horses

If it’s not clear at this point, the planners behind The Line aren’t laying the foundations for organic growth, they’re specifying a finished product. They imagine that a city is a tool for achieving an end, not the result of an entire population working together in pursuit of their own diverse and varied goals. 

MBS imagines the project as a development play, but The Line will no more spur economic growth in the Saudi desert than a scale replica of Manhattan would if we built one in the corn fields of Kansas. The physical development of a city is the result of economic growth — not the cause.

So why is this bad? People do dumb stuff all the time and we ought to encourage people to try new things and see what sticks, right? 

Generally, yes. But when a single person commands the resources of a nation-state, probably not.

The original proposal for The Line is bad not just because it’s a waste of resources, but because it’s a waste of resources at scale. Remember, the original price tag was over a trillion dollars. And scale isn’t just a problem with respect to material resources–there’s a human cost as well.

People already live in the path of The Line. Villages in the way of the project have been cleared to make room. Dissidents who protested the forced removal of their communities have been arrested and sentenced to death. And herein lies another problem with scale: for a project as big as The Line, there’s always someone in the way.

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There's criticism of The Line itself and then there’s criticism of the thinking that motivates it. The former ought to be obvious at this point, but it’s worth getting a few more licks in on the latter.

We often imagine that we can design urban life to a far greater degree than we actually can. When we believe cities are machines to be engineered instead of gardens to be cultivated, it not only leads us to follies like The Line, it also blinds us to how our already existing cities actually work. 

To the extent that American urban renewal was trying to accomplish anything good, it failed because of exactly this epistemic conceit. When we misunderstand what a city is and how it works, we fail to understand how to address its challenges as well.

Having said all that, this isn’t a polemic against city government or planning per se. Cities need institutions for resolving collective action problems and planned developments like California Forever are generally unobjectionable. The Line, though, attempts to plan at a scale and specificity beyond our ability to engineer and in its grasp exceeding its reach is where we find the harm.

Outro

Ultimately, The Line won’t be built as originally imagined. Without access to infinite capital and no real economic reason for existing, the project will likely continue being reduced in scope until it’s more molehill than mountain. So, we may get something more like a futuristic dead mall in the middle of the desert at some point.

But the thinking that went into the project won’t die with it. As urbanists, it’s this thinking that we ought to look out for and guard against. And not just because of the next ill-informed state-sponsored pipe dream, but also because of the ways in which it blinds us to how our already existing cities work and how we might navigate the challenges we face today. There are limits to what we can directly control and appreciating that fact would help lead us to policy that nurtures, supports, and facilitates instead of imagining we can configure, dictate, or command.

Postscript

Since writing this over a year ago, the inevitable has come to pass. The Saudi Government has begun scaling back the project as cost over runs and impossible goals collided with the end of ZIRP and declining crude oil prices. I have every expectation that this testament to hubris and bad theory will die a slow death over the course of the coming years. Hopefully it will one day serve as lesson in what not to do; barring that, perhaps it’ll at least serve as a remind that there is, in fact, such a thing as having more money than we know what to do with.

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At their cores, each of these movements aren’t just about urbanism, they’re about urban reform. And, after some reflection, it actually feels like they’re all pointing at different parts of the same thing. Something is broken and in need of repair. Or maybe wholesale replacement. Some will say it’s capitalism’s rotting carcass we smell. Others will claim it’s neoliberalism (whatever that means) death rattling in our ears. But these prognoses are too abstract for my taste. What YIMBYism, Georgism, and Strong Towns do is tell a story rooted in the material conditions of the places we live. They all point to problems in society and identify their roots in the literal foundations of our communities.

Admittedly, YIMBYism, Georgism, and Strong Towns don’t agree on absolutely everything; and, oftentimes, the things they do agree on they talk about in different ways. But what they all point to is an American economic paradigm that’s coming to an end. The development pattern we relied upon following WWII has run its course. And, as it’s begun sputtering to a halt, the economic prospects for younger generations have gone from bad to worse, imprinting political nihilism and reaction on the hearts of Americans living through the most politically formative years of their lives.

In my mind, this leads to one conclusion: our task is more than making minor adjustments to land use policy; instead, it’s replacing an entire economic model that’s now utterly spent. And, as has said before, we don’t have forever to figure out what comes next.

How We Built the Post-War U.S.

The story of American land use policy starts at the local level and is at various points a tale of our country’s worst impulses. Early proponents of zoning, what we theoretically use to separate uses, were using it to segregate people. After the supreme court struck down explicit race-based zoning in Buchanan v. Warley, early nativist reactionaries (of which there were many) adopted modern zoning as facially race neutral policies to achieve the same outcomes. This approach was deemed acceptable by the high court’s 1926 decision in Euclid v. Ambler, enshrining zoning as a permissible exercise of the state’s police power.1

While the judicial system was busy determining the legal limits of local land use regulation, the federal government was busy shaping housing markets as well. In the late 1920s, the Department of Commerce released multiple pieces of model legislation to encourage the adoption of zoning across the nation.2 Technical assistance was only the beginning, though. The federal government’s real impact came when it started physically reshaping the country via the credit markets.

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In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) began insuring private mortgages; critically, it only insured mortgages made (a) to white — or at least not black — families and (b) for single-family homes in low-density suburban development. These guidelines reshaped the mortgage industry by giving lenders a “de-risked” financial product and paved the way for 30-year fixed rate mortgage, a financial instrument some have called an abomination before the eyes of the lord.3

Later in 1938, Congress went beyond insuring private mortgages and created Fannie Mae to actually buy them off the books of lenders. Having a guaranteed buyer for mortgages allowed lenders to recycle capital faster and issue more loans. Critically, Fannie Mae was only buying mortgages that already qualified for FHA insurance; even as the federal government was injecting capital into housing markets, it was only available for suburban development and with the same racial qualifiers attached.

As we near the end of WWII, the foundations for the post-war development model were well laid, but there was still more to be done. After all, a couple single family homes does not the suburbs make. We also need car culture.

The Federal Highway Act of 1956 created the federal highway system we all take for granted today. Government support for explicitly car-centric infrastructure opened up land around the country’s existing urban cores. While all this financial alchemy was summoning a new world into existence on the peripheries, much of the old world was razed at the same time. Neighborhoods in the urban cores were seized through eminent domain and replaced with highway interchanges to connect central business districts to the newly risen suburbs.

I want to highlight here that all of this land use policy isn’t just land use policy in some narrow sense. Easy credit, subsidized car infrastructure, and the imposition of restrictive zoning narrowed the aperture of what types of development was legally permissible and then put a finger on the scales of what was financially feasible — all in the service of promoting homeownership nationwide.

Homeownership became mythologized as the pathway to economic security and an important milestone in the life trajectory of every would-be middle class American. As long as the economy always and everywhere grows, housing prices would only ever go up; so all we needed to do was help every successive generation get a stake in the ground (no pun intended, maybe).

To commandeer an old line from a different context, show me your land use institutions and I’ll tell you your development strategy.

The System Was Always Extractive

The American development model we created over the course of the last century left much to be desired. Sprawling, car dependent development makes our communities difficult to navigate for the young, the old, or really anyone not able to drive a car. Car dependency also introduced vehicle emissions that contribute to asthma and cardiovascular disease. And that’s on top of tens of thousands we lose every year due to motor vehicle fatalities.

But maybe car culture was a necessary evil. We needed the car to get to the suburbs, we needed the suburbs to enable homeownership, and we needed homeownership to launch the middle class. So, there was a system that came with some tradeoffs, but — at least for a while — it worked. Right?

I don’t think it actually did.

And to better understand why, it’s educational to take a closer look at the communities this system never served at all.

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Like we’ve already said, access to subsidized mortgages was gate kept on the basis of race. From 1930 to 1960, 98% of all federally subsidized loans went to white families. And while the system was broadly prejudicial against anyone not considered white by standards of the times, conditions were especially bad for Black Americans.4 For example, Black homebuyers weren’t just relegated to more expensive uninsured mortgages; instead, they often had to resort to something called a land installment contract. These financial instruments looked and smelled like a mortgage, but allowed the lender to fully repossess the borrower’s property in the event of a single missed payment. If a family was late on their final payment — even after years of timely payments — they’d forfeit their property (incentivising lenders to sometimes “lose” a check in the mail).

At the same time as folks were excluded from cheap credit for new homes, their existing communities were also literally bulldozed. All those highways connecting suburbia with preexisting urban cores had to run through somewhere and somewhere usually meant Black neighborhoods like the Fillmore District in San Francisco or parts of Tremé in New Orleans. Displaced individuals then ended up in ill conceived federal housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe which accomplished little more than warehousing working class Black folks in conditions of concentrated poverty.

The communities that did persist in places like Harlem didn’t fare much better. From ’s The Menace of Prosperity:

Four-fifths of Harlem’s commercial and residential properties were owned by non-locals or companies by the 1960s. Four-fifths of the Harlem workforce was employed outside the community … This dependence reduced the economic function of Harlem and other “ghettos” to providing revenue and low-skilled labor on behalf of outsiders.5

The post war development was extractive from the jump. And although that’s easiest to see in the context of racial discrimination, it also create an inter-temporal system of wealth transfer that’s slowly grinding to a halt.

The Ratchet Effect

Workers benefiting from easy credit and an invitation to the party that was The Golden Age of Capitalism turned their earnings into homeownership. When the value of these homes outpaced inflation, however, that wasn’t because their owners were keeping the finishes in the kitchen up to date. It’s because earlier waves of homebuyers were able to extract larger and larger shares of economic growth from the cohorts of homebuyers that followed.

Now, pundits (myself included) like to point to the run up in Bay Area housing prices following successive tech industry expansions as a go-to illustrative example. The easier place to see the inter-generational wealth transfer, though, is in Los Alamos, New Mexico — home of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

From my my post on the housing crisis in Los Alamos:

When the federal government pours money into LANL, that money covers payroll, and that payroll gets spent on housing, which pushes prices up. As long as supply remains inelastic, more money just means more problems (higher prices).

To clarify, some of those thousand [new] hires will be backfills for retiring employees, not net new headcount. So maybe it’s slightly less bad than it sounds? Sadly, no.

The marginal retiring LANL employee doesn’t automatically free up a unit of housing upon retirement. Chances are they bought a home at the beginning of their career with the lab; so when they retire, they’ve paid off a $350k mortgage on a house now worth $600k. The replacement hire faces that $600k price tag on a starting salary. And herein lies an important part of the problem: every subsequent cohort of LANL employees has exerted a ratcheting effect on the region’s home prices. We can’t spend our way out of this problem.

As Los Alamos goes, so goes the nation — and that’s the crux of the issue. The country’s development model was based on a land use system that, by its construction, would only ever work for some and could never work forever.

How Things Fall Apart

What does the system look like as it’s running out of steam?

For starters, our once exceptional labor mobility has nearly disappeared. According to Yoni Appelbaum, at our peak, as many as 1 in 3 Americans moved every year; that figure is now closer to 1 in 13. At its core, this is about housing costs. We used to move toward opportunity, now we move away from cost.

After we decided we’d no longer allow cities to build up or fill in, we began dealing with housing costs by sprawling out. Drive-until-you-qualify, however, has become increasingly ineffective. As points out in The Geometry Problem, linearly increasing sprawl non-linearly increases traffic. This is how we get soul crushing super commutes and why everyone’s suburban drive to Costco goes from 10 minutes to 30 after only a modest amount of local growth.6

To borrow slightly different framing from : America has always been a frontier economy, suburban expansion was our last last frontier, and that frontier is now used up. Barring the miraculous invention of some personal conveyance not bound by the strictures of either terrestrial geometry or energy costs, just doing more of the same harder will not carry us through the rest of the century. And when an economic system stops delivering on its promises, the consequences aren’t just economic.

Our culture and politics are always downstream of material conditions. Those conditions also exert an outsized impact on us as we live through our most formative years of young adulthood. The generation coming of age right now isn’t just experiencing a housing crisis—they’re having their baseline expectations about what’s possible shaped by a system that’s grinding to a halt.

Gen Z is doing about as bad as Millennials in terms of homeownership rates. And before we get into all the revealed preference whataboutism, a 2025 survey reported that 90% of Gen Z would like to own a home; only 62% believe that will ever actually happen. No wonder we see political fatalism and cultural nihilism.

Moreover, the point here is not that we need to get homeownership rates back up. It’s that we have a system that defines material success as achieving homeownership and this system is now failing on its own terms — and that failure is being felt hardest by everyone under the age of 40.

The Revolution Will Be Urbanized

If it’s not obvious by this point, I take a pretty materialist view of politics, culture, and society. And based on the last couple paragraphs, it might seem like I’ve succumbed to the same fatalism and doom I just spent a hundred words pointing out.

Believe it or not, I’m keeping hope alive.

Yes, things are breaking. But I think the grinding gears of our economic system are exactly what gave rise to the three reform movements that prompted this reflection in the first place. Strong Towns got started in 2009. YIMBYism took off in earnest around 2014. And Georgism…well Georgism has been politically dormant for ninety-years, but the fact that it’s now reawakening like one of those hibernating African fish makes my point all the same. Our social universe is downstream of material reality and material reality is driving us to grapple with the question of what comes next.

To put a finer point on it, my optimism comes from all the ways these three urbanist tendencies overlap. And that’s not just on theory or policy goals. All the most serious folks from each of these camps share a broadly liberal world view. Everyone wants to move in the direction of a world where the material necessities are easily accessible and people are maximally enabled to author the stories of their own lives. Similarly, there’s agreement on the stakes. It’s not about getting a couple extra bike lanes; it’s about refactoring the substrate of our entire economy and, in the process, leaving future generations with institutions capable of delivering material prosperity. It’s a tall order. But many hands make light work and, given the hands already set to the task, I remain optimistic that we’ll succeed in building that better future.

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A Lieutenant Governorship for Housing

Tubbs is the former Mayor of Stockton and during his tenure he established a reputation for experimentation, piloting a universal basic income program. He’s also taken a pro-housing abundance stance while still maintaining working relationships with equity and tenant’s rights groups that, at least in California, have historically been skeptical of the mainline YIMBY position. So that’s his general vibe, but the job Tubbs is running for, the Lieutenant Governorship of California, warrants some explanation as well.

In California, the Lieutenant Governor’s (Lt.) race is an independent election, completely separate from the main gubernatorial race. It’s its own role and more than once California has had a governor with an Lt. less than fully to their liking.

So, what does the California Lt. actually do? Traditionally, not that much.

The position has little in the way of formal authority and, if the Lt. doesn’t have a good relationship with the Governor, can turn into a bit of a do nothing post. Tubbs, however, is painting a more ambitious vision for the role.

In his op-ed, he points out that the California Lt. sits on the boards of the California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) — the state’s two public university systems which both happen to be major owners of public lands. Based on this, his proposal for how he’d spend his time in office is twofold: (a) develop housing on these public lands as part of the larger effort to address the state’s housing shortage and (b) use that development to generate revenue to funnel back into California’s higher education systems. Tubbs writes:

We can solve multiple problems at once if we’re willing to think differently about public assets. My plan is simple: make public land work for the public purpose.

Across the UC and CSU systems, that means long-term (from 50-99 years) ground leases that keep land in public ownership while unlocking it for housing. Mission-aligned developers would build mixed-income homes for faculty, staff, students, and surrounding communities, helping stabilize the very people who make our universities thrive.

The land stays public. The housing gets built. And lease revenue flows back into what matters most: financial aid, scholarships, and campus infrastructure. All of this strengthens our higher education system without raising tuition or selling off public assets.

Suffice it to say the YIMBY corner of my soul loves this proposal. If any place in the country needs more housing, it’s California. The other half of Tubbs’ proposal, though, is worth appreciating in detail as well.

There’s Still Gold in California’s Hills

The famous statistic the Governors of California love to repeat is that if the state were its own country, it would have the 4th largest economy in the world. California’s economy, though, isn’t uniformly spread across the state; it’s concentrated in the three major economic centers of San Diego, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Where the economy booms, land becomes super valuable. And land in California generally, and its three major economic hubs specifically, is worth more than any old-timey prospector could have ever imagined. The problem with California is that most of this value remains in private hands. Where other states1 recoup appreciating land values — values created by economic growth and public infrastructure — via property taxes, California (mostly) does not.

In 1978, voters in the Bear Republic approved the aptly numbered Prop 13 which dramatically curtailed the government’s ability to collect property taxes. Fast forward to today and the state’s median effective tax rate for homeowners is something like .7% (for reference, Illinois is more than double that at 1.83%). Because of the way Prop 13 works though, the spread on this is quite wide with documented instances of specific properties being taxed at effective rates of .06% (yes, we just moved out an entire ten’s place).2

So, a lot of California’s wealth is locked away in the earth and Prop 13 prevents the state from monetizing much of it through taxation. However, taxing private land is only one way to get at all that value; per the Tubbs plan, the other is leasing out land held in the public trust. The UC and CSU systems own a lot of dirt, and I could not be more supportive of the idea that those holdings ought to be put to good use in support of public education.

My bigger hope, though, is that this proposal heralds a new, and badly needed, paradigm for local development. One that reorients us towards growth and sets up cities across the country to thrive in uncertain times.3

Public Assets for Public Profit

There’s a common refrain amongst local officials that housing does not pay for itself. The idea is that new housing allows new people to move into your community and new people require services. From a fiscal perspective, the thinking goes, it’s better to permit hotels and retail that offer ready-to-tax commercial activity (and don’t involve as much getting yelled at by local NIMBYs).

But land leasing gives us a way around that problem.4 When a municipality (or whatever specific organ of government) simply situates itself as the landlord in perpetuity, we can act with certainty that the public purse will capture the upside from development.

A great example of this is from the opposite end of the country in Falls Church, Virginia. In 2017, the town decided to rebuild the local high school. The city had two options: (a) increase everyone’s property taxes by $1,050 or option (b) use 10.3 acres of publicly owned land for redevelopment, monetize through land leasing, and only raise everyone’s property taxes by about $280. After a voter education campaign and a series of public hearings, the council moved forward with option B. Families got a new school, the community got a high-density mixed use development, and the land defrayed most of the cost.

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Land leasing provides a way to ensure (and demonstrate that) development pays for itself. When governments then channel the proceeds back into specific public goods, we’ll be able to break through some amount of reflexive NIMBYism and give YIMBY advocates easier shots on goal.

There’s one other angle here, as well. It may be controversial (and I want to stress that this is my thinking and not necessarily my read of how Tubbs sees the world). It’s the idea that the government can and should be in the business of making money.

Hear me out.

Cities own a lot of assets in the form of real estate. For a long time, it’s been the norm to sell off public lands for a one-time windfall and then assume that any appreciation in property values will get partially recouped through property taxes. The problem with that is, on a long enough timeline, you get things like California’s tax revolt.

Instead, cities could be active participants in their own development. Developing and retaining ownership of public land could create non tax streams of revenue in perpetuity. In reality, this isn’t an especially off the wall idea. In a bygone era, New York City worked like this.5 Dag Detter and Stefan Fölster’s 2017 book The Public Wealth of Cities also made a similar call for better deployment of public assets (and provided recommendations on how to stand up a professional wealth management apparatus to do it).

Critically, the point is not that everything municipal government does should be on the basis of profit; instead, it’s a call for cities to embrace the idea that making money is good and that profitable public ventures can help pay for the things that communities need to make their cities great.

Outro

Whether we’re going to see progress on any of this soon remains to be seen. Mr. Tubbs has an election to win and a traditionally ceremonial office to turn into a vehicle for institutional reform. I have my hopes, but the practical politics of it all are in hands which are blessedly more capable than mine.

That said, I’m excited to hear these ideas out in the mainstream. When a candidate, even one as earnest as I understand Michael Tubbs to be, campaigns on a set of ideas, it’s because they think those ideas could be political winners. And that gives me hope for where California may be going next.

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The Strong Towns Perspective

[00:01:53 – 00:06:30]

There is a dominant way we build communities in the United States. This post-World War II development paradigm centers on low-density sprawl, rigid separation of uses, and the assumption that driving is the default way to access daily life.

That model produces a familiar set of pathologies. Cars are prioritized as the primary transportation mode, and incremental growth leads to exponentially worse congestion. The ten-minute drive to IKEA becomes twenty, then thirty—and there is no meaningful alternative to sitting alone in traffic.

Andrew notes that this is actually the best-case scenario. Beneath the congestion lies a deeper problem: the infrastructure required to support sprawl—roads, pipes, utilities—often costs more to maintain and replace than the tax base it serves can ever generate.

The Infrastructure Maintenance Gap

[00:06:30 – 00:10:15]

Infrastructure built between the 1950s and 1970s is reaching end-of-life simultaneously across thousands of municipalities. Reconstructing a single mile of four-lane roadway can cost $2–4 million. Meanwhile, most suburban residential development generates only $10,000–$30,000 per acre per year in property tax revenue. In Andrew’s telling, this means the postwar development paradigm renders many municipalities fundamentally insolvent.

By contrast, dense, traditional neighborhoods with mixed-use development generate far more revenue per acre while requiring less infrastructure per household. Sprawling subdivisions underperform financially—even before accounting for pedestrian safety, housing affordability, or quality-of-life concerns.

JUST…ONE…MORE…LANE

[00:10:15 – 00:18:45]

The belief that widening roads reduces congestion is false. Expanding unpriced highways induces new demand, filling added capacity within months. Single-occupancy vehicle use does not scale.

Free Range City

The Geometry Problem

I mention “the Geometry Problem” in a lot of posts, but haven’t described it at length yet. I think this concept logically follows my previous post, so today’s the day. So what is the Geometry Problem, and why does it matter…

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a year ago · 65 likes · 20 comments · Andrew Burleson

Compounding the problem, American engineering standards treat streets as conduits for vehicle throughput, optimized for speeds of 35–45 miles per hour. This framing ignores the reality that streets are also public spaces—places where people live, walk, bike, and exist.

(Shoutout to Ballard, Seattle)

Learning from the Past

[00:18:45 – 00:28:30]

Pre-World War II development patterns—streetcar suburbs, traditional main streets, connected grids—now command premium property values because support the dense, walkable kind of environments people love (this is the correct instance in which to deploy revealed preference). The Strong Towns perspective says we should allow places to density over time and build infrastructure that actually supports that kind of growth. Modern zoning makes this literally illegal is most places across the country.

Andrew also brings a lot of nuance to this part of the conversation. He doesn’t position the solution as doing some program of RETVRN to the past; it’s about recognizing things we used to do that worked and reincorporating them into how we do things today.

Recovering from Suburban Sprawl

[00:28:30 – 00:35:20]

There’s not a straight line out of the post WWII development pattern. A lot of what’s been built in many places is effectively throw away; in other terms, it’s tech debt.

That said, Andrew explains that older neighborhoods in older cities — that are built on older street grids — will have an easier time becoming automatically more walkable and bikeable by just allowing infill.

In other places, it’ll be harder.

Free Range City

The Missing Middle of Transportation

I deeply appreciated Andrew Miller’s series on the effectiveness of mass transit in cities, and recommend reading the whole thing. Part 1 explains why transit systems are structurally unable to fund themselves, Part 2 explains how we could align incentives and fix this. In…

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a year ago · 27 likes · 8 comments · Andrew Burleson

Street design is key. As densification happens, making streets navigable for non-car modes of transportation is absolutely critical. E-bikes and electric scooters will be invaluable for making that transition possible. Also, optimizing streets for speed != optimizing streets for throughput.

Baby Steps

[00:35:20 – 00:44:15]

Andrew points out that major transformation isn’t necessary for significant quality-of-life improvements. Reducing arterial speeds from 45 to 35 miles per hour dramatically improves pedestrian safety while causing minimal trip time impact. Installing mid-block crosswalks and allowing corner stores in residential areas provides destinations within walking distance.

Housing is Good, Actually

[00:44:15 – 00:50:30]

American zoning restricts housing supply in precisely the neighborhoods where people want to live—walkable, transit-accessible areas. This artificial scarcity drives prices far above construction costs while cities continue building sprawling subdivisions where infrastructure burdens mount. The policy solution is straightforward: allow incremental densification in established neighborhoods through accessory dwelling units, lot splits, and elimination of density caps.

Andrew also reminds us that dense neighborhoods generate higher tax revenue per acre while requiring less infrastructure per household. Cities that allow densification improve their fiscal position while addressing housing shortage.

A Neighborhood Safe Enough for Kids

[00:56:30 – 01:01:20]

We close the call with a conversation about building better places for families and their children.

Andrew explains that, because of the way his neighborhood in Denver is built, his 11-year-old daughter is able to walks home from school with friends, stop at playgrounds, and visit the ice cream shop independently. Apparently his daughter’s cousins find this amazing. He goes on to offer this as a worthwhile policy goal: enabling children to navigate neighborhoods safely and independently - which is really just a subset of the larger objective of making people’s lives better.

Postscript

That’s a wrap on my three part live stream series with leaders from different urban reform movements. If you’re interested in similar conversations from advocates working on either the YIMBY or Georgist fronts, consider checking out my prior interviews.

Next week, I’m going to try to make sense of all three movements and what their existences say about the moment in which we find ourselves and where we might be going next.

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As YIMBYism has garnered more attention, folks have begun asking deeper questions about what YIMBYs believe and how we approach the process of political reform. I’ve also seen incurious commentators take whatever the last thing they saw on Twitter X-The Everything App as representative answers.

Suffice it to say, they should not.

So, to set the record straight, I cashed in a favor and got , Executive Director at YIMBY Action, to help us set the record straight. The conversation is wide ranging and covers everything from ideology, policy, political strategy, and even the societal stakes as (at least some) YIMBYs see them. Enjoy.

All Roads Lead to YIMBY

[00:02 – 00:05]

Laura articulates the foundational framework of YIMBYism through what she calls “the three E’s”: equity, environment, and economy. She explains that good ideas have multiple moral justifications, and housing abundance is one such idea.

Environmentalists arrive at pro-housing positions by recognizing that housing shortages drive mega-commuting and sprawl, undermining climate goals. Dense, walkable communities reduce environmental impact.

Economic advocates see housing constraints limiting labor mobility, restricting firm growth, and dampening economic vitality. A vibrant economy requires housing abundance to support competition and value creation.

Equity advocates (where Laura primarily situates herself) focus on how housing shortages drive poverty, increase homelessness, and deepen segregation. Laura shares her personal background attending one of the first integrated schools in the DC area—integrated by race but not by class. This experience shaped her conviction that class segregation driven by housing costs makes society “less empathetic, less understanding, and creates a less stable society over the long term.”

The YIMBY tent thus includes everyone from libertarian capitalists to social justice advocates, all agreeing on the primacy of housing abundance while maintaining different ultimate values. As Laura notes, it’s an awkward coalition where participants must “keep your vibes at home for the next five minutes.”

Debunking Misconceptions About YIMBYs

[00:06 – 00:10]

Jeff poses several “quick hit” questions to address common misunderstandings about YIMBY beliefs:

On regulatory reform as a silver bullet: Laura firmly rejects the notion that changing zoning automatically produces housing “like mushrooms after rain.” Instead, she describes regulations as “a net holding back housing production.” Where economic growth would naturally generate housing demand, regulations prevent supply from responding. Removing the net allows housing to emerge in some places but not others—you “never know when economic growth is going to say we need to build housing here,” so the net should be removed everywhere.

This doesn’t mean regulatory reform is the only tool needed. Laura acknowledges additional challenges exist, particularly around financing for new housing types. She cites the example of ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) financing in California: initially, no financing industry existed, but after legalization, capital markets developed creative solutions. Similarly, she describes how board member Anthony’s ADU development company had to proactively find lending partners. The market can figure things out, but this takes time and entrepreneurial problem-solving.

Internal YIMBY Debates: Sprawl and Rent Control

[00:15 – 00:19]

Laura addresses two contentious policy areas within the YIMBY movement.

On sprawl: The tension primarily exists between environmentalists (who believe the housing crisis can be solved without greenfield development) and equity advocates. The equity camp splits between those who argue we simply won’t solve the crisis without some sprawl, and pragmatists who say that under current conditions, the crisis is so acute that sprawl development is necessary while simultaneously fighting for infill.

Laura notes all three perspectives have validity, but highlights a deeper issue: we lack vocabulary for distinguishing types of expansion. “Regional development is not the same as building a new city in the Grand Canyon.” Building the next suburb along an existing highway isn’t equivalent to pristine land development, yet we use the same word—”sprawl”—for both. This linguistic imprecision obscures meaningful debate.

On rent control: YIMBYs hold “hardcore” positions on both sides. Some view strong rent control as fundamental tenant protection; others see it as stifling production and causing long-term harm. Most YIMBY groups have adopted a compromise position: rent control is bad when applied to new construction but groups often won’t oppose it on older buildings.

Laura emphasizes that YIMBYism is not a holistic ideology—it’s a single-issue movement focused on new housing production. She deliberately keeps YIMBY Action focused on this core mission rather than wading into debates about existing housing stock management, which could include rehabs, government acquisition of small buildings, and other interventions. “YIMBYs should cede that area of expertise to other people,” she argues, because the movement could “spend a lot of time arguing” about existing stock instead of building new homes.

How Much YIMBY is Too Much YIMBY?

[00:19 – 00:25]

Jeff raises the “paper football hypothesis”—the idea that there’s an optimal level of YIMBY aggressiveness, beyond which backlash undermines progress. Laura strongly challenges this framing.

Laura confesses deep skepticism: “Is the backlash real? Or do people just lash?” She distinguishes between actual backlash (where moderate opponents are radicalized by overreach) versus the baseline opposition that exists regardless of tactics. “People find things to be mad about,” she notes, suggesting we should “price in maximum NIMBYism all the time—they’re gonna be mad.”

She identifies three factors that justify confidence in aggressive tactics: (1) our issue is popular, (2) our cause is just, and (3) we’re in it for the long haul. When playing the long game, individual skirmishes contribute to a larger narrative shift in public consciousness. The goal is changing what people consider possible and acceptable, not winning every discrete battle.

Inside Game vs. Outside Game

[00:25 – 00:30]

Laura distinguishes between insider and outsider political strategies within the broader pro-housing coalition.

Inside game organizations focus on:

• Building relationships with legislators and state capitol officials

• Donating to campaigns strategically

• Deploying lobbyists to walk the halls

• Maintaining access through relationship cultivation

Outside game organizations (like YIMBY Action) focus on:

• Building visible people power in legislative districts

• Mobilizing constituents to contact representatives

• Shifting the Overton window through public organizing

• Creating grassroots pressure campaigns

Laura emphasizes these strategies work best in conjunction, forming a well-rounded coalition. Insiders can navigate legislative mechanics while outsiders demonstrate constituent demand. Both are valuable—insiders will often tell outsiders, “absolutely, yes, please get constituent emails in on this issue.”

However, insider strategies create inherent risk aversion. Organizations heavily invested in legislative relationships become reluctant to criticize incumbents or take controversial stances that might damage access. Laura cites the example: when YIMBY Law sued California Governor Newsom, some allies said “I’m so glad you’re doing that, and I would never” because it would damage the insider power they’ve accumulated.

The YIMBY Action Organizing Model

[00:30 – 00:34]

Laura describes YIMBY Action’s organizational structure: 83 chapters across 27 states, each run by local volunteer leads who operate within a broader framework.

The national organization provides:

• Tools, guidance, and advice

• Connections to other local YIMBYs

• Project leads and coordination

• Strategic direction

Local chapters follow the principle: “take the bite you can take when you can take it.” This means:

1. Project-by-project organizing: Supporting individual housing developments through the approval process

2. Local legislation: Pursuing reforms like single-stair building codes or missing middle zoning

3. State legislation: Coordinating on bigger policy campaigns (with heavier national direction)

4. Electoral organizing: Conducting candidate questionnaires, making endorsements, and mobilizing voters

The model centers on a core premise: constituent power is decisive. When pro-housing bills die, it’s typically because many constituents called their elected officials in opposition. YIMBYs need an equivalent army making pro-housing calls and emails. The federated structure creates “this little army” that takes locally-appropriate action while coordinating on state and federal campaigns when needed.

Trench Warfare for Housing

[00:34 – 00:37]

Laura addresses skepticism about whether project-by-project advocacy is “scalable.”

If it’s the only strategy, it’s insufficient—you’d “move the needle a little bit” but not enough. However, project advocacy serves multiple critical functions beyond housing units:

Movement building benefits:

• Visibility and media attention: Projects get covered in local press and generate social media moments

• List growth: People find the organization through project controversies

• Iconic moments: Great public comments become viral content, raising the profile of the movement

• Member engagement: Volunteers “fall in love with projects” and stay motivated

• Tangible victories: Attending ribbon cuttings for buildings you fought for makes advocacy feel concrete and meaningful

Strategic intelligence:

• Better understanding of why projects actually die or get scaled back

• Insight into where developers face “soft power” constraints beyond legal barriers

• Information about what legislative fights to prioritize next

Organizational fit:

• Overwhelming for staff-driven organizations

• Galvanizing for volunteer-driven organizations like YIMBY Action

• People power scales better with volunteer passion than paid staff capacity

Laura emphasizes that project work is “really critical for keeping people in it for the long haul,” which is necessary given the scale of the housing shortage.

Implementation (The Secret Third Thing)

[00:37 – 00:47]

Beyond (1) launching chapters and (2) passing state legislation, Laura identifies a frequently underappreciated third step: monitoring and enforcement of new law (i.e. implementation).

The implementation gap: Most laws get implemented “in ways that leave a lot to be desired.” Cities engage in malicious compliance—technically following the law while undermining its intent:

• Requiring ADU setbacks that make construction functionally impossible on most lots

• Processing applications so slowly (six months to a year) that projects become economically infeasible

• Interpreting requirements in the most restrictive possible way

Laura describes this as “a lot of housing goes to die” in the gap between what’s written on the page and what happens in practice.

Tools for closing the gap:

1. Continuous pressure from grassroots: The army keeps “beating the drum” with trailing legislation and public advocacy, preventing elected officials from declaring victory and moving on

2. Lawsuits: When the legislative decision is clear but local governments deliberately ignore requirements, legal action provides the necessary “stick”

3. Demonstrating political will: Even when projects are legally entitled, if every public hearing speaker opposes development, officials will “find ways” to block it. YIMBYs must show up to demonstrate that pro-housing positions are popular

4. Local monitoring: State governments struggle to know when local governments are engaging in malicious compliance. The “air of reasonableness” around many obstructive policies (like setbacks that have existed for 50 years) requires local watchdogs to identify and flag problems

Laura acknowledges the difficulty of state governments truly forcing unwilling communities to change, drawing a comparison to federal integration of schools—which required outcomes-based measurement and real threats of lost revenue. Current housing policies are often “weak sauce” incentives to develop policies rather than hard requirements.

The long-term solution, in Laura’s view, will be policy based on outcomes: “If you produce X number of units, you get y benefit” or, conversely, consequences for jobs-housing imbalances that exceed certain thresholds. She notes that the U.S. historically required localities to adopt zoning by threatening to cut off access to federally subsidized mortgages—similar mechanisms could work in reverse. However, such policies face political resistance, making it YIMBYs’ job to “reduce that resistance over the next few years” until stronger interventions become politically viable.

What’s at Stake

[00:47 – 00:50]

Laura addresses the housing theory of everything—the idea that housing/land use dysfunction underlies many seemingly unrelated social problems.

She sees housing as central to political radicalization and social instability. When people lack opportunity, they become “deeply embittered”—not a radical observation but a lived reality of contemporary America. Embittered, angry populations become vulnerable to exploitation by various political movements. Laura cites Trump as “an example of taking advantage of the rage and embitteredness.”

The “only solution is to create a society where people have greater degree of opportunity.” While many interventions could increase opportunity, housing is the biggest lever. Access to education, jobs, and economic mobility all depend on where you can afford to live.

Laura’s stark diagnosis: “Most cities in America we’ve turned into country clubs. You’re either born into it or you have to buy your way in.” This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where opportunity becomes “more and more locked up,” which is “not just immoral but also dangerous.”

Postscript

As always, this was a fun conversation and I was happy to drill down into some of the intra-movement cleavages, disputes, and differences. Thanks to , , , , , and many others for tuning watching live.

Tube in next week when we’ll be closing out this live stream series with , Board Chair at Strong Towns and author of the excellent substack .

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In the United States, one of the main methods for subsidizing housing is called Inclusionary Zoning (IZ). More than a few folks have written about IZ’s shortcomings, so I won’t go into that here. Instead, I want to talk about a different way to build affordable housing. This approach, what I affectionately refer to as reverse inclusionary zoning, flips IZ’s logic; instead of requiring private developers to cross-subsidize affordable units, public or nonprofit developers deliberately build market-rate units to finance deeply affordable housing. It’s an important approach to building subsidized housing and it deserves more attention from advocates and urbanists of every stripe.

Understanding Inclusionary Zoning

IZ is a policy that mandates new housing (e.g. an apartment building) includes some minimum number of subsidized, affordable (aka below-market-rate) units. While mixing-in subsidized units with market-rate dwellings is demonstrably good policy, the problem comes when we get to the question of how to pay for it.

Typically, IZ policies require market-rate developers to pay for the subsidized units. Sometimes this housing is part of a developer’s project; other times, the developers are allowed to pay a fee to fund below-market-rate units elsewhere. Either way, IZ makes the marginal unit of market-rate housing more expensive. The more subsidy the developer is on the hook for, the more they need to make on the profitable units to cover the difference. Regardless of the specifics, developer-funded IZ acts as a tax on new housing at the time of construction.

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Inclusionary zoning doesn’t just increase the cost of new development, though. Sometimes it kills it outright.

Modeling the Los Angeles market, the Terner Center estimates that even a 1% inclusionary requirement—that is, requiring just 1% of units in a multifamily project to be subsidized—reduces market-rate housing production by roughly 10–15% (relative to a no-IZ baseline). Because IZ costs are imposed at the project-level, higher set-asides raise the break-even rent required on the remaining market-rate units. That pushes marginal projects past feasibility thresholds, reducing new supply and ultimately raising rents.

Crucially, this effect is non-linear: each incremental increase in the required set-aside eliminates a growing share of otherwise feasible projects. At a 5% requirement, the Terner Center model estimates a 28–33% reduction in market-rate unit production; at requirements above 10%, many projects become financially infeasible altogether, sharply suppressing new housing construction.1

And this is where we go from policy trade-offs to political problems.

NIMBYs, arguing in bad faith, often leverage IZ mandates as a way to kill off proposed development. There’s a limit to what developers can hope to charge for new market-rate units, and after a certain point, there’s no more margin to redistribute, and entire projects cease to be financially viable. Sophisticated NIMBYs know this and use project-level IZ negotiations as political veto points.

And before we resort to the line that “greedy developers” should just accept less profit, their hands are tied. Projects that can’t promise investors a minimum level of returns don’t get funded. This is a structural feature of modern real estate finance which makes taxing new market-rate development a bad way to fund affordable housing.

Public Developers Don’t Remit Private Profits

Adversarially extracting value from private developers isn’t a great way to pay for subsidized housing. That said, public developers entrepreneurially creating value through market-rate development can make a lot of sense.

Imagine a nonprofit developer or city housing authority tasked with building subsidized housing. The developer goes about building housing as they normally would, but rents out some portion of the new units at market rates — using the proceeds to subsidize the cost of the below-market-rate units. Public housing developers call this a mixed-income strategy and it’s increasingly common across the country.2

In Georgia, the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation (AUDC) has a number of projects underway utilizing this approach. One specific example is Mall West End, a currently under construction project planned to have 893 units with 30% rented out at below-market rates.3 Public developers in San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere have used this financing strategy as well.

So, it’s real and it works, but why should we care?

For starters, market-rate housing built by nonprofit developers can generate housing subsidies more efficiently than for-profit developers fulfilling an IZ requirement.

In an IZ regime, market-rate units not only have to cross-subsidize below-market-rate units but also deliver a competitive, risk-adjusted return to equity investors, meaning some of the potential subsidy is remitted to the project’s backers as profit. In contrast, a nonprofit developer doesn’t have equity investors expecting a return on their capital.

A nonprofit developer is also going to dial in the financially optimal mix of market-rate to subsidized affordable housing. Their purpose is to build subsidized housing, not maximize returns to shareholders. This matters both materially and politically. As a mission-driven public developer, they should be able to speak authoritatively and in good faith on how to maximize market-rate development as a tool for public subsidy. This should allay objections from advocates who sometimes believe there’s more subsidy to extract from profits than actually exists.4

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Reverse inclusionary is also a financing strategy that cities can pursue without having to rely on the federal government. As it stands, subsidized housing in the U.S. is overwhelmingly a federal affair (the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program and Section 8 vouchers being the two major pillars).5 This means cities have to hope for good policy and competent execution from the federal government. In the best of times, we might want to equip cities to act independently. The times are, decidedly, not the best. The more we can set up cities to succeed on their own, the better.

Alright, now for the caveats.

First, I’m giving you a simplified version of reality to highlight something important and under-appreciated. As often as not, these projects include commercial development as well (see the Atlanta example cited above), so they’re not limited to making money off housing. They’re often also combined with other financing mechanisms like land leasing and tax abatements to help the finances make sense. So, there’s a lot more to say about public financing, but we’ll explore all of that in depth soon.

And while reverse inclusionary does provide a degree of freedom for municipal governments, it also requires that these same governments create competent development authorities capable of delivering market-rate housing at the same risk/cost profile as a for-profit developer.6 Good policy will always require effective execution.

Outro

Caveats aside, reverse inclusionary zoning (aka mixed-income development strategies) is something every urbanist and housing nerd should know about. In a world with runaway housing costs, subsidized housing production has a role to play. Not all forms of public finance are created equal and, unfortunately, just make the private sector pay more is an insufficient answer to the challenges that lay before us.

Ultimately, we need to reorient housing policy away from zero-sum extraction and toward value creation—whether by private developers expecting market returns or public stewards investing in the common good.

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Postscript on Calculating Affordability

This is a brief note on how we think about subsidized affordability (for the folks slightly less steeped in housing policy).

Programs like IZ use something known as Area Median Income (AMI). This figure is calculated by HUD using American Community Survey data and is basically what it sounds like — the median household income for some geographic area.

To express affordability requirements in the context of IZ, we say (a) some percentage of the units in a building must be subsidized at (b) some percentage of the relevant AMI. For example, we could have a requirement that 25% of the units in a 100-unit building be reserved for renters making no more than 80% of local AMI.

Using San Francisco figures, the AMI for a single-person household in 2025 was $109,100; so a unit reserved for someone making 80% of AMI would mean someone making $87,300 or less. (Note that subsidies for folks making 120% of AMI are not unheard of as, in the country’s most expensive metros, these folks are still hard pressed to afford market rates)

So, all this matters because when we talk about means-tested housing subsidies, we have a trade-off between the number (#) of subsidized units and the degree ($) of subsidy. In our toy example above, providing 25% of the building’s units for residents at 40% of AMI (instead of up to 80%) would cost significantly more.

In this conversation, we not only clarify the ins/outs of Georgist policy, we also get into what implementation — technically, legally, and politically — actually requires. And, most exciting from my perspective, we end with a recap of the wins that and have already achieved in barely a year of policy advocacy at the Center for Land Economics.

(Also, scroll to the end for a full list of articles mentioned in this conversation)

Introducing Greg & Lars

[00:01 – 00:07]

Urban reformers are made, not born.

Lars Doucet started out thinking about urbanism as an architectural student. A couple twists and turns later, he began reading Georgist thought and wound up as a developer in the gaming industry. As a gaming dev, he witnessed several MMORPGs unintentionally recreate land bubbles that disrupted the worlds built for players and, in at least on case, saw a land value taxation recreated from first principles as a fix.

On the flip side, Greg Miller’s got his start in urbanism as a tenant organizer during college in South Bend, Indiana. He had heard the stories of the YIMBY movement in places like San Francisco, but came to the conclusion that land use liberalization might not be the binding constraint development in South Bend. After college, Greg took a job at HUD, but, for all the agency’s focus on housing, he found a total lack of discussion on tax policy as a determinant of affordability.

Progress and Poverty

Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds: A how-to guide

Land Speculation and Why It Sucks…

Read more

4 years ago · 32 likes · 1 comment · Lars Doucet

How Georgists See the World

[00:07 – 00:16]

Greg goes on to explain What Georgist’s think is wrong with the world.

Georgism begins from a simple institutional premise: land is a fixed, non-produced input required for all economic activity. In a growing economy, landowners can extract more and more from productive workers, businesses, and investors — all by dint of having gotten to the party first.

Lars go on to add that, conceptually, Georgism sits in a place between capitalism and socialism. Georgism introduces a third factor — land. When land is privately monopolized, its owners can charge for access and capture value generated by population growth, public investment, and economic clustering—without contributing productive activity.

Greg and Lars then go on to explain that Georgism comes out of a period of rapid urbanization in American history. The problems that this created were eventually addressed via car-based suburban sprawl, but this approach has reached the limits of its ability to scale. With our ability to (functionally) sprawl exhausted, we see rising inequality and a “second Gilded Age.”

Progress and Poverty

What happens when America's Monopoly board fills up?

I was recently interviewed by Realtor.com about the game Monopoly, which inspired today’s piece…

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6 months ago · 83 likes · 39 comments · Lars Doucet

The Georgist Solution: Socialize Land Value

[00:16 – 00:25]

Greg explains the two main approaches to capturing land value for the public good: land leasing and land value taxation.

In land easing, the government rents out publicly held land for development and acts explicitly as a landlord. This is a pre-appropriation strategy that prevents publicly created land values from ending up in private hands.

Progress and Poverty

Georgism through Land Leasing

Over the years I’ve often heard Georgism described as the greatest set of policy ideas that will never really be tried. In these conversations, though, the commentator is usually referring to a narrow conception of Georgism, something like 100% land value taxation. While it’s true we’ve never seen policy like that in the U.S., this view is reductive and…

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4 months ago · 48 likes · 35 comments · Jeff Fong

The other approach, land value taxation, reappropriates land values via direct taxation. The core mechanisms are:

• Taxing land, not buildings:

  • Taxing buildings discourages construction

  • Taxing land discourages speculation without reducing supply (i.e. taxing land won’t decrease supply like taxing the production of widgets would)

• Capitalization effects:

  • Land taxes are capitalized into lower purchase prices, not higher rents

  • Holding costs rise while acquisition costs fall

• No pass-through to renters:

  • Rents are determined by supply and demand, not landlord costs

  • Because land supply is perfectly inelastic, taxes cannot reduce it

As a policy proposal, land value taxation is best understood as a tax shift, not a tax increase; the larger idea is to not only increase taxes on land, but lower taxes on everything else. The goal is to capture socially created value while removing penalties on production.

Technical Questions on the Arcana of Land Value Taxation

[00:25 – 00:37]

Lars and Greg answer technical questions on land value taxation, including:

• What’s the best way to value multi-family residential development for purposes of assessment?

• What are the pros and cons of annual reappraisals?

• What is the Least You Can Do method for land valuation?

Why Land Value Taxation Is Difficult to Implement

[00:37 – 00:46]

Greg explains that the primary barriers to land value taxation are institutional and legal, not technical. Different state constitutions often impose uniformity clauses requiring identical tax treatment of land and improvements. The severity of this constraint varies by state.

Key barriers include:

• Constitutional definitions bundling land and buildings

• Uniformity clauses restricting split-rate taxation

• Assessment caps (e.g., California’s Prop 13) freezing land values

Workarounds exist, such as universal building exemptions that effectively shift taxes toward land without violating constitutional language. Feasibility is state-specific and the result is a patchwork of legal environments where reform ranges from straightforward to extremely difficult.

From a political strategy perspective, Greg and Lars see a path forward by passing land value taxation, even as a split-rate, such that tax bills for homeowners don’t go up. What they envision is dramatically raising the effective tax bill on land uses like downtown parking lots (i.e. extremely high-value land used at extremely low intensity).

The Center for Land Economics: First-Year Wins and Plans for 2026

[00:46 – 00:57]

Greg explains the Center for Land Economics’ main work streams are organized as:

• Education and mass organization

• Supporting and publishing open source research and software

• Direct technical assistance, especially to local officials and organizing groups

Big wins from year 1 include:

• Providing technical support with a Senator in the Ohio State Legislature, a City Council member in Syracuse, and other elected officials

• Publishing a research paper that convinced a county assessor in Maryland to update their assessment practices such that the county stopped undervaluing vacant land by a factor of 10

Looking ahead to 2026, the goals include:

• Expanding state-level enabling legislation

• Supporting jurisdictions with high administrative readiness

• Normalizing land-centric frameworks in housing and fiscal policy debates

Postscript

This was a fun conversation to record. Lars and Greg are working on an important issue and it was fun to talk though their ideas with such and actively engaged audience (thanks to , , , , , and about 52 other folks who tuned live).

Next week we’ll be continuing on with a conversation on YIMBYism with YIMBY Action Executive Director, Laura Foote. This will be a 201 level conversation, so if you’ve ever wanted to hear the inside baseball on YIMBY political strategy (there’s more than one), what YIMBY actually believe, and the handful of things YIMBYs disagree on…join us next week.

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Articles Mentioned in this Conversation

• Land Value Tax in Online Games and Virtual Worlds: A How to Guide

• What Happens When America’s Monopoly Board Fills Up?

• Georgism Through Land Leasing

• Will Land Value Tax Cause Rents to Rise?

I was so fascinated by the story, I reached out to Daniel about sitting down to chat. We were able to connect in December and this is the recording of that conversation (with timestamped summary below) — enjoy.

Amazon Won’t Save Us

[00:01 – 03:00] Contemporary urban economic development often defaults to courting large firms as the primary growth strategy. This orientation is not accidental. It is the result of long-running institutional shifts that narrowed municipal fiscal tools and made cities structurally dependent on private actors to generate taxable value.

Economic policy reflects ideas as much as outcomes. New York City provides a long-run case study of how theories about land, taxation, and public authority hardened into durable development regimes.

Give Me Land, Lots of Land

[04:00 – 06:50] By the mid-19th century, New York was a rapidly growing city anchored in port trade, manufacturing, and finance. As national expansion accelerated, capital flowed back into the city, translating directly into rising land values.

Growth intensified conflict over distribution. Land—not labor or productivity—became the primary constraint shaping affordability, investment, and political tension.

Losing My (Civic) Religion

[07:00 – 10:00] Early on, New York City relied on public land leasing and municipally run enterprises to fund itself. This model eroded in the early 19th century due to legal reforms, fears of corruption, and state-level efforts to curb municipal power.

The city was pushed toward a narrow fiscal base centered on property taxation. Instead of capturing land value directly, governments became dependent on private development and its taxable increases in real estate value.

Public Investment, Private Wealth

[10:30 – 12:30] With limited taxing authority, New York used debt-financed infrastructure to raise land values indirectly. Streets, sewers, and parks were justified as investments that would expand the tax base.

This created a pro-growth coalition of landowners, builders, and officials reliant on continual appreciation. When financial shocks hit in the 1870s, the model collapsed. A wave of municipal bankruptcies exposed the fragility of growth dependent on ever-rising land values.

Enter the Georgists

[13:00 – 16:00] Georgism emerged as a critique of land-driven urban economies. Its core claims were that land rents extracted value from productive activity and that taxing land value could both fund cities and free enterprise.

Georgists diverged internally. Early advocates sought to eliminate speculative rents entirely, while later reformers focused on capturing high land values through taxation without necessarily suppressing them. This tension—end speculation versus tax it—shaped how Georgist ideas were absorbed into mainstream governance.

Ye Old Timey Growth Ponzi Scheme

[21:00 – 24:00] By the 1920s, New York recommitted to land-value-driven expansion. Infrastructure for outer boroughs was financed citywide, while tax burdens increasingly fell on dense central neighborhoods.

The result was a self-reinforcing loop: expansion required infrastructure, infrastructure raised costs, central land intensified to pay for it, and higher values justified further expansion. This dynamic closely resembles a municipal growth Ponzi scheme.

Homeownership and Political Reversal

[25:00 – 27:30] Mass homeownership in the outer boroughs transformed urban politics. Formerly producer-oriented constituencies became landholders, reducing support for land value taxation and heightening resistance to change.

Populist rhetoric persisted, but its targets shifted—from landlords and monopolists to public spending and redistribution. Property ownership rewired political incentives.

Postwar Corporate Urbanism

[29:00 – 33:30] After the Depression, city leaders pursued white-collar corporate growth through urban renewal, rezoning away from manufacturing, and active firm recruitment. The theory was substitutional: attract high-income firms and workers, tax them, and fund social services indirectly.

This tied the welfare state to corporate success, creating mutual dependence between inequality and redistribution rather than addressing structural drivers of poverty.

Community Development and Its Limits

[35:00 – 37:30] In neighborhoods like Harlem and Bed-Stuy, activists described their economies as internally colonized: labor flowed out, ownership remained external, and capital failed to accumulate locally.

Proposals ranged from supporting local businesses to community-owned enterprises aimed at retaining surplus and building political capacity. By the 1970s fiscal crisis, most were subordinated to the dominant financialized urban economy.

Federal Intervention and Reinforced Dependencies

[39:00 – 41:30] New Deal programs expanded social spending but also reinforced land-centered growth. Housing finance and infrastructure investment revived private real estate markets, while welfare programs complemented rather than replaced corporate-led development.

Later critiques focused narrowly on social spending, obscuring the role of ongoing corporate subsidies embedded in planning, zoning, and tax policy.

New Times, Old Debates, and the Mamdani of it All

[42:30 – 48:00] Modern debates over affordability and development replay familiar patterns: scarcity treated as inevitable, corporate attraction framed as fiscal necessity, and housing politics front and center.

As for Zohran Mamdani, it’s difficult to say whether he represents a meaningful break with the past, but he is reconfiguring voting blocs in ways that make for previously unworkable coalitions.

The unresolved questions remain structural—whether cities can move beyond inflating land values and redistributing the proceeds, toward institutions that align growth, access, and public benefit from the outset.

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Happy New Year, y’all.

Looking back, my 2025 was nothing if not educational. One of the ideas that’s stuck with me over the break is the question of how we think about building a better world. Some of this was inspired by folks in the Progress Studies community, but the more proximal cause has been reading ’s The Menace of Prosperity.

At first blush, the book is a history of New York’s economic development from 1865-1981. Its deeper contribution, though, is as a history of thought. Daniel explains not only what New York’s policy makers did, but also what they thought they were doing. Learning about the reform movements and public debates of yesteryear got me thinking about where we’re at in present-day. But first, past is prologue.

An Extremely Abridged History of New York City

Going back to the days of colonial rule, the City of New York ran itself in an almost corporate fashion. The municipal government leased out public land, ran profitable monopolies like the local ferry service, and was very much in the business of turning a profit. Fast forward to the late 1800s and the political, legal, and institutional environment had curtailed the city’s ability to operate in this way.

What replaced the for-profit paradigm was a more arm’s length approach to policy. The government licensed out the rights to run monopoly services, rather than running services itself. It also defaulted to selling off public land under the theory that municipal coffers would benefit from both the initial sale and the future property taxes on private (and therefore more efficiently developed) real estate.1

Fast forward through the Great Depression, multiple debt crises, and World War II, and we arrive at the modern era of Federal involvement in local affairs. This period also brought along with it a development strategy that, if you squint at it long enough, looks a lot like addressing urban poverty by simply displacing the poor in favor of the rich (see: slum clearance).

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So that’s the “what people did” portion of the history, but, like I said, the more interesting bit is about “what people thought they were doing”.

For a commercial landowner in the late 19th / early 20th century New York, progress meant rising land values. Full Stop. For a non-landowning factory worker or blacksmith, not so much. In fact, many working folks and proto-white collar professionals became vocal proponents for Georgist tax policy.2

After the creation of New York’s subway system, though, the center of public debate began to shift. Transit made land in the outer boroughs accessible and facilitated the creation of a landowning middle class. Homeowners became interested in public investment to increase the value of their homes (and very interested in finding ways to pay for it other than by raising their property taxes).

Disagreement over the definition of prosperity is at the core of New York’s political history. In my view, it’s also at the core of all of our urban policy debates today.

Bringing us out of the book and into the present day, the election of Zohran Mamdani may presage a new phase in the city’s economic thought (though if you want to hear more on that, you’ll need to catch my interview with Daniel, coming out next week.)

The book’s larger lesson is that the definition of prosperity is always a political question. Deciding what it is, who gets it, and why, is as much contest as it is conversation. What’s more, there are ways to answer those questions that bake in a zero sum world and only secure progress for some by imposing poverty on others.

Reflecting on our Modern Reform Movements

Reading the Menace of Prosperity was a bit humbling in that the challenges New York City has faced look eerily familiar. High housing costs, municipal budget crises, and administrative corruption seem to be nothing new in the story of urbanism. Even some of the policy discussions about how to tackle these challenges began to sound disconcertingly present-day.

All this got me thinking about the aspirations and worldviews of the urban reform movements active today. Longtime readers may recall that I serve on the board of YIMBY Action. If you’ve read between the lines a bit, you may have also intuited I’m more than a little friendly to Georgist perspectives. And, to round things out, I have some good friends over in the Strong towns camp from whom I’ve learned a lot.

As someone with something like a foot in each of these tendencies (don’t ask me to do the math there), I’m always fascinated by the amount of nuance between these largely complementary worldviews. Some of this ends up being rhetorical, but just as often there are deeply embedded assumptions about the world that are difficult to tease out (see below).

So, this is what I want to spend the first part of the year exploring: what do present-day urban reform movements mean by prosperity, what do they believe needs to be changed in the world, and how are they going making an impact.

For our YIMBY conversation, we’ll speak with , Executive Director at YIMBY Action. We’ll get the Georgist viewpoint from and , both of the Center for Land Economics. And to round things out with the Strong Towns perspective, we’ll sit down with Strong Towns board chair .

These conversations will be live streamed over the coming weeks and my hope is that, in taking a step back, we can think more clearly about what we’re all doing to build a better future.

As always, my DMs are open if folks have burning questions they want to see asked. Also, if there are other people or organizations y’all would like to see interviewed, I’m open to doing more of these if y’all are willing to make the introductions.

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Lord, has it ever been a year.

Twelve months on and I’ve written a lot of words — many of which y’all weren’t around to read. So, for all of you newer subscribers, I pulled out what I think are my five most interesting posts from earlier in 2025.

These pieces cut across the breadth of my work over the year, so, regardless of what brought you here in the first place, there ought to be something for everyone.

Tasting Notes: My journey to the furthest reaches of the semi-contiguous US

You May Also Like: Our Once and Future Urbanism

Tasting Notes: Adventures in city building

You May Also Like: Neighborhood Privatization is no Panacea

Tasting Notes: Lurid tales from when I worked at Lyft

You May Also Like: The Death of a Waymo

Tasting Notes: How I think we cure NIMBYism

You May Also Like: Three Ways Housing Supply Actually Lowers Prices

Tasting Notes: Tech x Urbanism crossover event

You May Also Like: How Hamlet Makes Public Data Useful

Ok, that’s it for the year. Thanks for spending part of 2025 thinking about urbanism with me (and wading through my prose).

I’m looking forward to everything 2026 will bring and, in the meantime, I hope all of you are able spend the remains of this year with the people — and in the places — that you all love the most.

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Setting the Scene

[00:00 – 04:00] Los Alamos is one of the wealthiest counties in New Mexico and home to one of the most important scientific institutions in the world. Yet the town itself is visibly deteriorated: an empty downtown, aging housing stock, extreme prices, and little new construction. The contradiction is striking—world-class science in a place that cannot house its own workforce.

The Core Problem

[04:00 – 07:30] Los Alamos is built like a suburb, despite having none of the conditions that make suburban development viable.

Roughly 77% of the town is zoned exclusively for single-family homes, and until recently only about 5% of land allowed density above roughly 7 units per acre. Much of White Rock was zoned for extremely large lots, including two-acre minimums. These rules reflect 1970s-era planning assumptions rather than the town’s present economic reality.

Early plans once imagined a town of 30,000 people. Instead, zoning locked Los Alamos into low density, even as demand has intensified.

How Los Alamos Was Built

[07:30 – 12:30] During World War II, the U.S. Army seized land to support the Manhattan Project. Housing was built rapidly and cheaply to support wartime needs.

After the war, the Atomic Energy Commission continued to build and manage housing until the mid-1960s, when the federal government exited the housing business and transferred responsibility to the private market. Commercial properties downtown were often sold to private owners and retained across generations.

Kicking the Can

[12:30 – 15:00] Local leaders have long relied on a convenient story: that the Department of Energy will someday release more land, allowing the town to grow outward rather than densify.

This land transfer is always just over the horizon—and has been for decades. In practice, it functions as a justification for inaction, allowing elected officials to avoid politically difficult infill and zoning reforms while promising future relief that never arrives.

Housing Costs Rise Faster than Incomes

[15:00 – 18:30] Over the past several years, housing costs have exploded far faster than incomes:

• Incomes rose roughly 18%

• Rents rose 100–130%

• New home prices rose ~75%

• Median rent reached roughly $2,500/month

• Area Median Income sits around $136,000, while many service workers earn closer to $50,000

On paper, Los Alamos looks wealthy. In reality, most workers cannot afford to live there.

How Commuting Kills Science

[18:30 – 26:30] Roughly two-thirds of the laboratory workforce now commutes from surrounding communities. For early-career scientists and young professionals, this has become a retention crisis. Many leave after one to two years, worn down by long drives and isolation.

In extreme cases, interns and new hires have struggled to find housing at any price, leading some to camp in nearby national forests during the summer—an anecdote that has become disturbingly common.

The costs are not just personal. Informal collaboration—hallway conversations, after-work discussions, spontaneous idea exchange—are affected as well. Los Alamos’ scientific productivity depends on agglomeration effects that commuting actively destroys. Science is social.

“Just Pay Them More” Doesn’t Work

[26:30 – 30:00] Raising wages in a supply-constrained housing market does not solve the problem. It simply bids up rents and transfers more income to landowners.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy and laboratory leadership maintain that they do not build housing—and do not want to manage it. This mirrors the historical exit of the federal government from housing provision in the 1960s, but leaves local governments without meaningful institutional backing for reform.

Enter the NIMBYs

[30:00 – 34:00] Proposals to redevelop empty downtown areas or add townhomes reliably trigger familiar opposition. Arguments quickly shift from parking or scale to anxiety about “the wrong kind of people,” often framed around children, schools, or vague safety concerns.

This resistance persists even as the town visibly declines.

Sovereignty, History, and Limits

[34:00 – 37:00] Nearby tribal land occasionally surfaces as a hypothetical solution, but history complicates the idea. Los Alamos sits on land widely understood as stolen, so the idea of partnering with tribal governments to develop housing on nearby reservation land remains politically intractable.

What Changed in 2022

[37:00 – 41:30] A major development code rewrite in 2022 made real, but limited, progress:

• Allowed buildings up to 86 feet (roughly 8 stories) downtown

• Reduced parking requirements

• Legalized mixed-use development

• Technically allowed ADUs, though with restrictions that still limit uptake

The reforms stopped short of eliminating parking mandates entirely or fully embracing density. Developers continue to cite financing challenges, but the counterargument is simple: local governments must remove every avoidable regulatory barrier before claiming the problem is out of their hands.

Permitting, Financing Risk, and State-Level Levers

[41:30 – 46:00] Long permitting timelines increase costs through debt carry and uncertainty, directly undermining feasibility. Even when projects are allowed on paper, process risk kills them in practice.

Potential solutions increasingly point beyond the local level: state preemption, streamlined approvals, and even land value taxation as tools to force underused land into productive use.

None are politically easy. All are becoming materially harder to avoid.

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Andrew Miller and The End of Driving

[00:00 - 04:03] Andrew Miller, is the author of the Substack as well as the new book, The End of Driving: Automated Cars, Sharing vs Owning, and the Future of Mobility.

The End of Driving presents the following theses:

• We have a two possible futures with AVs: one with privately-owned vehicles (bad) and one with shared AV transportation systems (good)

• We’re heading toward the bad future by default.

The Two Paths Forward

[04:03 - 06:20] Private ownership is the likely default outcome due to path dependency, established car company infrastructure, and regulatory barriers. Robotaxis face fierce municipal pushback (example: potential Boston ban), while privately-owned autonomous vehicles only require federal safety approval.

Who’s Building What?

[06:20 - 10:19] Waymo dominates shared mobility, while traditional automakers (Mercedes, GM/Cruise, Tesla) are all incrementally advancing toward private ownership through driver assistance features. ODD (Operational Design Domain) refers to the specific conditions where autonomous systems can operate safely.

Risk Profiles and Use Cases

[10:19 - 13:13] Urban robotaxis operate at lower speeds with simpler failure modes (pull to curb), while highway autonomous systems face higher stakes despite more predictable conditions. Automated trucking represents a promising but slowly-developing use case.

The Elon Musk Question

[13:35 - 19:25] Elon Musk deserves respect for achievements (SpaceX, early Tesla, PayPal) but employs deliberate hype as a strategy.

Tesla’s camera-only approach (versus competitors using LIDAR/radar/GPS) may work eventually, but proving safety to regulators will take time—potentially five+ years.

Meanwhile, Tesla faces competitive pressure from Chinese manufacturers like BYD globally and political backlash domestically. The cyber cab incident (driving into oncoming traffic on launch day in Austin) illustrates the challenges ahead.

Policy Solutions for Better Outcomes

[19:25 - 28:06] Key interventions to avoid the bad default future:

1. Regulatory harmonization: State-level robotaxi approval should be as straightforward as federal approval for privately-owned AVs. California’s CPUC model provides a positive example.

2. Super blocks for AVs: Zones where only autonomous vehicles can operate, moving at pedestrian speeds. This gives urbanists car-reduced streets while maintaining access benefits—autonomous vehicles will naturally route around these zones unless necessary.

3. Transit agency transformation: The most critical challenge. Rail systems with dedicated rights-of-way will survive, but bus-based systems face existential threat from robotaxis. Solutions include automating existing rail and buses, and agencies operating their own robotaxi fleets for paratransit, feeder services, and subsidized first/last-mile connections to transit hubs.

Traffic Laws and Autonomous Vehicles

[24:00 - 27:24] Traffic laws function as guidelines with “reasonable person” exceptions. Autonomous vehicles can be programmed to specific thresholds of reasonableness, allowing enforcement of stricter compliance (like slower speeds in super blocks) that can’t be reliably expected from human drivers.

Current Progress and Examples

[28:06 - 35:01] San Francisco emerges as a success story—despite initial resistance, city officials have worked to help Waymo succeed once mandated by the state. Phoenix and Miami also deserve credit. Disempowering the most vocal blockers (often city councils and mayors) while working with professional civil servants yields better outcomes.

Liability and Safety

[35:01 - 42:44] Manufacturers must accept 100% liability for autonomous vehicle accidents as both good policy and practical necessity for public adoption. The contrast between fully autonomous vehicles (Waymo/Zoox) and partially autonomous systems (Tesla autopilot) is stark—the latter creates dangerous situations where humans must stay alert during automated driving, similar to airline autopilot challenges.

What to Expect in 2026

[42:44 - 45:27] Waymo’s rapid expansion from 5 cities at year’s start to over 15 now signals accelerating deployment. Zoox is launching in Washington D.C., which could influence lawmakers. Tesla faces pressure to show progress despite readiness questions. Most people who haven’t tried a robotaxi yet will have the opportunity by end of 2026.

How to keep up with Andrew and his work

[45:27 - 46:42] Andrew directs listeners to his book “The End of Driving” and his Substack newsletter , where he publishes weekly on autonomous vehicles, transit, freight, and more.

Thank you to , , , and several other folks who tuned in live.

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Notes on Notes

For those who don’t partake of the feed-based social media, reposting a note from October. It’s an honest to god true story on both levels (I actually did have this conversation on the streets of San Francisco and the Newsom Mayoral administration actually did remove a bunch of public trash cans) — enjoy.

Abundance Coke vs Progress Pepsi

Earlier this year I attended both the Abundance Conference in Washington D.C. as well the Progress Conference that was held a bit later in Berkeley. Both events were about charting a new course for society and making the world a better place, but there’s a lot between the two to compare and contrast.

For Abundance’s part, the conference was every inch a D.C. politico event (lots of think tankers, pundits, electeds, and policy advocates all gathered in a hotel conference space for two days). I myself was there in my capacity as YIMBY Action board chair.

The event was centered around the Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson book (Abundance) published earlier in the year and its attendant questions of “How can political progressives deliver materially meaningful improvements in people’s lives?” and “What do progressives need to change about the way they do politics to do so?”

Though folks were interested in a range of topics including AI and energy production, no conversation was ever more than ninety seconds away from housing given the centrality of the issue and all the tangible progress YIMBYs have made over the last several years. On the whole, the vibe was very anxious democratic party apparatchik.

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The Progress Conference, in contrast, was much, much more west coast.1 Held at Lighthaven in Berkeley, the event had a less explicitly political tone. That’s not to say politics weren’t discussed — several prominent YIMBYs gave presentations on not only policy, but also politics — but the event was less focused on politics as the one and only vehicle for change. And given the makeup of the attendees, that’s not surprising. Where Abundance was quite beltway, Progress had a much larger share of entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists. One of the most interesting talks I attended was a presentation by Renaissance Philanthropy CEO, Tom Kalil, on how to reimagine science funding to speed up research.

One of the other differences between the two events was the level of community. The organization that hosts the Progress Conference, the Roots of Progress Institute, does a good job fostering community and it’s a very intentional part of the programming before, during, and after the event. Part of their stated goal is to connect people in the hopes that those connections result in new research, new advocacy organizations, new companies, etc. They lean in hard on the idea that the people you meet at their conference might be people with whom you’ll want to go do something with out in the wider world.2

Fun stuff aside, the more Progress aligned folks are still grappling with how to think about theories of change. For the Abundance crowd, the answer is “figure out how to win at politics.” Given the folks in Berkeley were less squarely rooted in professional politics, it’s a more ambiguous question with less certain answers. On that topic, I was actually asked to write about how that conversation played out; so, click through if you want the commentary in long-form.

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For me, everything is adjacent to (if not directly downstream of) something to do with urbanism.3 Usually that just means housing, but if we want to be precise, there’s a lot of messed up things in transit and municipal finance (Houston is far from perfect, after all). So, I’ll be interested to see how these conversations progress in the coming years and I’m hopeful that an abundance of technical talent, political energy, and financial capital all pushing in the direction of a positive sum world can do some good.4

Elsewhere Online — building housing, does it even matter?

In other news, I may have gotten into a spat with Australian Macroeconomist, Cameron Murray. For those who weren’t terminally online housing nerds in the heyday of Twitter (aka X-The Everything App), Dr. Murray is one of a handful of erudite academic commentators who believes that housing price has zero relationship with housing supply.

Though I was vaguely aware of Dr. Murray, my full introduction to his views came via a recent interview he did with . After listening to the conversation, I did my best to parse his arguments and respond in a full-on reaction post. As it turns out, the timing was fortuitous, as YIMBY Action Executive Director, , and I were scheduled to do a stream with the guys at Boyd the following week.

Dr. Murray and I have gone back and forth a bit since then and, fwiw, I appreciate his willingness to engage. It’s been an exercise in active listening that’s given me an opportunity to re-interrogate my own policy positions. So, if you’re into that type of thing, there’s a few links here worth a listen and a read.

Onwards and Upwards

Speaking of live streams, we’re gonna try a few of those on Urban Proxima. After publishing interviews as transcripts in the past, I’m realizing that some conversations would be more entertaining and accessible in an audio-visual format. First on the list is a discussion with , he’s the man behind one of the best transit newsletters on Substack, Changing Lanes, as well as co-author of the new book, The End of Driving: Automated Cars, Sharing vs Owning, and the Future of Mobility.

Tune in on Tuesday, December 2nd at 10am pst / 1pm est to learn all about the state of autonomous vehicles and what the technology will mean for infrastructure, policy, and the public. If you’re already a subscriber, I believe you’ll get a notification as soon as we go live; if not, you ought to be able to sign up here.

Couple closing thoughts for all of y’all who choose to spend your precious time and attention on the words I write.

First, thank you. There’s nothing more precious in this life than time, so the fact that any of y’all want to spend any of yours here with me is something I don’t take lightly. Second, I take requests. To me, this publication is less about content than it is conversation. To that end, my comments section, email, and DMs are always open. There are a thousand topics I’d like to cover, but if there are some that matter more to y’all, I am more than happy to pick up those questions first.

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Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is one of seventeen national research centers under the purview of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Created in 1943, the laboratory is located in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and was the central site for the Manhattan Project. Today, the lab is responsible not only for ongoing nuclear weapons research, but also applied materials, energy, and climate science under the auspices of the DOE.

LANL has a problem, though: workforce housing. In this regard, LANL isn’t actually unique. Research centers across the country are all facing this same problem. The housing crisis is impeding the country’s ability to hire and retain the next generation of scientists. If you care about American science for reasons of national prosperity, security, or, really any reason at all, you ought to also care about housing.

How Zoning Strangles Science

Los Alamos is a dual city/county jurisdiction in New Mexico. It’s a community of roughly 20,000 people bordered by national park land as well as several tribal reservations. Despite a modest upzoning in 2022, the town remains dominated by a restrictive land use regime that maintains low-density development patterns and guarantees high housing costs.

The net result of all that is exactly what we’d expect. As housing has become more expensive, newer employees at the lab have begun to live farther and farther away. Approximately 66% of lab employees commute in from outside the county. The spillover from lab employees into neighboring communities like Santa Fe has created a knock-on displacement effect, pushing residents there even further out into Bernalillo County. And before anyone raises the “but maybe Santa Fe is just nicer” objection, a survey of 9,392 in-commuting LANL employees showed 75% would have preferred to live near the lab in Los Alamos County if they could.1 This has created a retention problem, which LANL leadership openly acknowledges.

At a 2022 town hall, Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Thom Mason explained (emphasis added):

Housing is listed in the exit interviews as kind of the number two factor in terms of our challenge; it’s really not so much hiring. ...We hired 2,077 people with great credentials and lots of enthusiasm, and exceeded our target for hiring. So our challenge is more on the retention…not so much getting people—it’s this increase in attrition in the early career staff after they’re here.

When we don’t build enough housing, prices outpace wage growth, subsequent waves of workers have to secure housing farther and farther away from economic centers, and less affluent communities already on the periphery get priced out even farther. It’s a tale as old as time (or at least 20th-century American land use).

Except it’s even worse.

LANL intends to hire 800-1,000 employees in 2026. This hiring will be enabled by additional funding via the much-discussed Big Beautiful Bill, and while it’s great that the lab came out of our recent budget conflagrations with a few extra bucks, there’s still a problem.2

When the federal government pours money into LANL, that money covers payroll, and that payroll gets spent on housing, which pushes prices up. As long as supply remains inelastic, more money just means more problems (higher prices).

To clarify, some of those thousand hires will be backfills for retiring employees, not net new headcount. So maybe it’s slightly less bad than it sounds? Sadly, no.

The marginal retiring LANL employee doesn’t automatically free up a unit of housing upon retirement. Chances are they bought a home at the beginning of their career with the lab; so when they retire, they’ve paid off a $350k mortgage on a house now worth $600k. The replacement hire faces that $600k price tag on a starting salary. And herein lies an important part of the problem: every subsequent cohort of LANL employees has exerted a ratcheting effect on the region’s home prices. We can’t spend our way out of this problem.

Now, as bad as all that is, we still have room in our story for it to get even worse.

According to LANL’s Director of Community Partnerships, Kathy Keith, student interns, unable to secure any housing at all, sometimes camp in the nearby national forest. If our national science program depends on the interns not being eaten by bears, we need to admit we have a problem.3

Unfortunately, the situation in Los Alamos isn’t unique. Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories face similar challenges in California’s expensive Bay Area housing market.4 And a host of other national science facilities are located in high-cost areas like Berkeley, Menlo Park, and the greater New York metropolitan area.

The problem isn’t restricted to government-funded laboratories, either. Consider Boston. The city is arguably the country’s biggest hub for pharma and biomedical research. It’s also notoriously one of the nation’s highest cost metro areas. At a private event I attended earlier this year, an investor gave a whole talk about how the city’s housing prices (driven by the city’s housing policies) were a major impediment to her firm’s ability to deploy capital against scientific research.5 Here again, housing costs are increasing the cost of scientific research for absolutely no added benefit.

What to do about it?

There’s a wide array of policy options to make sure cities with national labs are able to house the next generation of researchers shining the light of human knowledge into the gloom of our collective ignorance. The standard prescription includes allowing small-lot development/accessory dwelling units, abolition of parking requirements/height limits/onerous setbacks, and the adoption of by-right approval processes. There may still be financing and labor constraints to overcome in a market like Los Alamos, but, at least in housing, you have to legalize the market before you can go about creating it.

That said, my goal here isn’t to propose a model ordinance for Los Alamos or anywhere else. Instead, it’s to put a bug in the ear of all you science hawks.

Science doesn’t happen amongst people perfectly distributed across the American landmass. Even in this age of remote work and Zoom meetings, people still work together best when they can congregate as a community. Whether that’s in the same room, neighborhood, or city, the implications are the same. American land use that limits the number of people who can come together also financially impedes our ability to deploy capital in pursuit of scientific advancement.

If you’re worried about the pace of American innovation, if you’re anxious about our ability to deploy capital against problems of national import, you need to care about housing. Parochial concerns and status-quo bias will continue to bleed resources away from our national science efforts unless we address the housing shortage in the cities where science takes place.

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p.s. If you work on science policy and are interested in learning more about the land use policy of it all, send me a DM. I know all the coolest kids already working on housing and am always happy to make an introduction.

Rethinking Home Construction

Jeff Fong: Let’s start with table stakes. What’s the difference between the types of homes you’re building and conventionally constructed ones?

Vikas Enti: Yeah, so let me start with what’s similar. We’re building homes that meet the same code standards. The way it gets lent against and transacted…it doesn’t have any distinction.

Where things get different is the advantages we get with factory built housing, in addition to being able to build these homes on a much, much faster timeline…with more cost certainty, more predictability…you’re also able to build to a much higher energy efficiency standard. A lot of this has to do with air tightness, which is a key function of energy efficiency.

For a home, it’s easy to apply the same amount of insulation in the factory; but to achieve air tightness, it’s a lot harder to do with on site construction, so the fact that the precision allows us to make sure that the homes we build exceed the energy efficiency requirements from air tightness so it directly translates to a home that ends up actually saving a lot more energy over time. That translates to cost savings for the owner from an energy efficiency standpoint.

The other benefit our customers get is the strength of these structures. We have to design our structures to be transportable, right? They’re transported on highways or trucks and have to withstand all the wind speeds there. They also have to be pickable by a crane, so the load ratings we’re designing our structures for typically exceed the wind load and snow load ratings of a typical home.

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Our homes actually end up becoming a lot stronger, and we’re not deliberately designing to do that. We’re very optimal in how much material we use, but the way we’re modularizing the structures, we end up having additional walls, additional ceilings and floors that have to stack up. That all results in a home that’s not only significantly stronger, but also has much better sound isolation, so the comfort levels in these homes are much better.

The air tightness also results in a home that is not as susceptible to absorbing external pollutants. So if you had a wildfire outside or smoke outside, all the air that’s going in our units goes through what’s called an ERB, that’s an active ventilator with filters in it. So the actual air quality in our homes is much, much higher and better than a traditional site built home.

A Technologist Takes on Homebuilding

Jeff Fong: Can you say more about what you mean by the word module? What are the pieces that y’all are manufacturing and then assembling on site?

Vikas Enti: So for the Reframe approach, we’ve chosen to go with volumetric building blocks. We’ve broken a building down into full rooms, so what we’re shipping could be a collection of…a kitchen and a bathroom as one single box.

So we have the floor, the walls, the ceiling, all fully intact. Doesn’t need to have all sides. We have ways to transport them without all sides being built up. But we’re fitting out cabinets and appliances in the factory. We’re finishing the floors, the ceilings, all the electrical HVAC work also gets done in the factory. So we’re getting to a pretty high level of completion. Our goal is to at least complete 85% of the work in the factory. What ends up happening on the job site is you have these giant boxes brought down by flatbed trucks. You have a crane on site and the crane just picks up the box. It’s on the foundation, and you’re literally stacking a bunch of these boxes together.

And this conversation is timely. We just stacked our third project. So, our second customer project, third project to be fully done, was a three story apartment building in Somerville, Massachusetts. It took us three days to go from a foundation to a structure that was fully completed and dried in. And we’re driving efficiencies there, but yeah, like our building block is a volumetric module.

Jeff Fong: If we were on the factory floor I’m imagining these individual pieces would look like part of an Ikea showroom or a set from a TV sitcom?

Vikas Enti: Pretty much, it is surreal sometimes when the module gets to the final step in the factory and you walk in and you’re like…Oh, I’m in someone’s living room…and you’re still on the factory floor.

Jeff Fong: That’s cool, it almost sounds like pieces of a life size dollhouse.

Well, I noticed y’all build specific types of housing. I see multiplex, duplex, two-story, bungalow, and cottages. These are all what I would call missing middle. Is there specific thinking behind why y’all are focusing on these types of housing products?

Vikas Enti: Yeah, we’ve been pretty deliberate about focusing on missing middle as the core competency for the business.

When you sort of think about the market landscape today, there’s actually a good amount of housing that’s getting built in large scale single-family developments or in large scale multifamily. This is where all the big players are, but I think they’re still pretty mismatched on where people actually want to live and where we actually see existing services that can accommodate more housing; but the cost of building housing in those markets is incredibly high.

So, we’ve been focusing on missing middle housing for two reasons: one, we see a significant cost escalation. As an example, out here in Massachusetts, the greater Boston area, to build an infill lots current on-site construction costs range from $350 to $450 a square foot and that’s giving us enough headroom to actually bring our technology to market. And that’s pretty true across the country, where infill costs are sometimes twice as high.

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The second reason we focused on this is, in our opinion, ripe for institutional capital over time, if you can establish that your delivery method actually allows you to get significant access to all these scattered sites and get cost efficiencies there.

The whole technology stack we built — with robotics for manufacturing and all the AI and algorithms on the design side — allows us to go after these infill lots with the same efficiency a production builder would get on their lots or for large multifamily. So there’s an intersection of where we saw market demand, but also where we saw a superior advantage with our approach.

A World Without Tape Measurers

Jeff Fong: Maybe that’s a good jumping off point, into y’alls process. I read that you’re using robotics not only to increase labor productivity, but also to decrease training time for new employees. Can you talk a bit about that? Are these bespoke internal tools or are you repurposing commonly used technology from types of manufacturing?

Vikas Enti: We use robotics today for automating framing of walls and ceilings, but we’re creating a roadmap to automate about 60-80% of tasks in the factory.

Our approach for Robotics has been very focused on maximizing the use of off-the-shelf hardware. The actual arm that you see is a standard industrial arm, you could pick any color and supplier you want to buy from. Our IP is what effectively ends up becoming the “hand” of the robot. So everything up to the wrist you can buy off the shelf; the hand is our custom design.

We also have this whole magnetic picturing technology that we’ve developed that allows us to … if you see the video on the website, the robot’s sort of framing studs onto this blank panel jig in the back. We use magnets to hold structures in place and that whole fixation technique is actually giving us significant cost advantages.

Our entire robotic work cell costs $200K and it’s 500 square feet in size. That’s a fraction of what other suppliers in the industry actually charge for these work cells. So we’ve got an advantage there. And using off the shelf hardware, custom end of arm tooling. And we use a 3D camera system and a significant amount of software that we developed that allows us to see these studs.

This reduces the need for us to have these massive conveyor lines that bring studs to the robot. Here, we just have a person dropping a pallet, but studs, the robot sees the studs and knows which ones to pick, and can directly go frame stuff. So we’ve been able to drive significant efficiencies there.

Jeff Fong: How much in-house software development have y’all done? I think I read something called pixels to parts?

Vikas Enti: It’s the backbone of our entire enterprise. We’re probably the only company in the world today where you have architects, carpenters, software engineers, roboticists, all eating lunch together. We’ve built a full stack approach, and so we’ve invested heavily in software. It actually precedes the manufacturing, it starts at the design step.

So even the way buildings are designed, we start work with the traditional work for the tool called Revit that most architects use, but very quickly jump into a mechanical CAD system called Onshape. And this is where we’ve been writing our custom software, inside Onshape, where we actually have simple things from “how do you automatically frame a full building?” all the way through more complex things, like, “how do you route pipes and wires automatically?”

So we’ve been building all these algorithms inside Onshape to make the design engineering process significantly faster. The place where we’ve already unlocked significant value, like, once you get to this high fidelity model…how do you automatically send instructions from that CAD model to the robot, to our CNC saws and routers, and also to people who were up-skilling (who are actually getting instructions off of an iPad).

And your IKEA analogy comes back to bear here again, which is the way we’ve sort of structured our whole process. The instructions from the CAD model kind of go in an order where it first sends cut instructions to our saw, and then our saw cuts lumber. But not only is it cutting it, it’s also printing instructions on it, and it’ll print barcodes. So for studs that are going to the robot, the barcodes help the robot understand what’s done in the recipe. But there are some walls the robot cannot frame today. These have to go to our manual framing station. Here we’ve printed locations of where exactly all the individual studs have to go line up, where we have the core holes, et cetera.

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So the Build Team gets a kit of parts that already has instructions printed on it. Then they get supplemental instructions on an iPad, and they often tell us that this whole thing feels like them assembling Ikea furniture. They don’t need a tape measure anymore, right? We want to kill tape measures. We want to kill ladders. We want to kill chop saws. We want to take the stereotype of what a construction site needs to look like to a point where you’re getting pre-cut materials or parts coming together.

But to enable that feature, we have to do significantly more work on the 3D modeling side…to where we’re actually modeling every single wire, and then fixture, location, fastener locations….and then we’ve and we’ve made the cost of getting those instructions from the model to these endpoints, almost brought down to zero.

Productizing Construction

Jeff Fong: So it sounds like you’re really productizing the entire process bit-by-bit and saving humans for the hard parts. And did I hear correctly that within your software, you’re building an internal representation of every constituent piece of everything that you’re building? That’s got to significantly reduce waste, I’d imagine.

Vikas Enti: Absolutely. We’re already reducing a lot of waste with sheet goods. We get to nest any cuts we have to make, we get to plan material usage for the entire product or the project, versus just a single wall in front of you.

For optimizing lumber usage, we’re getting better there. I think we’ve had other challenges with lumber, just the quality of studs that we’re getting. So that’s been an active work in progress. But in principle, you’re right, because we’re effectively building a building three times: we build it 100% digitally, then we build them as modules in the factory, and then we get to assemble them on the job site.

We actually get three passes at getting this done versus the way it’s done in industry today, where you get line drawings from an architect and then you have a skilled trades person on the job site, figuring out, on the fly, exactly how they’re going to build that structure. They can’t really optimize beyond what’s in front of them. They get to build things once. So everything feels like a prototype. They get no efficiencies. Then you have all the waste from the material side and the labor hours that are not optimal.

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We have reference products, right? So you mentioned the cottage house, the multiplex or duplex. We have a reference design, but that design means nothing until we can actually make it compliant for a given job site or a given site. We have to adjust dimensions sometimes to make it compliant with setbacks for zoning. Other times, you’ll have to change one wall to be more fire resilient because it has to meet building code requirements for separation and so on. There’s still work involved; this is not a mass production approach where you get to design one standard product and replicate it.

To truly be successful, we have to be able to customize these products to meet site conditions. And this has required us to invest in this whole pixel support [design] pipeline. Every single project has some variance, so we had to design this pipeline to make sure that the cost of customization actually goes down to zero for us, because the software is actually taking care of all the nitty gritties.

Modular Houses that Still Feel Like Homes

Jeff Fong: Your process is more to deal with local land use regulations and building code requirements — you’re not actually building custom homes, right?

Vikas Enti: Exactly, we’re not a custom home builder. Our customers are developers. We’re helping them maximize value for the parcels they have so they can realize their returns, build a lot more projects, and increase the supply of housing. For us to make this whole cycle time go really fast…the sooner we can get a building to be buildable by-right (where we’re skipping the whole zoning review process and going directly to permits) becomes a winning combination. To make that work, we need to be able to conform our designs to meet site conditions.

So the site is what we’re really obsessing over, but we’re not forgetting the living experience. We still believe in the Reframe living experience. People living in our homes get a vastly superior experience compared to the home next door. They’re more energy efficient, a lot quieter, a lot healthier, better materials, lower embodied carbon…like we baked a lot into our platform.

Jeff Fong: From the homeowners perspective, if you walked into a Reframe home, would you feel like you’re walking into a Reframe home?

Vikas Enti: Yeah, we’ve been very deliberate. The materials we’ve chosen, that the customers see and experience, that they’re very familiar, they’re no different. When people walk in, the usual reaction is, oh, I can’t believe this was built in a factory.People feel like it’s a normal home.

The apartment building we just built recently, breaks all notions. Like, this was built in a factory. It’s very hard for people to compare and contrast just from the sheer scale of it. But when you walk in, you find that we made design choices where we still have large open spaces.

We actually use three modules together that are connected to create the living room, dining room and the kitchen as one large open space. Which old school modular players were not able to do. Manufactured housing, which were the predecessors of trailer homes, tend to be just one or two boxes wide, and they have a very different design language and material choice that you can tell. Our stuff is pretty indistinguishable from materials you would use on the job site.

Reframe’s Business Model

Jeff Fong: A minute ago, you mentioned that your customers are actually developers, so you’re not interacting directly with the homeowner or the home buyer as a customer. Is that correct?

Vikas Enti: Yeah. So as a preferred go to market motion for us, we’ve been biasing more towards developers who can get us a multi-year pipeline. This allows us to actually plan for the required capacity. But the home we built last week was actually sold to a family.

It’s going to be a multi-generational living experience. This might be the only home where we actually know who’s going to be living in. The first home we built last year was built as a rental unit, but we never got to meet the occupant. All the other projects are designed without knowing who the end customer is. We’re not set up to be successful where we can provide a high touch experience to an end customer.

Jeff Fong: And if I remember correctly, Reframe is currently operating in Massachusetts and SoCal, is that right?

Vikas Enti: We’re fully operational here in Massachusetts. We’re setting up operations in SoCal. We’ve sold one project already for a rebuild in Altadena. In fact, I’ll be flying out there later today, and our goal is to set up a factory in SoCal by Q2 next year. We’re actively exploring factory sites for it.

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Jeff Fong: And I also saw you referring to your production facilities as micro-factories. What’s the service area for one of these? If you set up a micro-factory in SoCal, is that serving all of San Diego?

Vikas Enti: Our preferred size is 50,000 square feet, which is about the size of a Garden Center at Home Depot, so relatively small. And for the service radius, our preferred radius is to be within 50-100 miles. That distance is actually more to do with us having better control and delivering a full stack experience, because we are the designer, manufacturer and on site installer. But from a logistics standpoint, I mean, we can ship anywhere. In fact, we’ll be shipping the first Altadena home from Massachusetts to California. It’s atypical, but the cost differentials are high enough that we can actually absorb the transportation costs to make this work as a pilot.

So there’s other examples. All Citizen M hotels in the US were built in Poland and ocean freighted over. There are companies building modules out in China and shipping them to the West Coast. There’s actually a pretty global supply chain around it, and it all just comes down to how much of a cost arbitrage you have. But our preferred approach, the business we want to be in, is one where micro-factories are local, so developers can build trust with the process.

We believe that’s a critical part that the industry was missing before that didn’t really allow it to spin the flywheel, to drive more demand. We want to make this experience very familiar. Not feel like a concept that people are trying to take a risk on. Like, we go to Home Depot to buy stuff. We could show up at our factory, see what’s happening. Like you contract with us, you’re able to check it anytime you want to. You know that this is just a better way to build a home — not a remote, scary approach, just something that’s a lot more pragmatic and practical for a certain type of product.

Amazon Robotics to Modular Homebuilding

Jeff Fong: In the last few minutes I’d like to ask you a little bit about yourself. How did you get into co-founding a modular home startup? I think I remember that you have an Amazon background, but what was your jumping off point here?

Vikas Enti: I mean, the short version is, I became a dad. Up to that point, I had deployed over half a million robots at Amazon. After becoming a dad, a lot of my focus sort of shifted to like, am I applying my skills in the right way where it matters? to where my kids, when they’re teenagers, can look back and say my dad did that.

My focus lens at that point was, how do you think about reducing carbon emissions? So which industry can you go to? Housing and our homes are actually one of the biggest contributors to emissions. About 27% of all carbon emissions come from our homes. So it became a good starting point, but as I got deeper into it…it became pretty clear that the housing crisis and the climate crisis are so intertwined and that this is the biggest problem of our generation.

I was pretty equipped to build conviction that this is a problem to solve. The solution took another six months to get the first pass on building conviction for…what does it look like to change the process and sort of take a factory built approach? Why factories? We get to bend gravity here, we get to build the ceilings and walls before we have to build the floors.

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And my own experience from Amazon was like, don’t automate an existing process. Take a step back, redefine the process, and then bring automation in. So the factories made sense. I got to really explore this thesis for about six months with the venture firm. The goal was to kill this thesis, and I just fell in love with it. By the end of it, I was like, yeah, this is what I want to be doing. Then I went and found Aaron and Felipe, my co-founders, to come on the journey, and here we are.

Jeff Fong: Any last thoughts, anything else that I didn’t ask, or that you would want folks to know about reframe or what y’all are doing.

Vikas Enti: Quite simply, our whole mission is to build resilient homes that are attainable for everyone. People have gotten savvy about energy efficient homes, but they really aren’t thinking beyond energy efficiency. Given everything we’ve learned from the LA wildfires, what’s happening with tornado damage in St Louis, and wind damage from hurricanes in North Carolina… I think we need to build homes to a higher standard.

We want customers and stakeholders to actually demand that. Demand building codes, to actually adapt to what the changing world looks like.

Jeff Fong: Awesome. Well, that’s all I have for you this morning. Thank you for taking the time Vikas.

In business, as in life, timing is everything. And, given the times, the growing number of modular developers makes all the sense in the world to me. Over the last ten years the housing crisis has reached sufficient proportions to launch an entire political movement and the need for any and all solutions to address the millstone around society’s neck could not be greater. Moreover, the current administration’s immigration and tariff policies mean there’s never been greater need for productivity improvements in the construction sector.

There’s a regulatory angle here as well. Reframe, and other players in the space, specialize in missing middle types of housing products. These are housing typologies that we’re only now beginning to re-legalize in communities across the country. Some have pointed out that legalization doesn’t automatically produce new housing and while that’s true, I remain unworried. If we make the market for missing middle possible, entrepreneurs like Vikas will make it real.

The episode in question was a Cameron Murray interview with William Miller and Peter Banks of the Boyd Institute. does not believe that increasing housing supply can ever lower housing costs. Suffice to say I disagree with that viewpoint, but trying to grapple with what I can only describe as a macro-determinist worldview was fun, so I jotted down my thoughts in response.

What Crisis?

The Boyd Institute’s Peter Banks opens up the conversation with a straightforward question: Do you think there’s a housing crisis? Why do you think that way?

Murray responds:

If you think the housing crisis is something like the housing market behaving abnormally, then no.

A few minutes later, he goes on to say:

…to diagnose this as…something specific in the housing market has gone wrong, I think misunderstands the housing market.

I find this framing odd. No one I know in the YIMBY milieu is arguing that there’s some point at which housing markets (somewhere) worked and if we could only RETVRN to tradition we could restore what was lost.

At the highest level, the YIMBY problem statement is something like:

• Housing prices are high (relative to people’s ability to pay) and this is bad (on grounds of justice, economic growth, environmental preservation, and more)

• Prices are high because housing is scarce (in places of high-opportunity)

• We can make housing less scarce (and therefore less expensive than would otherwise be the case) via different policy

As for the actual crisis, it’s the drag on the economy, effects on the environment, and disparate impacts on marginalized communities.

As for the YIMBY vision of a better world, realistically, we’re looking at moderating price-to-income ratios. Even outcomes where current price levels remain stable in high-opportunity metros, but we expanded the housing stock such that many, many more people could access them would be directionally correct.

Housing Markets According to Murray

Murray goes on to describe how prices get set in the housing market. He says (emphasis mine):

...if you want to fight economic forces you have to prevent trades that would otherwise occur because we are a rich society and rich societies like to spend money on things. That might be recreation, holidays, cars, but do you know what else? It’s houses. And unless you prevent people from trading those houses, you’re going to get to where the market price is, regardless of the overall quantity.

If I’m interpreting Dr. Murray correctly, he seems to be saying prices are determined by demand such that for any given quantity of supply we’ll always return to a constant price level.

While it’s not wrong that the wealthiest individuals in a housing market define the top of the distribution, demand from the super wealthy to live in any specific city is not infinite. Taking a step back, though, it seems like Murray just takes a very macro lens to everything.

At one point, Miller and Banks tee up a question with a hypothetical midwestern tech worker who would like to move to San Francisco. They imagine San Francisco built one more unit of housing, this midwesterner then moves to San Francisco freeing up a unit wherever in the midwest he’s just left and bob’s your uncle, downward pressure on prices.

Except Murray thinks not.

His riposte is that, sure, that could happen, but then that freed up midwestern unit just results in one less newly constructed midwestern unit. So at best, you’re moving things around. He also seems to be skeptical that allowing the market to spatially-reallocate our midwesterner to San Francisco is an improvement.

Granting his premise for a moment, I think removing material constraints and providing individuals with the widest set of choices about how they want to live their lives is good. To me, this scenario isn’t a question of trusting The Market with resource allocation. It’s about embracing a society where people have greater agency in a practical, material sense.

But also, I don’t believe we have to grant his premise.

There’s a robust literature on filtering. More specific to its mechanics, has a wonderfully accessible write-up on vacancy chains. Again, Murray doesn’t buy this, saying:

And if you go, Oh, … now there’s 20 dwellings, as in, you mean there are 20 dwellings at this location that the people living here didn’t buy off the plan of a different project at another location … If that’s your objective, that’s great … If you think we’ve suddenly got 20 more dwellings across the city more than the counterfactual, because there were no offsetting effects everywhere, then you’re wrong.

But this implies the existence of a self-equilibrating national housing market instead of a series of semi-interconnected regional housing markets, adjustments between which are full of friction and informational gaps.

So, I’m not convinced that tripling the amount of housing construction in San Francisco (or some other high-demand American City) results in every marginal rich person from everywhere else in the country descending upon the Bay Area. That would require rich households to have infinitely elastic location preferences (imagine someone in Boston constantly ready to outbid for SF housing if the price dips slightly). In reality, people have strong location preferences based on jobs, family, and networks that aren’t perfectly substitutable.

Murray’s version of a national housing market also seems to imply information is near-perfect and mobility is near-frictionless. The actual process of learning about housing in another city, coordinating a move, finding employment, etc. means the marginal buyer of new SF housing is much more likely to be someone already in the Bay Area trading up from existing housing stock.

Instead, I think the effect looks more like the top of the income distribution already in the region trading up to whatever the newest housing in the hottest location happens to be. That probably sounds strange to anyone actually from San Francisco and that would be because the city has built so little for such a long time that the richest neighborhoods today have been high-cost for fifty or more years at this point.1 In markets where building actually happens, the richest folks move around. For example, in Amarillo, Texas, the posh neighborhood changes every couple years as people with money want newer/better (it’s all very Veblen).2

Funnily enough, my last point accords with Murray’s description of the top of income distribution. The more money we have, the nicer things we want. The point of departure, again, is that he thinks the U.S. housing operates as a nation-wide, self-equilibrating market where building in one city versus another is just pushing peas around on a plate. I think the more relevant scale of analysis is within regional housing markets.

What’s Regulation Got to Do With It?

According to Murray, supply doesn’t really matter, therefore regulations that prevent supply in some specific place don’t matter much either. But this seems like an empirical question, so let’s turn to an example.

In 1998, the city of Houston significantly reduced minimum lot sizes in the area known as the inner loop. Previous to the reform, minimum lot sizes were set at 5,000 square feet; after the change, they were reduced to 1,400 square feet. In 2013, these changes were extended more widely. These reforms resulted in a boom of homebuilding, particularly of the kind the reform legalized — townhomes on small lots.

Research cited by Pew notes that the townhomes built by replacing an older single-family home (and subdividing the lots) had a “median assessed value of $340,000, considerably lower than the $545,000 median value of other new single-family homes in the city, and an amount that in 2020 was affordable for families earning at least 105% of the area’s median family income.”

This is roughly what I’d expect. Land costs are a major component of housing costs (in high-price metros, it could be on the order of 70% of total cost). When we allow denser development, i.e. we build such that more people can live on less land, we get relatively less expensive housing.

Time is Money

Getting more nuanced, Murray also dismisses the idea that timelines matter. In his view, being able to build faster doesn’t interact with price.

He goes on to provide an anecdote about a public housing provider in New South Wales with some properties that they decided to liquidate. According to Murray, they thought they were going to earn $400 million, the sale got delayed five years, and by the time they sold they ended up getting $710 million. He closes the anecdote by saying that if:

…the markets growing because the economy is growing and waiting pay is just as much as going and so it’s the change in the returns that stimulate those adjustments.

Which might be true, but not important?

Sure, land speculation is a thing.3 But there’s nothing that guarantees a particular return over some specific time horizon such that the developer turned speculator can plan accordingly. Miller even tried to pin him down on this, asking whether this logic would hold if the landowner acquired the land with leverage (i.e. had interest payments on debt to account for). Murray just kinda yadda-yaddas, saying that in general equilibrium it’s all the same and moves past the question.

But it matters.

Developers have heterogeneous capital costs. Changing the time cost of money changes the calculation differently for different actors. And, again, that cost is real.

A 2000 paper by Mayer and Sommerville, “Land Use Regulation and New Construction”, examined not just the relationship between regulation and price, but the link between regulation → how long it takes to produce new housing → the resulting impact that delay has on price.

Their findings were that discretionary permitting results in both a slower supply response and less new housing supplied overall…which increases prices relative to the counterfactual.4 To reach that conclusion, Mayer and Sommerville compared 44 different U.S. metros on the basis of how quickly (or not) their local land use systems allowed new housing starts. That’s relevant for our conversation because, and the authors make this point explicitly, there is no such thing as a national housing market (at least not in the U.S).5

American Land Use as Rent Extraction

My final point of consternation is with Murray’s account of land use planning. He says,

I think the best way to talk about town planning is it regulates where things go, not how quickly or how many there are.

I can’t speak with any authority on Australia, but to the extent Murray believes this is the case for U.S. land use, he’s factually incorrect.

The approval process is a major determinative factor in how quickly new housing can be built in the face of rising demand. And as for how many of something there is, in most places in the U.S., it’s illegal to build duplexes, therefore we don’t have many duplexes. Local land use regimes have an impact on the quantity of a great many different things from what I can see. Murray doesn’t stop there, though.

He continues:

Town planning exists in every city. It evolved everywhere for good reasons, right? There are noise, shadows, reflections, smells, vibrations, accessibility. The externality package of a city is enormous and we can litigate that through the courts the old fashioned way or we can just set some simple rules and go here if you comply with these do whatever you want and if you don’t we’re gonna have to have an argument.

As for this last bit, the answer is, again, largely no. American land use tools were not primarily invented to mitigate externalities, at least not in the sense I hope Murray means. They were created for the purposes of raising housing prices to segregate Americans along lines of class and race.

I really want to emphasize that this is not a controversial statement and I’m not attempting a 2015 twitter style everything-is-actually-about-racism dunk. The people behind what we now take for granted as standard land use policy were not hiding anything and this is well attested in books like The Color of Law, Stuck, and The Warmth of Other Suns.6

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So, if we want to say that modern planning tools do not in fact raise prices we have to either hold the position that a) the originators of said tools — at least in the U.S. — were wrong in their understanding of policy or b) sometime in the last century, these tools underwent some change that rendered them benign.

Perhaps there’s an argument for the former, though I’ve yet to hear it. As for the latter, I’d need Murray to point out where on the timeline The Rings of Power went from implements of rent extraction to value neutral tools of modern life.

Murray’s Alternative

I found the entire conversation fascinating, but I wish I could have heard more about Murray’s alternatives for housing provision (I’ll have to go read his substack).

In keeping with his description of how housing markets work, his short answer for dealing with high prices was to prevent people from transacting. If the top of income distribution drives up prices when they trade in the housing market, the only option for curtailing prices is to prevent the trades.

That then leaves us with various public housing schemes to replace market provision, which, to my YIMBY ears, is catnip. Some of the most prominent YIMBYs in good standing are below-market-rate housing developers and baked into YIMBY assumptions about building a housing abundant future is a role for subsidized housing. How we go about that and what percentage needs to be covered via public provision is an open question, but it’s part of the pro-supply worldview.

Outro

Ok, climbing off my soap box.

At the end of the day, one Australian national’s opinions on the U.S. housing market don’t matter all that much, but engaging with ideas does. In articulating my thoughts, I’ve tried to understand what I think Dr. Murray is attempting to say. When I’ve done so in the past with fellow travelers more closely associated with Georgist strains of thought or working on these issues through a Strong Towns lens, I’ve learned something in the process. So that’s all to say, this type of exercise is less about debate and more about listening and introspection.

In that spirit, if I’ve misunderstood or misrepresented any of Dr. Murray’s positions, I fully invite him to take me to task in the comments or via whichever other medium he prefers. And, as almost an afterthought, I wish I would have heard more about his ideas on housing subsidy. He seemed to have some nuanced takes there that I suspect would have been thought provoking, whether or not they were persuasive.

Despite the seeming difference of opinion on theory, interpretation of fact, and preference with regard to policy, he seems like an affable guy. Should the opportunity present itself, I’ll publicly commit to buying him a beer — for the sake of the discourse.

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Roberta’s article was originally published in Portuguese and I’ve translated/re-posted it here with her consent. I’ve also added clarifying footnotes where useful for a non-Brazilian audience, but you can kinda just substitute The United States for Brazil as you’re reading and the lesson remains the same.

During the 12 months between 2024 and 2025, Helsinki recorded zero traffic deaths. Unfortunately, this is still a distant reality for many cities, both in absolute and relative terms—and it was only possible thanks to a series of urban planning measures such as lowering speed limits, redesigning streets, and prioritizing pedestrians and cyclists over cars. The Finnish experience offers valuable lessons for those who want safer, more human-centered cities.

What Helsinki Achieved is a Big Deal

It is important to highlight how significant Helsinki’s accomplishment is and what it represents. Some may argue that the city was able to reach zero traffic deaths because it has “only” 690,000 inhabitants—much fewer than capitals like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.1 If we want to take that criticism seriously, we should compare this data with similarly-sized Brazilian cities.

Ribeirão Preto, for example, has 698,000 inhabitants. In 2025 it’s already registering more than eight deaths per month and is on track to surpass 100 deaths if this pace continues. Joinville, with 616,000 inhabitants, recorded 90 traffic fatalities in 2022. And Uberaba, with 337,000 residents (half the size of Helsinki), reached 47 traffic deaths in 2023. If Helsinki’s success were solely due to its not-so-large population, we would see very different realities in these Brazilian cities.

It is also possible to compare relative figures. São Paulo saw 8.6 traffic deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2024. In the same year, Helsinki had only four deaths total, representing 0.59 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Even considering the population difference, the rate of traffic deaths in São Paulo is 14 times higher. Helsinki also stands out in the European context, performing considerably better than other capitals. Berlin and London record more than double the deaths per 100,000 people; in Vienna and Madrid, the rate is at least 40% higher than Helsinki’s.

What the Finnish capital has achieved is impressive even by European standards. But compared with Brazil, it is crucial to highlight the enormous gap — not by chance, but as a reflection of the very different paths urban planning has taken in the two countries.

How did Helsinki do it?

The secret is no single measure, but a long-term, multi-prong strategy. Helsinki embraced “Vision Zero,” a policy launched in Sweden in the 1990s and now adopted by cities around the world. It’s based on the premise that no traffic death is “acceptable” and that the goal must be not to reduce, but to eliminate fatalities completely. The idea is to create multiple “layers of protection” so that if one fails, another mitigates the impact of a traffic accident.

In Helsinki, this translated into concrete actions:

• Reducing car speeds, with more than half the city’s streets limited to ~18mph.2

• Redesigning streets, improving sidewalks and crossings to prioritize pedestrians and cyclists and discourage car use.

• Maintaining high-quality public transit to reduce car dependency.

• Increasing enforcement with speed cameras, automated monitoring systems, and police presence.

• Running educational awareness campaigns.

To inform the physical interventions, Helsinki identified high-risk areas based on extensive data collection about accidents, vehicles, and residents’ perceptions. Beyond the measures cited above, the lack of this type of monitoring is also a widespread shortcoming in Brazilian urban planning.

Lessons for Brazil

The first step when analyzing examples like Helsinki’s is to avoid dismissive arguments like “that’s only possible there because the city isn’t very big” or “Brazil isn’t Europe, things are just different here.”3 Sometimes these reactions may have some merit, but they distract from what really matters: we are losing far too many lives in traffic every day, and this must change. Back in 1983, Helsinki recorded seven times more fatalities than in 2024—showing that the city made a deliberate, structured effort over the span of years to achieve this goal.

The most important lesson, however, lies in the list of Helsinki’s “Vision Zero” policies. Unfortunately, such measures are still very uncommon in Brazil, which explains the gulf between the two countries’ traffic death numbers. In Brasília, for example, a recent government billboard advertised the construction of 11 new overpasses, while almost nothing is said about improvements to crossings, sidewalks, and bike lanes. This is the reality in most Brazilian cities. The inversion of priorities in urban mobility is clear—and deadly.

That said, we do have some isolated examples of cities moving in a more Vision Zero–aligned direction. Perhaps the most notable is Fortaleza, which between 2014 and 2022 achieved a 58.3% reduction in traffic deaths. The “secret” was very similar to Helsinki’s: lowering car speeds, redesigning roads to prioritize pedestrians and cyclists, and increasing enforcement.

These cases show us that there is a viable path to preventing traffic deaths—and that it is already tested and proven. The challenge now is to follow it.

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