America doesn’t have a single-family housing problem. It has a housing supply problem.
I recently watched a video about America’s housing crisis that is worth the time, even if I don’t agree with every conclusion it reaches.
The visuals are an important part of the argument, so I encourage you to watch it rather than relying solely on my description of it.
The video begins with a striking comparison. Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai and other major cities changed dramatically as their populations and economies grew. Skylines rose. Density increased. New housing followed people, jobs and economic activity. It then contrasts that development with places such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, arguing that many American cities essentially became “frozen in place.”
That’s somewhat overstated, but the underlying question is legitimate: What happens when demand for a place keeps increasing but our willingness to build housing there does not?
We already know the answer.
Prices rise.
Housing really isn’t exempt from the laws of supply and demand. If 100 families are competing for 80 homes, somebody gets priced out. Give those families subsidies, tax credits or down-payment assistance and you may change which families can bid more, but you still have 100 families competing for 80 homes. Eventually somebody has to build homes 81 through 100.
That is where I think the video gets the most important part of the argument right.
Freddie Mac estimates America remains short roughly 3.7 million housing units, concluding that inadequate supply has contributed directly to higher rents and home prices. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies paints an equally difficult picture. In 2024, 22.7 million renter households were spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, while 12.1 million were spending more than half.
This is not an abstract urban-planning debate anymore. Housing is consuming family budgets, delaying homeownership, making it harder for young people to start families and forcing workers to live farther away from the communities where they work.
But this is where I begin to part company with the video’s narrative.
The single-family home isn’t the villain
At one point the argument evolves from “we need more housing” into something closer to “America’s cultural preference for detached single-family homes is part of the problem.”
That leap deserves considerably more skepticism.
One survey cited in the video actually demonstrates why. When Americans under 55 were asked to picture their ideal home, 79 percent selected a detached single-family house, despite only 59 percent actually living in one. Only 8 percent said an apartment was their ideal. Even 61 percent of current apartment residents said their ideal was a detached home.
We can debate where that preference originated for the next hundred years. The video traces it through British landholding, Thomas Jefferson and postwar suburbia. But at some point we should consider the most obvious explanation: a lot of people simply like having a house.
They like a backyard. They like bedrooms for their children. They like a garage, a garden, a dog, some privacy and enough room that they don’t know when the neighbor upstairs drops a bowling ball at midnight.
That isn’t propaganda. It’s a housing preference.
And housing policy should not make the opposite mistake of replacing laws that mandate single-family neighborhoods with a philosophy that treats single-family housing as something society ought to discourage.
The objective should be choice and supply.
A twenty-story apartment building can be exactly the right housing product near a major employment center or transit corridor. A six-story mixed-use building can make enormous sense downtown. Duplexes, fourplexes, townhomes, accessory dwelling units and cottage clusters can provide important steps between an apartment and a detached house.
And yes, subdivisions of detached houses also belong in that equation.
So do manufactured homes and factory-built housing, which are too often ignored entirely in housing discussions despite their ability to deliver homeownership at substantially different price points.
There isn’t one housing crisis requiring one housing type. There is a housing shortage requiring more doors at more price points.
Austin may actually prove both sides of the argument
One of the most interesting examples is Austin, Texas.
Austin dramatically increased housing production and subsequently saw rents decline. From 2015 through 2024, the city added about 120,000 homes, increasing its housing stock roughly 30 percent. By January 2026, median rent had fallen to $1,296 from $1,546 in December 2021, even as the city’s population continued to grow.
That’s powerful evidence that supply matters.
But look closer at what Austin actually built.
It wasn’t an ideological experiment in eliminating houses. Almost half of the new units were in large apartment buildings, while roughly one-third were single-family homes or townhomes. Another 2,850 accessory dwelling units were added. Meanwhile, Austin’s suburbs added 214,000 housing units, and 77 percent of those were single-family homes or townhomes.
That’s much closer to what I believe a functioning housing market should look like.
Apartments where apartments make sense. Density where land values justify density. Townhomes and smaller houses where people want them. Single-family neighborhoods where families want space. ADUs tucked onto properties that can accommodate another household.
Not one answer. Lots of answers.
And when enough of them get built, something remarkable happens: consumers regain bargaining power.
Even “luxury” housing matters
The video also makes another counterintuitive argument that I think is largely correct.
People understandably ask why building an expensive new apartment helps somebody who could never afford to live there.
Because housing markets are connected.
Research by economist Evan Mast followed residents moving into new market-rate multifamily buildings and then followed the households moving into the homes they vacated, repeating the chain several times. By the sixth round, nearly 40 percent of those moves had reached below-median-income neighborhoods.
Another study of large new apartment buildings found rents in nearby units fell roughly 6 percent relative to comparable properties farther away, in part because the new buildings absorbed higher-income households who otherwise would have competed for existing housing.
Think of housing as a ladder.
If somebody moves from an older apartment into a new apartment, they leave something behind. Somebody else moves into that unit and leaves another one behind. Housing works its way through the market.
But that ladder breaks when we stop adding rungs.
It also explains why simply calling every new apartment “luxury housing” doesn’t tell us much. Today’s new building is tomorrow’s twenty-year-old building. Virtually all housing was new housing once.
That doesn’t mean market construction solves everything. Harvard’s latest research makes an important distinction: extremely low-income renters face a shortage so severe that ordinary private development cannot produce enough housing at rents they can afford. Those households will still require targeted assistance and subsidized housing.
Supply is necessary. It isn’t magic.
Regulation has a cost
This is also where the video asks some uncomfortable but necessary questions about zoning, permitting, historic preservation and public review.
Some regulation is obviously necessary. Nobody seriously proposes allowing a chemical plant beside an elementary school or constructing a twenty-story building without fire codes, structural standards or adequate infrastructure.
But regulation isn’t free.
Every additional year waiting for approval costs money. Every consultant, attorney, engineering study, appeal, design requirement, parking mandate and discretionary hearing eventually becomes part of the price of the finished home—or causes the project never to be built at all.
And sometimes legitimate neighborhood concerns become little more than a polite way of saying, “I already live here, and I don’t want anybody else to.”
That isn’t a conservative property-rights principle that I find particularly convincing.
Property rights cannot mean I have broad authority over my land while simultaneously claiming a veto over what everyone else builds on theirs.
There is also an uncomfortable historical record behind some exclusionary zoning. Berkeley itself acknowledged in a 2021 resolution both its early adoption of single-family zoning and the racial and economic exclusion associated with those policies.
Recognizing that history, however, doesn’t require concluding that the detached house itself is somehow morally suspect.
The problem wasn’t the house.
The problem was using government to prohibit alternatives.
That’s an important distinction.
Build the whole ladder
The housing debate too often becomes another American argument in which we’re handed two choices that don’t actually need to be mutually exclusive.
Either preserve every neighborhood exactly as it existed in 1965 or cover America in apartment towers. Protect homeowners or help renters, build suburbs or build cities. Density or sprawl.
I reject the premise.
A healthy housing market should allow a 25-year-old to rent a studio near work. A young couple should be able to move into a townhouse. A growing family should have an attainable path to a three-bedroom home with a yard. An older homeowner should be able to downsize into a condo without leaving the community. Someone caring for an aging parent should be able to add an ADU. And people who want to live downtown in a twenty-story building should have that choice too.
That’s a housing ladder.
For decades we have removed rungs from it while simultaneously pumping more money into the people trying to climb it. Then we’ve acted surprised when the price of the remaining rungs skyrocketed.
The solution isn’t to declare war on the American single-family home.
It is to stop declaring war on everything else.
Build apartments. Build condominiums. Build townhouses. Build duplexes and fourplexes. Build manufactured homes. Build smaller houses. Build larger houses where the market supports them. Allow cities to grow upward where density makes sense and outward where infrastructure and land make that practical.
Then let Americans decide where they actually want to live.
The housing crisis isn’t really a battle between density and suburbia.
It’s a battle between scarcity and abundance.
On that point, the video gets something very important right: when millions of Americans need housing, eventually we have to stop trying to manipulate who gets access to the existing supply and start doing the painfully obvious thing.
Build more of it.
That’s my viewpoint.
Sources & Further Reading
1. Max Fisher — Video: America’s Housing Crisis and the Cities We Stopped Building – Video Link
2. Freddie Mac — “Housing Supply: Still Undersupplied by Millions of Units”
November 26, 2024. Estimates the United States housing shortage at approximately 3.7 million units and discusses the relationship between inadequate supply and housing affordability.
https://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/housing-supply-still-undersupplied
3. Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies — “High Costs and Slumping Demand Squeeze Housing as Affordable Units Remain in Short Supply”
2026. Reports that 22.7 million renter households were cost-burdened in 2024, including 12.1 million spending more than half their income on housing.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/press-releases/high-costs-and-slumping-demand-squeeze-housing-affordable-units-remain-short-supply
4. Institute for Family Studies — “Homes for Young Families: A Pro-Family Housing Agenda”
Survey research finding that 79% of respondents identified a detached single-family home as their ideal housing type, compared with 8% choosing apartments or condominiums.
https://ifstudies.org/r
5. The Pew Charitable Trusts — “Austin’s Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents”
March 18, 2026. Examines Austin’s addition of roughly 120,000 homes from 2015 through 2024 and the subsequent decline in rents. Importantly, the new supply included apartments, single-family homes, townhomes and accessory dwelling units.
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2026/03/18/austins-surge-of-new-housing-construction-drove-down-rents
6. Evan Mast, W.E. Upjohn Institute — “The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market”
Research tracing the chain of moves created by new market-rate housing. The study finds that new construction can loosen housing markets farther down the income spectrum as households move between units.
https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/307/
7. Evan Mast — Journal of Urban Economics: “The Effect of New Market-Rate Housing Construction on the Low-Income Housing Market”
Peer-reviewed published version of Mast’s housing-migration research.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119021000656
8. Brian Asquith, Evan Mast and Davin Reed — “Local Effects of Large New Apartment Buildings in Low-Income Areas”
The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, 2023. The study found that new market-rate apartment buildings reduced rents in nearby units by approximately 6% relative to comparison properties and absorbed substantial numbers of higher-income households.
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article/105/2/359/100977/Local-Effects-of-Large-New-Apartment-Buildings-in
9. City of Berkeley — “Resolution to End Exclusionary Zoning in Berkeley”
2021. City documents discussing Berkeley’s history of single-family zoning, exclusionary land-use policies, racial and economic segregation, affordability and displacement concerns.
https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-council/city-council-agendas/city-council-special-meeting-eagenda-february-23-2021-0
10. New York City Department of City Planning — New York City Zoning Handbook
Official history and explanation of New York City zoning, including the development of the 1916 Zoning Resolution and concerns over building height, shadows, light, air and incompatible land uses.
https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/downloads/pdf/about-us/publications/nyc-zoning-handbook-2025.pdf
11. U.S. Census Bureau — New York City Population Data
Official Census data for New York City, useful for comparing historical claims about city population growth with the 2020 Census population of 8,804,190.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork/POP645221
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