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The housing theory of everything (2021)

Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.

This is true across the developed world: Dublin, Singapore, Auckland, Paris, Vancouver, Rome, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Moscow, Cape Town, Zurich and many other cities have wildly expensive housing compared to the cost of building more of it. Economists Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga judge that if New York allowed more of the sorts of densities that were more common historically, rents and house prices would fall towards construction costs, and the city would at least double in population, to over 40 million people. Elections in the English-speaking world are increasingly becoming divided between relatively prosperous and well-educated citizens of cities and their suburbs on one side and people in the rest of the country – rural areas and economically depressed towns – who resent the perception that the system is rigged in favour of the already well-off.

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