Abundance Is Necessary But Not Sufficient

Supply, affordability, and stability

There’s a growing recognition that our country’s housing situation is untenable. I trust no serious Democratic presidential candidate will run in 2028 without a housing policy plan. Housing debates may even be the battle line where broader disagreements—from the role of the federal government in markets to tax policy—are played out, like the role healthcare policy played in 2008.

Much like healthcare back then, there’s a good chance that Democrats will only get one bite at the apple to pass consequential housing legislation. In the Obama years, Democrats exhausted much of their political capital to pass the Affordable Care Act; it cost them control of Congress for the rest of Obama’s presidency. While the ACA has since persevered—a victory unto itself—Congress has been unwilling and unable to push for meaningful reforms to further increase coverage, lower spending, or improve outcomes. I imagine housing will follow a similar track.

That’s why it’s crucial that Democratic housing proposals meet the breadth and scale of the housing crisis. Today, Democratic elected officials from across the ideological spectrum are latching on to the concept of abundance, made famous by

Ezra Klein

and

Derek Thompson

’s book. In short, abundance advocates for reforms that increase supply (of things like housing) by removing procedural and regulatory constraints (like zoning) that are antithetical to desired policy outcomes (like housing affordability).

The problem is while abundance is absolutely necessary, it’s not sufficient to solve our housing crisis. We have to do more.

The layers of our housing crisis

Too often policymakers shrink down the housing crisis into one single problem because trying to meet the depth and breadth of the whole problem is daunting. But if we only get one chance to make a generational change in federal housing policy, we can’t shirk from the task at hand.

Here’s a handful of the unique (but intertwined) problems we face:

1. Housing costs rose faster than incomes in nearly 90% of counties in America from 2000 to 2020. Housing costs are growing across the country—not just in megacities and the coasts. Despite a rise in real wages, they’re not close to keeping up with housing costs. Since 2001, median rents have grown 10 times faster than median incomes for renters. The rent is too damn high!

2. We’re millions of units short. Depending on who you ask and how you measure, the country’s housing supply shortage is in the millions. A common number is in the 4 million range, but it’s likely higher (something we’ll get to later). Regardless of the specific number, we know that housing supply has not kept up in recent decades and the pace of development never really rebounded from the Great Financial Crisis.

3. In a typical year, landlords file for 3.6 million evictions—or about 7 per minute (and this is likely an undercount). I spent the better part of two years helping Matt Desmond set up the Eviction Lab so I know these data intimately. It’s very, very hard and annoying to try to get a count of formal evictions, or those processed through the court system. There’s no nationwide dataset that courts feed into, which is why we built one. Many courts are lackluster (at best) at data tracking (or they don’t share data) and eviction filings themselves aren’t uniform across jurisdictions. Beyond the messiness of these data, the Eviction Lab estimate doesn’t include informal evictions, or any time a tenant is removed from their home outside of a court-process. This can happen many ways, e.g., a landlord cuts off utilities or removes a front door to force a tenant to leave. In these instances, tenants may not recognize they have legal rights to fight back, don’t have access to lawyers, or simply must find new safe shelter quickly instead of wading through the legal process.

4. Only 1 in 4 families who qualify for a housing voucher get one. Low-income families that receive a housing voucher only have to pay 30% of their income to rent and the government covers the rest. However, unlike SNAP or Medicaid, vouchers aren’t an entitlement; not everyone who qualifies will get one. Nationally, the waitlist to get a voucher is about 2.5 years and in some of the biggest cities it can average 8 years. And even if you get a voucher, you might not be guaranteed to find a landlord who’ll accept it because of rampant voucher discrimination (landlords don’t like dealing with the administrative responsibilities and inspections attached to the program, despite receiving government-guaranteed rent payments).

You can quickly ascertain how these four issues are interconnected and how different proposed policies would address each problem. For example, inclusionary zoning was all the rage several years ago. That policy requires or incentivizes new development to include a certain number of affordable housing units. In practice, as Matt Yglesias recently detailed, it essentially amounts to a tax on developers. Inclusionary zoning means that affordable units will get built—which is good—but fewer overall units will be built—which is bad.

Also consider Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze proposal. He’s said he would freeze the rents on rent-stabilized units in NYC, which make up about 44% of the NYC rental market. This would certainly help low-income families in those units¹ and could lower eviction rates, as non-payment of rent is the lead cause of eviction. However, broad rent control disincentivizes development, lowers housing supply, and, therefore, exacerbates unaffordability at a macro scale. It’s great if you’re one of the people in a rent-controlled unit, but it’s bad if you’re not.

The shortcomings of Abundance

The essence of abundance is to increase housing supply. For abundance advocates (myself included), the main issue with housing in America is affordability, which is inextricably linked to inadequate housing supply. Everything else, in theory, flows from that. If you build more homes, housing writ large will become more affordable. From there, homelessness and housing instability will also decline.

Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t always follow the intuition of a supply and demand graph. We already know that even in places with growing housing supply, there is still housing instability; many poor families face eviction and homelessness. That’s why while more supply is absolutely necessary and should be prioritized, it isn’t a panacea for our country’s most vulnerable. We have to do more.

Brian Goldstone’s There’s No Place for Us is a heartbreaking and illuminating book to understand that. He follows five working families in Atlanta trapped in a cycle of homelessness. For these families, the problem isn’t constrained housing supply. Indeed Atlanta’s had a housing boom. However, affordability for low-income families is worsening. The number of affordable units— defined as a rent of $600 for a family making $24,000—has declined by 5% per year since 2012, with a faster decline predicted in years to come. Econ 101 would have you believe that as more housing units are built—even if they are luxury units—overall prices would begin to come down. That’s not the case in Atlanta largely because there’s been a big population inflow alongside the economic development that’s come to the city. Instead, the median rent shot up 76% between 2010 and 2023.

To be clear, more housing supply will be a good thing for affordability nationwide. But there will be nuances in different places. Atlanta’s poorest families have not benefited en masse from new housing units. As Goldstone describes, their slice of the housing market is a cruel one. These families are often dishing out what little money they have to extractive rooming houses and extended stay hotels, the only places they can afford. What’s more, Georgia is one of just three states that do not legally require landlords to keep units “habitable,” meaning that the units that low-income folks find themselves can be intolerable, lacking the basics that make a home healthy and safe. Tenants, though, have little recourse given their lack of legal protections, the lack of options in the housing market, and even the lack of available shelter beds.

Again, this won’t look the same in everywhere. Minneapolis liberalized its zoning policy a few years ago by eliminating single-family zoning and took on other pro-supply reforms, like reducing parking requirements for new multifamily buildings. Consequently, the city has been a leader in new housing development. As

Leah Rothstein

writes:

From 2017 to 2022, the city increased housing stock by 12% while rents increased by just 1%. In comparison, the rest of Minnesota added 4% to its housing while rents went up 14%....The Minneapolis area’s homeless population decreas[ed] by 12% between 2017 and 2022 while the rest of the state experienced a 14% increase.

More housing led to more affordability in Minneapolis. It’s a great example of abundance lifting all boats. But we can’t assume that every place will be the same and, regardless, we have to ensure that housing is available for every family, not just the majority of them.

Abundance AND

So where does this actually leave us on housing policy beyond trying to build, baby, build?

First, we must recognize the tensions that come with policy prioritization. That means for many places, strict Inclusionary Zoning requirements would hinder us from reaching adequate supply and the federal government probably shouldn’t push that down cities throats. But, if we push to build with little regard to which kinds of units are built—luxury or affordable—we need to keep the Atlanta situation in mind and have complementary solutions for families like those in Atlanta who would get displaced.

That takes us to the second point. We can do a lot more to help vulnerable families in America without dampening housing supply growth. Here’s a handful of ways how:

1. Vouchers: The Housing Choice Voucher program is broken. As previously mentioned, it only covers a fraction of financially eligible families. And, families who get a voucher still have trouble finding a unit. We can make the voucher program into an entitlement and enforce anti-discrimination laws against landlords who reject all voucher holders. We can fund “navigators” to help families find a unit once they receive a voucher. And we can re-examine if any conditions attached to vouchers are unduly burdensome for tenants or landlords. Of course, a large increase in government subsidies could push up rents going against broader affordability—a central policy goal. That’s why it’s crucial that more vouchers be coupled with all of the abundance supply-side reforms.

2. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC): LIHTC is a federal program that subsidizes the development of affordable rental housing. Since its inception, it’s helped bring over 3.5 million units online. What’s clear from the Atlanta example is that we need affordable housing development, not just luxury units. LIHTC helps fill that gap without disincentivizing supply like Inclusionary Zoning does. We can expand LIHTC to boost affordable housing. The program itself could also be reformed to ensure longer-term affordability. For example, LIHTC projects lose their affordability requirements generally after 30 years (that’s a big reason why Atlanta’s affordable housing stock is shrinking). There are also ways in which that timeline can be even shorter (Goldstone unpacks one loophole in his book). If we pour more money into the tax credit for developers, we can also require them to keep buildings affordable for longer.

3. Social housing: A way to boost supply beyond deregulation and increasing tax credits is for the federal government to get back in the business of building. Goldstone and others define social housing as a “public option” for housing. Where it differs from traditional public housing is that it’s not just meant for poorest families, but also working class and middle class families. I wrote about it more in WGP’s first post. We can certainly create better conditions for the private sector to build housing while also building out social housing; we need all hands on deck.

4. Increase shelter capacity: The number of permanent shelter beds has grown by 251% since 2007. Unfortunately, it’s still not enough. The number of people who were homeless and unsheltered grew 48% from 2015 to 2023. While there’s still a need, we should continue building out shelter capacity. It’s a stain on our country that people cannot get a roof over their heads.

5. Better measure the problem: Goldstone concludes, “homelessness is an exponentially bigger and more pervasive phenomenon than we have been led to believe.” That’s because the government’s “Point-In-Time” count—our best measure of homelessness—is woefully inadequate in capturing people’s lived experiences. For example, it doesn’t count when a family of five has to crash in their sibling’s living room because they were recently evicted. It doesn’t capture when people are temporarily at an extended stay hotel, trying to find a new home while their savings dwindle. There’s been an impulse for decades to minimize the problem so that we don’t have to look it in the eyes. A senior Reagan HUD official went so far as to say, “No one is living on the streets”—as if he could speak it into existence. We won’t be able to solve the problem if we hide from it.

One Shot

I’m not naive to the fact that taking an “Abundance and…” approach to housing will be challenging (and expensive). That’s the case because we’ve let this housing crisis fester for so long that it’s reached this scale. There’s no excuse to not fix it at scale now. Again, Goldstone says it better than I can:

“It doesn’t have to be this way…Ours doesn’t have to be a society where people clocking sixty hours a week aren’t paid enough to meet their basic needs; or where parents have to sell their plasma or food stamps or go without electricity in order to keep their children housed; or where your ability to afford an apartment is contingent on winning a voucher “lottery” and spending years on a waitlist, only to then lose the voucher when no landlord will accept it…Mass homelessness arose recently, within our lifetimes. It’s worth reminding ourselves of this fact, because if it hasn’t always been like this, then a different kind of future is possible.

So as Democrats try to put abundance into action, they shouldn’t stop there. It’s a false choice to pick between fostering more supply, promoting affordability, and ensuring stability. We can build more housing while providing more vouchers. We can liberalize zoning and increase tenant protections. We can build social housing alongside private development. If we only have one chance to fix the housing crisis, we should actually go for it.

1. Most of the rent-stabilized units are not reserved for low-income households.