As a reminder, the first official event for my Build or Die book tour is scheduled for December 9, 7 p.m., at Clio’s Books in Oakland, California. I’ll be discussing the book with Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project and author of The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy. We’ll also be joined by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, one of California’s foremost housing champions.

If you’re based in the Bay Area, come by! Tickets are $10, but for $33.80 you get both a ticket and a copy of Build or Die. Book your seat here. And if you can’t make it, remember that the book is now available for preorder from Bookshop.org.

And now on to today’s subject.

In Part 1, I covered this year’s races for statewide office, all of which are fairly straightforward and offer a clear contrast between their respective candidates. Now, things are going to get more complicated; it’s time for us to wade through the thicket of propositions whose fates the voters are being asked to decide.

There are 14 measures to get through, covering everything from fixed-rate mortgages to immunotherapy research to voter ID. But there are a couple of themes here worth calling out. First, three of the ballot measures are what I call “neo-Jarvisian,” in reference to Howard Jarvis, the avatar of California’s late 1970s tax revolt. Propositions 41, 42, and 43 all seek to limit the government’s revenue-raising ability in one way or another.

Second, with one exception—Prop 43—I’m voting “yes” on all the measures that originated with the legislature. And with one other exception—Prop 3—I’m going to be voting against all of the ones that made it onto the ballot due to a signature-collection campaign. I didn’t plan it that way, but it makes a certain degree of sense; California’s state legislators, for all of their manifold flaws, are generally trying to make policy on behalf of their constituents. The ballot measures that bypass the legislative process, on the other hand, are more likely to be the product of well-funded campaigns by powerful interests who are trying to line their own pockets.

Proposition 1 — Affordable Housing

We start with a relatively easy one. Proposition 1 would authorize the state to issue a little over $11 billion in bonds for various housing-related activities, mainly the development, acquisition, and preservation of affordable housing. The analysis from the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO)—where I worked for about two years following grad school—finds that these bonds would subsidize up to 43,700 homes (and provide homebuying assistance to another 40,000 households). Not enough to dig the state out of its housing deficit by any means, but nonetheless a move in the right direction.

Mandatory disclosure: one of the legislative champions for this bond is Asm. Buffy Wicks, who, as I mentioned above, will be a guest at my book launch event.

How I’m voting: Yes

Proposition 2 — Rainy Day Fund

One of the things I learned while working at LAO is that budgeting for the state of California is an absolute mess. And one of the key reasons why it’s a mess has to do with revenue volatility: the state’s general fund is heavily reliant on progressive income taxes, which means that its fiscal health is, to a remarkable extent, downstream from the yearly earnings of its wealthiest residents. In a year when a few large tech companies IPO, the state gets a tax windfall; on the other hand, this system turns a bad or even middling year for Silicon Valley and Hollywood into everyone’s problem.

Under Gov. Jerry Brown, the state strengthened its rainy day fund to help smooth out some of the jaggedness and unpredictability that its tax regime introduces into the annual budget cycle. Proposition 2 would allocate more cash to the rainy day fund until it reaches 20 percent of total general fund taxes. (It would also tweak how the rainy day fund interacts with the state appropriations limit, but that’s probably too technical for this post.)

Ultimately, California needs to do a comprehensive overhaul of how it does budgeting, involving a series of amendments to the state constitution (including, ideally, scrapping the aforementioned state appropriations limit entirely). But until then, putting some more money aside for the lean years is a sensible idea.

How I’m voting: Yes

Proposition 3 — Income Tax

As much as I complain about California’s overreliance on progressive income taxes, I do think progressive income taxes are a good idea. The current tax rates for affluent Californians (for example, single filers making upwards of $371,000 per year) are set to expire in 2031; this proposition would make them permanent. LAO estimates that this would mean somewhere between $5 billion and $15 billion in annual tax revenue.

How I’m voting: Yes

Proposition 4 — Campaign Finance

Under current law, the state, counties and most cities (with the exception of those with a city charter) are barred from allocating public funds to political campaigns. Prop 4 would lift that prohibition, allowing the state, all counties, and the 74 percent of cities that don’t have a city charter to institute public campaign finance programs if they so choose.

As you might expect, I’m generally supportive of public financing for political campaigns as a way to mitigate the excessive influence that big money holds over our democratic process.

How I’m voting: Yes

Proposition 5 — Recall Elections

California law makes it exceptionally easy—some might say far too easy—to force costly and time-consuming off-cycle recall elections. See for example the bizarre and pointless 2021 matchup between Gavin Newsom and right-wing talk radio personality Larry Elder, or the 2003 recall of Gray Davis that gave us The Governator. This ballot measure wouldn’t raise the bar for triggering a recall race, but it would fix another big problem with the current system: the two-question recall ballot.

Historically, recall elections have been meant to settle two questions simultaneously: First, should the incumbent politician be removed from office? Second, assuming they are removed from office, who should replace them? In other words, voters are being asked whether to fire powerful state officials without any indication of who would then fill in. If I vote to recall Gray Davis, then maybe I’m voting for Schwarzenegger to take his place. But then again, maybe I would vote for Davis to hold onto his seat if I knew Schwarzenegger was definitely the alternative. Either way, a “yes” vote on the first question always ends up being a dice roll.

Prop 5 would clean up some of the messiness inherent to recalls by separating the first and second questions. If the governor gets recalled, then the lieutenant governor takes over until the next statewide election. If any other official gets recalled, their seat remains vacant pending a special election or gubernatorial appointment. It may not be a perfect solution, but it at least makes it a little clearer what you’re voting for at each step in the process.

How I’m voting: Yes

Proposition 37 — Fixed-Rate Mortgages

This one would create a $25 billion bond issuance to fund supplemental fixed-rate mortgages for middle-class California homebuyers. A nice idea in theory, but I tend to be skeptical of homebuyer assistance programs; speaking as a member of a potentially qualifying household, I don’t think we’re the ones who really need subsidies. I’d rather the state focus on expanding the supply of for-sale housing (say, by making it easier to build condos), which will drive down the cost for households like mine without the need for a demand-side subsidy. Then the state can allocate its finite revenue from taxes and bond sales to the households that really need help—not those who would like to own their homes one day, but those who are struggling to find a safe and sustainable housing situation of any sort.

It’s unclear if Prop 37 would even help the households it targets. If the state continues to subsidize demand without spurring a commensurate growth in housing supply, then virtually all the benefit from Prop 37-style subsidies will be captured by sellers; because they’re selling a scarce good, they can name their own price, and they would probably respond to the passage of Prop 37 by naming a price that accounts for the fact that middle-class homebuyers can now afford to pay more.

This argument is probably familiar to readers who are embedded in housing policy debates. But in the interest of fairness, I should note a couple of features of Prop 37 that make it superior to the usual middle-class demand subsidy. The first is that Prop 37 may turn out to be revenue neutral; repayment on the bonds will come from beneficiaries’ mortgage payments, not state coffers. The second is that qualifying homebuyers can only use the Prop 37 mortgage on newly constructed homes. In theory, then, this is both a demand-side subsidy and a supply-side subsidy, because it will provide some guarantee of demand to developers who build new for-sale starter homes.

In theory. I’m skeptical Prop 37 would have an effect on supply because developers already benefit from the near certainty that any new for-sale housing they build will be greeted by a horde of interested purchasers. That’s why they’re able to set prices at such a high level. Lack of steady demand is not the binding constraint on housing production in California, not by a long shot.

To the extent that Prop 37 does create any incentive to build, though, I fear it will be creating an incentive to build more suburban sprawl. That’s where the regulatory conditions for new for-sale home construction are most favorable under California’s current land use system, and Prop 37 would do nothing to change that.

How I’m voting: No

Proposition 38 — Immunology and Immunotherapy Research

This is another one that looks good at first glance and then a whole lot worse once you examine the details. The topline is that this would create an $8.4 billion bond issuance to support immunology and immunotherapy research. Sounds reasonable, especially given that the Trump administration has eliminated so much of the federal funding for medical research and development.

But why immunology and immunotherapy, specifically? What makes this area of medical research worthy of special consideration? Well, it turns out that the whole proposition is carefully worded to ensure that half of the $8.4 billion raised goes to a single, specific nonprofit called the California Institute for Immunology & Immunotherapy (CIII). Quite the coup for a research institute that doesn’t even have its research campus yet.

So why this nonprofit? Because Prop 38 is backed by the same people who are establishing the institute in the first place. For example, one of the institutional backers for Prop 38 is the Milken Institute, established by CIII co-founder Michael Milken, a former Wall Street financier who served time in the early 1990s for securities fraud and various related infractions. Trump pardoned him in 2020.

In other words, this whole thing smells like a racket—an attempt to pocket more than $4 billion in taxpayer money under false pretenses. A lot of rackets make it onto California’s ballot, but this has to be one of the most obscenely blatant examples I’ve ever seen.

How I’m voting: No

Proposition 39 — Voter ID

Voter ID laws are a form of voter suppression, ostensibly meant to solve the virtually nonexistent problem of non-citizen voter fraud. This is an easy one.

How I’m voting: No

Proposition 40 — Wealth Tax

This one is a little more challenging. In principle, I support confiscatory taxes on the uber-rich; if I could wave a magic wand, one of the first things I would use it for is taxing every billionaire into a humble centimillionaire. But I have misgivings about the design of this proposition, which I covered in the below post.

What is Missing From the Billionaire Tax Debate

Or: Why I'm queasy about Prop 40

Public Comment • Ned Resnikoff

The tl;dr is that I have serious qualms about one-off tax levies, and the measure is designed in such a way that it may discourage investment in housing production. Further, I have my doubts about the state’s capacity to implement Prop 40 as written, and I think supporters are a little too quick to dismiss capital flight concerns. So I will reluctantly be voting no.

How I’m voting: No

Proposition 41 — Taxes and the State Appropriation Limit

Ugh, FINE. I guess we need to talk about the State Appropriation Limit again.

In 1979, the year after California passed the disastrous Prop 13, Paul Gann—Howard Jarvis’s partner in crime—spearheaded a successful effort to write what is alternately called the Gann Limit and the State Appropriation Limit. Henceforth, public spending would be capped at fiscal year 1978-79 levels, adjusted for inflation and population. There are some exceptions that allow the state to collect certain types of revenue and make certain types of expenditures that are not subject to the limit, but overall it acts as a pretty hard constraint on efforts to expand the size of the state government—for example, through new wealth taxes.

Prop 41 would make it illegal to exclude any new special taxes from the SAL calculations. It would also require regular audits for state programs that are funded with special taxes. Given that the SAL should not exist in the first place, I don’t think we should be trying to make it more binding than it already is.

How I’m voting: No

Proposition 42 — Prohibits New Personal Property Taxes

This is a straightforward attempt to nullify Prop 40. And while I’m no fan of Prop 40, I’m even less of a fan of efforts to impose a constitutional ban on any new wealth taxes at all.

How I’m voting: No

Proposition 43 — Special Taxes

While this proposition was added to the ballot by the legislature, there’s an asterisk: the legislature only forwarded Prop 43 to the voters as part of a deal with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association under which the association would pull an even more extreme measure. As such, this is another attempt to hamstring public revenue-raising efforts, this time by raising the threshold needed to pass local, citizen-initiated special tax measures from a majority of the voters to a supermajority.

How I’m voting: No

Proposition 44 — Community Health Clinics

Two ballot measures left to go, and we are finally done with the neo-Jarvisian propositions. Now we’re on what I think of as this year’s dialysis measure.

Those of you who have voted in more than a couple of California’s statewide elections probably remember that ballot measures regarding dialysis clinic regulation tend to pop up with bizarre frequency. The real-world impact of these proposed regulations tends to be both inscrutable and beside the point. The real point is that their sponsor, SEIU-UHW (United Healthcare Workers West, also the main backer of this year’s Prop 40), wants to unionize the dialysis clinic industry and tries to use the threat of these ballot measures as leverage to extract voluntary recognition agreements from the state’s big dialysis providers.

The same thing appears to be happening this year with community health clinics. Prop 44, which is also backed by SEIU-UHW, would require that community health clinics spend no less than 90 percent of their annual revenue on “program services” aligned with their mission. What expenses fall under that umbrella would largely be left up to the discretion of the attorney general.

Whether this solves a real and serious problem is unclear, at least to me. The Yes on 44 website lists a few examples of what it classifies as egregious misspending by community health clinics; for example, one failed to break even on its big annual gala, and another suffered a data breach after spending $0 on IT services. If these are among the most damning cases that Yes on 44 can muster, it’s pretty thin gruel.

The real tell, though, is that Yes on 44 notes that “multiple community clinics have had to pay out millions of dollars to resolve allegations of violations of California labor law.” If Prop 44 caps the amount these clinics can spend on legal defense, then that gives a large amount of leverage to SEIU-UHW, which can bury clinics in lawsuits if they don’t voluntarily recognize the union as their workers’ sole bargaining agent.

For the record, I think it’s imperative that the United States work toward rebuilding the sort of private-sector union density that it enjoyed in the immediate postwar era. But I don’t care for these kinds of tactics, which would allow SEIU to “organize” clinics while making a minimal investment in actually organizing the people who work there. Prop 44 is also a great example of why California’s ballot measure system is so broken: rather than empowering ordinary citizens of the state, it has mostly turned into a battleground between various well-funded interests chasing their own parochial objectives.

How I’m voting: No

Proposition 45 — CEQA

Speaking of which. On its face, Proposition 45 sounds like exactly the kind of thing I should be in favor of: it streamlines environmental review for various “essential” projects, most notably housing. Sounds great, right? As I briefly mentioned in Part 1, and discuss at further length in my forthcoming book, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has long been a significant obstacle to housing construction. Ironically, given its ostensible purpose, CEQA enforcement tends to most severely penalize attempts to build dense infill housing—exactly the type of housing that we most need to build if we are going to preserve undeveloped natural habitats and cut the state’s transportation pollution to zero.

Over the past couple of years, as CEQA’s real costs to environmental quality have become more obvious, the dam has finally broken on CEQA reform. In 2025, Newsom signed legislation that streamlines review for projects that will help the state meet its environmental goals and turns the state’s long-dormant CEQA exemption for infill housing into something of real significance.

Which brings us to Prop 45. The strength of the 2025 reforms is that they better align CEQA with its ostensible goal of environmental protection. There’s still more work to be done, but I think future reform efforts should be carried out with that same goal in mind: turning CEQA into a real environmental planning tool instead of a cudgel that NIMBYs can wield against climate-friendly projects. But that’s not what Prop 45 does.

Instead, Prop 45 applies its streamlining rules to all types of housing, including the environmentally ruinous suburban sprawl. Similarly, it applies to all types of transportation infrastructure (with the exception of high-speed rail): not just transit and active transportation projects, but also car infrastructure like highway expansions. Which makes sense once you learn that one of the proposition’s main backers is the California Building Industry Association, which mainly represents single-family sprawl developers. CEQA needs additional reforms, but Prop 45 would take those reforms in precisely the wrong direction.

How I’m voting: No

Before we get to the main thrust of this week’s post, an announcement: the first official event for my Build or Die book tour is scheduled for December 9, 7 p.m., at Clio’s Books in Oakland, California. I’ll be discussing the book with Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project and author of The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy. We’ll also be joined by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, one of California’s foremost housing champions.

If you’re based in the Bay Area, come by! Tickets are $10, but for $33.80 you get both a ticket and a copy of Build or Die. Book your seat here. And if you can’t make it, remember that the book is now available for preorder from Bookshop.org.

Also, if you’re in the Santa Fe area, I will be giving a talk as part of the Livability Speaker Series on October 8! Tickets to this one are free, and you can reserve your spot here.

And now on to today’s subject.

California makes it simultaneously very easy and very difficult to vote. It’s easy to vote in California because the state makes it exceptionally easy to register and has universal vote by mail. But it’s difficult to vote in California because there are so many damn things to vote for.

It’s not so unusual for a state to have the candidates for governor and lieutenant governor on separate ballot lines. Nor is it uncommon for states to separately elect the state attorney general and secretary of state, even though the equivalent federal offices are part of the president’s Cabinet. Where things get weird in California is the sheer number of other statewide elected offices: state superintendent (the head of the state Department of Education until 2027, when the department will finally move under the governor), state treasurer, state controller, and insurance commissioner. And that’s before we get to some of the local offices that people need to vote for, such as seats on the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board.

Then there are the statewide ballot measures. This year, the voters are being asked to weigh in on 14 propositions, eight of which would amend the state constitution. These cover such abstruse topics as deposits into the state’s rainy day fund and changes to the California Environmental Quality Act. You know, the types of questions that we ostensibly have a state legislature for.

In the interest of making things a little less confusing for people, I thought I would provide some brief thoughts on all the statewide races and propositions, including how I plan to cast my vote in each case. Think of these less as formal endorsements and more as one man’s opinion. I’m not telling you how to vote; my hope is that by reconstructing my own thought process, I can at least make it slightly easier for other voters to decide for themselves.

This post is Part 1 of the voter guide, where I focus on races for statewide office. In Part 2, I’ll cover the ballot measures.

Governor

This is a rather depressing, uninspiring race. I wasn’t particularly impressed with any of the primary candidates, and I remain unimpressed with the somnolent and largely invisible campaign of former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. Yes, his campaign’s housing platform is pretty good, but I still haven’t seen any evidence that the candidate has actually read it. Once in office, would he spend the political capital necessary to put a dent in California’s housing crisis? Would he spend the political capital necessary to do anything? Because he seems fairly content to let the state run in self-driving mode, even if that means hurtling off a cliff.

That said, I’m a “vote blue no matter who” guy, and Trump-endorsed candidate Steve Hilton would be a disaster for the state. His platform—which includes plans for building more suburban sprawl, rolling back green energy rules, cutting the gas tax, boosting oil drilling, and turning California into “the crypto capital of the world”—is that of a climate arsonist. So Becerra it is.

How I’m voting: Xavier Becerra

Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Controller, Treasurer, Attorney General, State Superintendent

As I said, vote blue no matter who. However much individual Republican candidates may attempt to distance themselves from Trump, they’re still members of the party that Trump and his coterie have turned into a vehicle for their authoritarian, nakedly fascist ambitions. As such, there’s not really much to think through for any of these races. (The state superintendent race is officially nonpartisan, but Richard Barrera has the endorsement of the California Democratic Party and Sonja Shaw is affiliated with the “parents’ rights” movement. Accordingly, she opposes vaccine mandates and is leaning hard into transphobia.)

How I’m voting: Fiona Ma, Shirley Weber, Malia Cohen, Eleni Kounalakis, Rob Bonta, Richard Barrera

Insurance Commissioner

Okay, so here’s a genuinely interesting one. Thanks to California’s jungle primary system, the two candidates who made it to the general election are both Democrats, so “vote blue no matter who” doesn’t apply. And it’s a high-stakes race, because the winner will be charged with regulating home insurance markets at a time when they are very much in crisis.

I sometimes like to say that “home insurance crisis” is a bit of a misnomer: it’s really just the climate crisis but refracted through the home insurance industry and various aspects of state law. The real problem is that California environmental regulations and land use rules have, for decades, penalized attempts to build multifamily housing in already urbanized areas; this helped to shift the locus of development toward greenfield areas in what is now called the wildland-urban interface. As climate change has made wildfires both more frequent and much more destructive—particularly in the WUI—this has made insuring California homeowners into an increasingly risky proposition. And it has been made riskier by the fact that state law constrains the ability of insurers to accurately price the sudden increase in risk; as a result, some of them have simply decided to stop writing new policies.

To the extent there’s any sort of solution to this, it involves building more multifamily housing in areas removed from the WUI, curbing suburban sprawl, letting insurers incorporate climate modeling into their rate-setting processes, and doing what can realistically be done to fire-proof existing WUI-based communities. Anything else is magical thinking.

One of the candidates for insurance commissioner is State Senator Ben Allen, who has long been focused on disaster insurance, environmental resilience, and related issues. He hasn’t been great on housing issues in the past, which makes sense given that his district covers Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice, and other affluent, NIMBY-heavy environs. He did, to his credit, abstain from the vote on SB 79 instead of actively voting against it. His campaign platform includes a fairly sensible mix of ideas: incorporating climate modeling into rate-setting, incentivizing resilience infrastructure development in frontline jurisdictions, and so on.

Allen’s opponent is former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who proudly touts the endorsement of Bernie Sanders on her campaign website. She goes big on the magical thinking: her marquee proposal is for single-payer public disaster insurance. Such a proposal makes sense if you think the main cause of the insurance crisis is that greedy insurers are trying to bleed California homeowners dry. But if you think the real problem is climate risk, then I’m not sure what’s gained by socializing that risk and potentially making the state liable for claims from, say, wealthy Malibu homeowners.

Kim says “a public system would address climate disaster instead of avoiding it.” But ask yourself this: are you confident that a public agency would set premiums that accurately reflect the dangers of new construction in the WUI? Or would it succumb to political pressure and hold rates down, effectively forcing taxpayers to further subsidize suburban development in high-risk areas?

Granted, Kim can’t impose single-payer home insurance all by herself; she would need the legislature to go along, and it probably wouldn’t. But as a signal of her likely priorities in office, the proposal suggests that Kim would be a reckless presence in a very delicate role.

How I’m voting: Ben Allen

Stay tuned next week for Part 2: Ballot measures

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

“Ned Resnikoff has written the authoritative guide to the big decisions that have shaped the American city in the twenty-first century, from housing to transportation to public safety. This is essential reading for those who wish to make the city all it can be.”—Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center

Preorder Build or Die now from Bookshop.org.

Trying to change housing law can be difficult, frustrating work. The legislative process moves slowly, and so does the regulatory process, but neither really pauses at the end of regular business hours. Meanwhile, all kinds of factions and narrow interests want to intervene and put their stamp on whatever it is you’re trying to do. Sometimes—in fact, quite frequently—you need to swallow bitter compromises if you want to get something done. And sometimes, even after you trade away most of your original bill, you still lose. Or, if you win, NIMBYs immediately figure out how to deploy legal challenges and clever workarounds to substantially undermine your victory.

There’s also the reality that pro-housing advocacy is inevitably going to make a lot of people hate you. And being hated feels shitty! Especially if the haters are your neighbors or people in your general social and professional environs!

If only there were some kind of shortcut that allowed you to skip past all the struggle, the late nights, the difficult choices, and the vituperation. If only we could solve the housing crisis through a process of peaceful consensus-building rather than through head-to-head political combat.

In a recent essay for Works in Progress, political scientists David Foster and Joseph Warren offer one potential shortcut: “grant a clear property right over development to local residents and minimize transaction costs within land use regulation.” They write:

It’s an appealing notion: with the right institutional design, maybe the local NIMBY coalition can be reduced to a tiny rump faction that YIMBYs can then safely ignore. But this argument relies on a handful of misunderstandings regarding the nature of NIMBYism in the American context. First, many local governments across the United States already have plenty of mechanisms that are ostensibly meant to “guarantee that developers provide benefits matching local preferences.” These include local inclusionary zoning ordinances, development impact fees, and discretionary permitting procedures that allow city councils and planning commissions to negotiate additional developer concessions as a condition of project approval. These mechanisms don’t seem to have diminished NIMBYism; instead, they can serve as a weapon in the hands of local NIMBYs who want to pile on enough community benefit requirements to make all development financially unworkable.

Second, Foster and Warren’s argument downplays the very real benefits that multi-family development provides to incumbent residents, even in the absence of any specific concessions from developers. A growing population means more tax revenue, an expanding local economy, and more demand that can stimulate the creation of new community amenities, like restaurants and coffee shops, that are open to everyone. Relatively low-cost new housing makes it possible for the children of longtime residents to establish their own families in town, instead of being forced to move elsewhere. And greater density is a precondition for establishing certain types of public services, in particular high-quality transit systems. Multi-family homebuilding is very often positive-sum, at least when viewed from one angle.

Which brings us to the third misunderstanding, having to do with the interests that motivate organized NIMBYism. Here is how Foster and Warren characterize the approach to housing advocacy taken by many YIMBY groups, including my former employer, California YIMBY:

That’s one way to characterize the argument behind state preemption of local land use, but it isn’t the only one. The theory of incentives Foster and Warren describe isn’t a necessary premise for the argument; you can be agnostic on why some cities fight new housing development while still accepting the conclusion that YIMBYs should respond to this opposition by pursuing state preemption.

In fact, Foster and Warren elide a couple of important observations in the document they point to as the source for their theory of incentives. That document, a 2018 letter to the California Senate’s then-Transportation and Housing Committee chair by a group of pro-preemption scholars, notes that existing local “constraints on new housing catered to the concerns of existing residents, who worried about traffic congestion, neighborhood aesthetics, the ease of parking on the street, and the nature or character of people [who] might live in multi-family housing.” Foster and Warren omit several of these concerns from their own gloss on the theory, most notably “neighborhood aesthetics” and “the nature or character of people [who] might live in multi-family housing.”

These are not incidental omissions. Objecting to “the nature or character of people [who] might live in multi-family housing” is usually classist at best and racist at worst, given that people who rent apartments in a given area tend to have lower incomes than their neighbors who own the single-family homes in which they reside. And this objection motivates a great deal of opposition to multi-family housing, particularly in what are sometimes referred to as “high-opportunity neighborhoods.” This is a feature of American NIMBYism going back to the origins of modern zoning law; as Yoni Appelbaum notes in his splendid book on the origins of the housing crisis, the first quasi-zoning rule in the United States was a blatantly segregationist ban on Chinese laundries across much of Modesto, California. Shortly before Berkeley implemented the first single-family-only zoning ordinance, one of its leading proponents explicitly noted in the local press that restrictive zoning would help preserve the Elmwood Park neighborhood as a “high class residence tract.” Thus the neighborhood would avoid the fate of the area surrounding Dwight Way Station, where the presence of a Chinese laundry "deteriorated the neighborhood until only negroes and Orientals would rent the nearby buildings."

Where NIMBYism is motivated by a desire to preserve the economic or racial homogeneity of a given area, two things follow. First, developer concessions are unlikely to erode this opposition, because the most vocal NIMBYs will object to multi-family construction of any kind, period. Second, even if trying to accommodate this attitude was not fruitless as a practical matter, we should, as a matter of political principle, refuse to make any concessions to segregationism.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all NIMBYs are personally racist, let alone that racism is the sole motivating force behind NIMBYism. What I am suggesting is that it’s impossible to understand the significant headwinds that multi-family development faces in the United States without taking race and class into account. Furthermore, wielding higher levels of government to preempt segregationism at the local level is pretty much the way successful desegregation efforts have always played out in this country.

So why not pursue the same strategy today? Well, according to the headline for Foster and Warren’s essay, “housing reforms keep failing.” That’s a very bold claim, but it seems to belong to the Works in Progress editors more than to Foster and Warren, who are more equivocal:

Far be it from me to deny that “challenges remain” even after the passage of major housing reforms. But I still think Foster and Warren are downplaying the importance of those reforms. Later on, they write: “In many cases, dramatic reforms have yet to show a positive effect on housing construction. This is plausibly because many have been, by political necessity, surgically targeted at specific areas like transit stops, while reforms with potentially wider impacts face backlash and retrenchment.”

A couple of problems here. First, the “surgically targeted” line appears to be a swipe at SB 79, which took effect only this year—far too early to evaluate its impact on housing production or affordability. Second, the “many cases” hedge obscures the many other cases in which major housing preemption efforts have had a marked effect on housing production. California’s aforementioned ADU reforms are just one example; see also the Live Local Act in Florida, where Foster teaches.

At the local level, too, we have reams of evidence that straightforward upzoning and land use reform approaches can produce a lot of new housing and lower rents. Austin, Texas provides us with perhaps the most dramatic recent example. Sacramento is another case in point. These aren’t examples of state-level preemption, but they’re nonetheless proof of concept for the old zoning-and-permitting-reform approach that Foster and Warren wish to discard.

So why are they in such a hurry to discard it? It’s worth noting that Works in Progress has published a couple other recent pieces advising YIMBYs on how they can sap the strength out of NIMBY opposition and build a broad pro-housing consensus. First there was “How ugliness helps NIMBYs,” then, on a similar theme, “Do people prefer traditional architecture?” The former essay argues “that ugliness is sometimes a major driver of opposition among people who live nowhere near the development in question,” while the latter measures “ugliness” according to popular sentiment. Taken together, these pieces would seem to present a program for how aesthetic purity can defang a key source of opposition to new housing.

I am deeply skeptical of this program for some of the reasons we discussed above. But you can see the common thread: a fundamental conviction that political conflict is ontologically bad, and that well-educated professionals can design it out of the political system. This is essentially the same view that many of the original capital-P Progressives held around the turn of the twentieth century. This view also appears to have helped motivate the California Forever project—which was, in its original form, an attempt to short-circuit grueling zoning reform battles in existing cities by building a brand new city from scratch in rural Solano County. Works in Progress is housed within the tech company Stripe, whose CEO, Patrick Collison, is an investor in California Forever.

I think Works in Progress does a lot of great work. But I also think this attempt to chart a YIMBY course that circumvents normal conflictual politics is woefully misguided. Most of the time, you can’t really govern a heterogeneous democratic society by consensus. And you really can’t rely on a broad societal consensus when you’re dealing with deeply rooted social problems. The best you can do is what YIMBYs everywhere are currently doing: keeping conflict within democratic guardrails while patching together a big enough coalition to emerge from the conflict victorious. Sometimes you just need to win.

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center

“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.” — Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Preorder Build or Die now from Bookshop.org.

I can’t find it now, but there’s an old episode of the great, recently concluded podcast Tides of History where host Patrick Wyman and his guest (a fellow historian, whose name escapes me) get into an interesting discussion about counterfactuals. The use of counterfactuals in historical analysis is apparently fairly controversial; a Substack post on the topic from earlier this year notes that the eminent English historian E.H. Carr dismissed counterfactuals as “parlour games.” Serious historians, according to this line of thinking, don’t indulge in speculation about how things might have gone differently. Instead, they focus on what actually happened and why.

Wyman’s point (also argued in the aforementioned Substack post) was that any discussion of historical cause and effect is inherently counterfactual. If I write that the Roman Empire Christianized because of Emperor Constantine I’s conversion to Christianity, then it logically follows that I also believe the reverse: in a world where Constantine had not converted, then the old Roman state religion would have remained in place for at least the duration of his reign. The implied counterfactual can’t be disentangled from any attempt to explain why the Roman state adopted Christianity when it did.

This isn’t just an academic point for professional historians. All causal claims are counterfactual. If I tell you I’m jittery because I had a third cup of coffee, that means I’m not jittery in the hypothetical universe where I stopped at two cups. And if I say that underhanded corporate price-fixing tactics caused the housing affordability crisis, then it follows that there would be no housing crisis in the absence of landlord price-fixing schemes.

That latter claim is implicit in a lot of the recent anti-YIMBY broadsides from the neo-Brandeisian left. For example, in the most recent issue of Dissent, Claire Kelloway and Sandeep Vaheesan write:

Kelloway and Vaheesan (the latter of whom I’ve previously debated in Dissent’s pages) are careful not to make an explicit causal argument. They don’t say price-fixing software like RealPage’s YieldStar caused the housing crisis. They just say that RealPage has been accused of driving up rents. And this sort of chicanery, allegedly, explains why “liberalizing land-use controls, in practice, has not necessarily delivered major augmentation of the housing stock.” It’s because unregulated corporate greed, not restrictive land use rules, is the real binding constraint that stops us from solving the housing crisis.

Maybe they relegated the causal claim to a subtextual level because they knew they didn’t have a very strong case. In the above paragraph, Kelloway and Vaheesan link to a legal complaint from Washington, D.C.’s Office of the Attorney General, which sued RealPage and several D.C.-based landlords that made use of YieldStar. The OAG’s complaint notes that “RealPage widely touts the impact of its [Revenue Management] products, advertising revenue lifts of 2-7%.”

Is RealPage’s boast accurate? The empirical research isn’t very clear on this point. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that RealPage has the power to uniformly increase median rents by 7 percent above their “normal level” in any city where YieldStar is in common use.

If we assume that D.C.’s rents are 7 percent higher due to RealPage than they would have been otherwise—which, again, assumes RealPage achieved its self-described maximum possible impact—then how much did RealPage contribute to the city’s housing affordability crisis? Well, RealPage was founded in 1998. Between 2001 and 2018, the median rent in D.C. climbed a whopping 59 percent in real dollars according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. So, without YieldStar, rents would have only gone up by … 52 percent. And again, the real-world effect of this software on citywide median rents is probably quite a bit lower than what we’re assuming for the sake of this thought experiment. In the counterfactual universe where RealPage and similar companies did not exist, D.C. would still have a very severe housing affordability crisis.

If we were to single out the decisive factor that contributed to swelling rents in D.C., I think a mismatch between housing supply and demand is a more likely culprit than cartel behavior on the part of landlords. Between 1996 and 2015, the city’s rental vacancy rate plunged from 13.4 percent to 5.4 percent. That’s a pretty good proxy for how well the rental market in a given area is meeting demand for housing; vacancy rates are higher where there’s a lot of housing to go around, and lower where a lot of prospective tenants are chasing a comparatively small number of available units. So a consistently declining vacancy rate suggests a city where more and more people are looking for housing with each passing year and there are proportionally fewer and fewer homes available. Which gives landlords the market power to hike rents higher than YieldStar alone could ever do.

The YieldStar theory doesn’t pan out in other cities, either. Take San Francisco, which banned “the sale or use of algorithmic devices to set rents or manage occupancy levels for residential units” in 2024. Guess what happened immediately afterward? Median rents skyrocketed; between 2025 and 2026, the median rent on a two-bedroom apartment rose 25.9 percent. That is largely a result of the current AI boom: tech companies are hiring for a lot of high-wage jobs in the city, thereby attracting affluent newcomers who need to compete with existing residents for a relatively static supply of housing. You might argue that rents would have climbed higher if San Francisco hadn’t banned YieldStar and similar apps, but it is a lot harder to plausibly argue that the ban put a significant dent in the city’s housing crisis.

I have my own counterfactual to put forward: if San Francisco had not enacted a major citywide downzoning in 1978, if housing entitlements were based on consistent rules instead of the whims of local officials, and if the California Supreme Court had not ruled in 1972 that CEQA applied to virtually all new construction, then San Francisco would not have a housing crisis today. Successive tech booms in the Bay Area would certainly have raised rents citywide, but they also would have led to a home construction boom that would have substantially mitigated those rent increases. Based on the available evidence, I think my theory is considerably more plausible than the RealPage theory.

In fact, we can find something like a real-world counterfactual to my story of San Francisco if we look southeast. Austin, Texas, experienced a local boom of its own in the 2010s, and saw a corresponding spike in rents. But unlike in San Francisco, Austin policymakers responded to this spike by aggressively liberalizing local land use rules. As a result, Austin grew its housing supply by more than three times the national rate between 2021 and 2024, and saw a 4 percent drop in rents during a period when rents across the U.S. overall rose by 10 percent.

None of the above should be interpreted as a defense of RealPage; I agree that coordinating prices with your supposed competitors is sleazy, cartel-like behavior. You won’t hear me object if other cities decide to follow San Francisco’s lead and crack down on such practices. But doing that won’t get us any closer to solving the housing crisis. San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and their peer cities still need to permit more multifamily home construction.

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center

“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.” — Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Preorder Build or Die now from Bookshop.org.

Last week, scholars with the Public Policy Institute of California made a bold claim in a new report: Prop 47, a 2014 ballot measure that downgraded some nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, has “contributed to increases in unsheltered homelessness and drug use as well as a decline in drug treatment.” That finding has since been making the rounds in the state press, with big writeups from CalMatters and the New York Post’s recently established California bureau. (It should be noted that Prop 47 was partially rolled back by 2024’s Prop 36; it’s a bit early to say what the impact of this partial rollback would be.)

It’s not much of a mystery why the PPIC report is getting so much buzz. For years, various pundits on the right have insisted that California’s homelessness crisis is largely a result of the state’s permissive drug laws and relatively generous social safety net. That is one of the core arguments that animate Michael Shellenberger’s 2021 book San Fransicko, along with much of the agitprop that helped launch Christopher Rufo’s career in the right-wing think tank world. More recently, the Cicero Institute—a personal project of billionaire venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale—essentially dictated a homelessness strategy to the Trump administration that is based on similar principles. If homelessness is driven by housing scarcity, then it follows that we can largely solve homelessness by building more housing and moving people from the streets into stable homes; if homelessness is what happens when people of weak character realize that they can do drugs all day and mooch off the state instead of finding a job, then we can only solve homelessness by showing those people the whip.

Shellenberger, Rufo and Lonsdale are charlatans; you can read my response to San Fransicko here and to some of Lonsdale’s arguments here if you’re interested. But the team at PPIC is not made up of MAGA ideologues or serial fabulists. These are serious researchers doing serious work. And so, when those researchers make a claim that runs directly counter to my own work on homelessness, I can’t dismiss it out of hand.

So let’s dig into exactly what PPIC’s Magnus Lofstrom, Shannon McConville, and Sean Cremin found. (Full disclosure: Magnus was one of my econ professors in graduate school.)

Using biennial point-in-time (PIT) counts, PPIC compares the rate of homelessness in California to a composite rate pulled from various comparison states. They find the trend in California’s homelessness rate largely tracked the trend in those comparison states, up until the passage of Prop 47; afterward, they diverged fairly sharply.

Thus, in the words of Magnus and his co-authors, “We estimate that the reform led to a roughly 10 percent increase in California’s unsheltered homelessness rate or about 7,000 additional unsheltered people experiencing homelessness, accounting for approximately 20 percent of the growth in California’s unsheltered homeless population between 2015 and 2019.”

But there are a couple of caveats. The first is that the PIT count process was reformed in 2015 to better capture the US unsheltered population, right around the same time as Prop 47 implementation and the subsequent divergence in homelessness rates. “It is possible changes in how local agencies conducted the counts could have contributed to the increase in homelessness that we observe, especially for unsheltered counts after Prop 47,” Magnus and co-authors write. “As long as these efforts were no greater in California than in comparison states, our synthetic-approach estimates would not be affected. However, our within-California estimates would be overstated if these improvements to the count were broadly implemented across local agencies after Prop 47.”

The PIT count is a flawed metric in any number of ways, and one of its major flaws is that it tends to substantially undercount unsheltered populations. It’s a lot easier to take a census of people who are signed into shelters and assigned designated beds. Unsheltered people, in contrast, are notoriously difficult to track down. So a change in how PIT counts are conducted, if it leads to a more accurate count, could cause the baseline estimate to jump in areas with unusually large unsheltered populations—such as California, which, thanks to its temperate climate and inadequate shelter bed capacity, has by far the largest unsheltered population in the United States. (The PPIC report’s technical appendix doesn’t list the comparison states, but New York, for example, has a very high rate of homelessness, a much less forgiving winter season, and a legal right to shelter in its largest city.)

And there’s another important caveat. PIT counts exclude people who are hospitalized, incarcerated, or otherwise institutionalized; if you’re sitting in a jail cell, you are not considered homeless for the purposes of the count. So while it’s theoretically possible that a lot of Californians got into hard drugs once illicit drug use was no longer a felony, a substantial share of the PIT count increase may simply come from the fact that a lot of people who previously got sucked into the prison system, and therefore excluded from the PIT count, are no longer getting felony convictions.

The CalMatters writeup of the PPIC report acknowledges this, noting: “It’s unclear how much of that increase in homelessness is tied to increased drug use, and how much instead is because unhoused people who would have been sleeping in jail before Prop. 47 now are sleeping on the street instead.” But CalMatters adds that Magnus “suspects it’s a bit of both.”

But now we’re in the realm of supposition, because there’s nothing in the PPIC report that allows us to disaggregate the two effects. PPIC had previously reported that California’s jail and prison population fell by approximately 13,000 inmates within two years of Prop 47’s passage; in contrast, as mentioned above, the newer report attributes an increase in the unsheltered population of about 7,000 people to Prop 47. The most parsimonious explanation is that, prior to Prop 47, jails and prisons were a sort of shelter of last resort for many homeless people who were caught committing nonviolent offenses. That strikes me as considerably more plausible than the claim that criminal justice reform somehow encouraged homelessness. (And again, this is all assuming that the captured rise in the unsheltered population is 100% real, and not in part an artifact of the change to how PIT data is collected.)

As we’ve covered in this newsletter many times before, there doesn’t appear to be any meaningful correlation across states and metropolitan regions between drug use rates and rates of homelessness; West Virginia, for example, has one of the most pervasive drug problems in the country but a well below average rate of overall homelessness. That’s because housing is relatively cheap in West Virginia, and housing affordability remains the critical factor that determines homelessness rates.

At this point, someone might say: Who cares about the exact mechanism linking Prop 47 implementation to higher homelessness rates? If there are more people on the street as a result of Prop 47, for whatever reason, then that still demonstrates that we should start charging nonviolent drug users with felonies again.

To which I’d say, okay, fine. It is inarguable that moving someone from homelessness to prison removes them from the PIT count. But does that really count as a success? If imprisoning nonviolent drug offenders is the “solution” to their homelessness, that implies we could solve the entire homelessness problem in California by rounding up the unsheltered population and dumping it into concentration camps. That solution may suit the fine people of the Cicero Institute, but I’d be hard pressed to call it a solution; both because it’s morally appalling and because a Gulag First policy wouldn’t address the affordability problem that is pushing Californians into homelessness in the first place. I’m reminded a little of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when President Trump said he wanted to prevent a cruise ship full of infected people from being transferred to onshore medical facilities, because putting those people on American soil would cause them to be counted in the country’s overall case rate.

There’s one more finding in the PPIC report that I want to highlight. Magnus et al. write: “We find that, in any given year, counties with higher rents and lower housing vacancies have significantly higher rates of homelessness. However, we do not find a statistically significant association between changes in local homelessness rates and changes in fair market rents or housing vacancy rates over the past two decades.” In other words, homelessness in, say, Los Angeles does not necessarily decline when rents in the city drop. Which would seem to suggest that, despite what I’ve been arguing in this post and for the past several years, making cities more affordable does not have an appreciable impact on their rates of homelessness. What gives?

To answer that question, I decided to take a look at fair market rents in the parts of California with the highest concentration of homelessness: San Francisco and Oakland, and Los Angeles. Here is a chart that Claude produced for me using HUD fair market rent (FMR) data on two-bedroom units, adjusted for inflation. (Note that the methodology for calculating FMR has changed over time.)

In Los Angeles, you don’t see a ton of fluctuation in fair market rents between 2000 and 2026; it’s more of a steady climb. But in Oakland and San Francisco, while the overall trend line points up, rents are pretty volatile. They also appear to be correlated with the business cycle, so that you see a Bay Area FMR drop a couple of years after the collapse of the first tech bubble, followed by a rapid spike after the second tech boom took off. And then another drop not long after the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset. FMR data tends to have a built-in lag of a couple of years, which explains the gap between these economic downturns and the decline in housing costs.

Given all of that, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that these FMR declines don’t map onto homelessness declines. Yes, rents fell in the early 2010s and early 2020s, but those falls were the result of serious economic shocks; in both cases, a lot of people were being forced out of work simultaneously. If your rent falls 20% but your income completely zeroes out, then your housing has become less affordable even if it is objectively cheaper. This point is consistent with another key finding from the PPIC report: that “places that saw a larger decline in SSI benefit [federal cash assistance] caseloads over time also saw a larger increase in their homeless population.”

The sort of rent decreases we need in order to reduce homelessness are not the periodic drops that occur as a result of economic crises. California’s housing deficit has accumulated over decades, beginning with the downzonings of the 1960s; as a result, the general trajectory for housing costs has been upward, despite some recession-induced fluctuations. We shouldn’t expect those fluctuations to yield sustained reductions in homelessness; those sustained reductions will only come once California achieves a stable growth rate in housing supply and a commensurately steady decline in rents.

Which brings us back to the main takeaway regarding Prop 47: for homelessness to decline, homeless people need to have somewhere other than shelters or the streets where they can lay their heads. Instead of a jail cell, that should be a permanent home.

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center

“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.”—Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Preorder Build or Die now from Bookshop.org.

If you are still posting on X, you should stop today. Quitting the site yesterday would have been better, but doing it today is better than doing it tomorrow.

The moral and political case for quitting X is so obvious that it scarcely bears repeating, but I’ll briefly recap it anyway. The guy who owns X—the person to whom you are personally donating if you pay for a blue checkmark—is Elon Musk, an out and out white supremacist who uses X to spread Nazi ideas like Great Replacement theory. He is a major backer, in both money and propaganda, of the global far right. During his brief tenure inside Trump’s Administration, he spearheaded the destruction of USAID, which, according to recent estimates, may result in 14 million deaths between 2025 and 2030.

X is the platform this particular mass murderer uses to seed his most poisonous ideas. A couple of months ago, he used the platform to egg on the Belfast pogrom. Those who continue to post on X—in particular those X users who are not racist psychopaths—are enhancing the site’s usefulness to him as a propaganda tool by drawing more eyes to the platform and making it look like an ideologically diverse “marketplace of ideas” instead of what it is: a delivery vehicle for bringing fascism into the mainstream of global politics. Oh, and perhaps the Internet’s leading destination for those in search of child sexual abuse material.

Some non-fascist X users have acknowledged all of this and argued that, nonetheless, progressives must remain on the platform to fight the propaganda machine from within. I think that represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how the platform operates. The token Democrat on Fox News (these days, the main one is Jessica Tarlov) is not there to undermine the network’s political objectives. She’s there as a useful foil and to make Fox News appear (marginally) more credible as a balanced debate platform. Similarly, prominent progressives on X are reinforcing the network effects that give the site its power. Consider this: Musk’s meddling in the site’s algorithm to suppress certain kinds of posts and elevate others is well documented. So if your anti-fascist posts on X are still getting views, it’s either because these posts are so toothless as to escape Musk’s notice, or because they are in fact useful to him.

Like I said, that’s the moral and political case. I don’t expect it to persuade anyone who isn’t already persuaded. But if you’re a writer, journalist, or political figure, here’s another very good reason why you should drop X: self-interest.

If your job has anything to do with politics or the news media, then you probably consider seeing the world clearly to be an important professional asset. You need a decent sense of the shifting political winds: changes in public and elite opinion, windows of political opportunity that are opening or shutting, and so on. If you’re a political journalist and you don’t have a nose for these things, then you’ll always be either playing catch-up with your savvier colleagues or making calls that will embarrass you later. And if you’re an advocate or politico, then the professional consequences of making a bad call can be even more severe.

The temptation to use Twitter as a mirror of the political world has always been high, and it has led plenty of people astray in the past. That’s the reason why “Twitter isn’t real life” became something of a cliché back in the old days: some reporters would see a particular idea or story catch fire on Twitter and mistakenly assume that it must therefore be genuinely important, or some ambitious politician or policy entrepreneur would begin speaking in a language that was incomprehensible to those who weren’t extremely online. Touching grass, to resurface another old Twitter cliché, has always been good policy.

But the risks are even bigger now that Elon Musk is bending the site formerly known as Twitter to his own political ends. He is deliberately building an immersive environment where far-right extremism is not only present but omnipresent. “Normalize” is another word that became yet another online cliché during the first Trump Administration, but there is no better word for what Musk is trying to do: he is using X to make Nazism appear normal to habitual X users.

That does not mean that everyone who uses X is going to get brainwashed into becoming a Nazi. But propaganda can work on you in subtler ways as well. It can insinuate extreme ideas into the texture of your everyday life. It can create a whole dreamscape for you to sleepwalk through. And the more time you spend in that dreamscape, the greater the odds that it will influence your real-world thinking and decision-making in ways that you will come to regret later.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but my argument didn’t quite click for me until I read this Unpopular Front post from John Ganz. In the post, Ganz cites a 2025 Henry Farrell essay on “malformed publics,” or what I called the dreamscape of X:

I would go one step further than Farrell. It’s not only that these platforms distort our perception of what other people believe. It’s that they alter our notion of how normal public discourse is conducted. They embed us in a certain type of emotional, affective reality that over time comes to influence our own affect.

I’m speaking from personal experience. My first job out of college was as a researcher for Media Matters for America, where my job mainly involved watching at least six hours of Fox News every day. Watching Fox News did not make me more conservative; quite the opposite. But it did affect me. The visual language and rhythms of Fox News burrowed into my subconscious. I found that I was becoming antsier, crankier, more paranoid, and more short-tempered when it came to handling disagreement. I was internalizing the Fox News affect even as I was consciously drifting further left in order to concretize my rejection of Fox News ideology. It was impossible not to see politics through a frame that Fox News set for me. On at least one occasion, I had a dream that consisted entirely of sitting at my desk in the Media Matters office, watching an episode of The O’Reilly Factor.

Ganz writes that he has “seen people change with their algorithms and it’s pretty scary and sad.” I can second that. One example that leaps to mind is Noah Smith, an liberal economist frequent commentator on current events. Back in 2021, before Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, he was mostly writing about economic policy, although he would also drop the occasional lukewarm take on politics, such as in this post observing that the George Floyd protests were peaceful and not the first strike in a civil war. I didn’t agree with Noah on everything, and sometimes I thought he got a little over his skis when he was playing outside his academic discipline, but he also struck me as more or less a normal moderate liberal.

Now, though? Now he’s writing about the scourge of “Islamoleftism,” posting that the United Kingdom could succeed Iran as “the standard-bearer of global Islamist ideology,” and implying that “racial hiring preferences” should be limited to low-wage service sector roles where Black workers are already overrepresented. He also endorsed Elon Musk as Trump’s Secretary of Defense. Weird shit, in other words.

I don’t mean to pick on Noah too much. He’s just one guy, and he’s not the most egregious example by any means. I think there’s a decent chance that one day, when he’s no longer on X, he’ll look back on his “Islamoleftism” with regret. But that’s exactly my point. Prolonged X exposure is deranging people who should absolutely know better.

And thanks to the sort of feedback loops that are endemic on social media, sometimes that derangement can hit enough people simultaneously that it has a real impact on American politics and the news we consume. Ganz cites Vincent Bevins pointing to one relatively innocuous example: the mass delusion among many X-addicted journalists that Trump’s 2024 victory coincided with a marked lurch to the right in American culture and popular opinion. This was the now largely memory-holed “vibe shift.” Bevins writes:

Perhaps a more consequential example is the Graham Platner bubble. If you don’t remember who that is, he was the Maine Senate candidate who, with his tattoos and gravelly voice, was supposed to attract the white working class back into the Democratic tent. He was also a former Blackwater mercenary with a Nazi tattoo, and, as it turned out, an alleged rapist.

In a postmortem on Platner’s since-dissolved campaign, Slate writer Alex Kirshner observes that Platner was, as the headline says, “the perfect Twitter candidate.” Even after it was revealed that Platner had an SS tattoo, many of the liberal and left-wing pundits who have stuck around on X turned into Platner dead-enders. It was only after Politico broke the news about the first rape allegation that most (but not all) of those dead-enders jumped ship.

But as even the guy who initially recruited Platner into the race later admitted, “the tattoo should have been enough” to disqualify him from running for the Democratic nomination in Maine’s Senate race. And among almost all the politically engaged people with whom I discussed Platner, it was enough. All of them, I should say, except for the people who are still active on X. (I should note that even after everyone learned about the Nazi tattoo, Platner still won the primary handily.)

How to explain that divide? Some of it may be the result of who self-selected into remaining on X. But I suspect that the larger factor is that liberals and leftists on X are swimming in a swamp where the use of Nazi ideas and iconography is basically normal. The owner of the platform does it and elevates other people who do it instead of moderating them out of existence. So if a little dalliance with Nazism is basically unexceptional, should it really be disqualifying? After all, everyone is doing it.

Some of the people who later had to recant their Platner support due to the rape charge are now insisting they have no regrets. Prior to that Politico story dropping, there was no reason to suspect him of being anything other than a flawed but basically decent guy. I see it differently: wearing a Totenkopf tattoo on your skin for the better part of two decades may not prove you’re an unreconstructed Nazi, but at an absolute minimum it proves that you have poor judgment and a low moral character. A lot of the commentators who argued (and, in some cases, continue to argue) otherwise are people who spend a nontrivial portion of their lives on a platform owned by a Nazi.

After Napoleon ordered the execution of the Duke of Enghien, Talleyrand (or someone else in Napoleon’s circle) is said to have observed that the death sentence “was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.” Among the X-addicted political and media elite, we might say that Platner dead-enderism was worse than a mistake; it was a professional embarrassment. If you need proof, watch the Pod Save America boys try to do damage control after their earlier exertions to hype up the Platner campaign. They’ve eroded their credibility with their own progressive audience, and they know it.

If you’re on X and you want to avoid similar mortification, then one of the best things you can do for yourself is quit X immediately. Stop giving Elon Musk unrestricted access to the darkest recesses of your brain.

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center

“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.” — Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Preorder Build or Die now from Bookshop.org.

Does the academy have a pro-YIMBY bias? That’s the argument of financial analyst Aziz Sunderji, who published this chart last week to illustrate the point:

In a Substack post accompanying the chart, Sunderji explains: “Of the 61 papers in my compilation, only a third can be classified as YIMBY. But these have outsized influence: the average YIMBY paper has been cited 6x more than the average paper that comes to alternative explanations for the high price of housing.”

One possible interpretation of this finding is that the YIMBY papers are simply more credible and of higher quality. And indeed, several of the anti-YIMBY papers in Sunderji’s dataset are seriously flawed; see Salim Furth’s response to the Louie, Mondragon, and Wieland paper, for example. Similarly, this Yonah Freemark paper (which is often cited by anti-YIMBY pundits, if not academics) is fatally flawed as a test of YIMBY policies because it focuses solely on zoning in Chicago without acknowledging the unchecked veto power that local aldermen have over development in their districts.

Sunderji anticipates this objection by citing other research that finds a tenuous (at best) relationship between research quality and how often a given paper gets cited. Fair enough. It may be the case that researchers are responding to external cues—simple "momentum” may be one of them, as Sunderji suggests, although I don’t think we should dismiss the possibility that economists and planning academics are noting the more tentative, observational data coming out of cities like Austin, Texas and factoring the evident success of YIMBY policies in those places into how they evaluate the academic literature.

But as I dug deeper into Sunderji’s dataset, I began to suspect that his findings were largely an artifact of how he coded various papers. For example, two papers—one by Jenny Schuetz, and another by Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan—get categorized as “bridge” literature which acknowledges the insufficiency of boosting housing supply on its own. I think Jenny would be a bit surprised to find herself placed in the non-YIMBY camp; she currently leads housing programs at Arnold Ventures, which is a big institutional funder of YIMBY organizations. Been, Gould Ellen and O’Regan have written extensively in support of the argument that building more housing is good for housing affordability.

But the oddest coding decision Sunderji makes, in my view, is to place political scientist Jessica Trounstine among “the realists” who think inequality and demand-side factors, not limited supply, are to blame for the housing crisis. Trounstine’s work does indeed focus on how wealthy, disproportionately white homeowners work to enhance their own property values and limit outsiders’ access to housing and public amenities. But, in Trounstine’s telling, restrictive land use rules are one of the key tools they use to accomplish this goal. Her work does not provide a rebuttal to the YIMBY narrative but an important complement to it.

Sunderji’s effort to draft Trounstine into the anti-YIMBY cause points to a larger intellectual limitation embedded in the supply-skeptic position. Anti-YIMBYs of the left love to argue that YIMBYism ignores questions of power or economic inequality. See Alexander Ferrer arguing that YIMBYism has always functioned as “a promise that we didn’t need to redistribute anything.” Or Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan observing that the “surge in inequality over the past forty years is one driver of the housing crisis about which YIMBYs have little to say.” (I also show up in the piece that quotes Ferrer, and Callaci and Vaheesan were replying to me as part of a public debate.)

In fact, YIMBYs have plenty to say about power relations, inequality, and redistribution; it’s just that the anti-YIMBYs of the left haven’t been listening. In my own view, wealth inequality is both a cause and a consequence of the housing shortage. The “consequence” part should be relatively easy to grasp: housing shortages benefit incumbent landowners and rentiers, who see their property values soar and discover they can demand increasingly exorbitant rents from prospective tenants. Meanwhile, those of us who can’t afford to purchase homes see a greater share of our income disappearing into our landlords’ bank accounts instead of growing through savings.

There’s another layer to this inequality story as well: the really pronounced housing shortages are in “superstar” cities like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, which have high-wage local industries. Access to those industries can help some people ascend the class ladder, but high housing costs in those cities are just as likely to prevent them from ever getting their foot in the door.

As for how inequality causes housing shortages, Trounstine’s work—as well as the work of Richard Rothstein, Yoni Appelbaum, and others—helps point the way. In this case, the key point is that America’s land use system is a direct product of its twentieth-century racial caste system. White property owners deliberately restricted housing construction in their cities in order to ensure that prices and rents would stay above what most non-white families would be able to afford, guaranteeing that racial segregation would persist in fact even when racially restrictive covenants and other more explicit de jure tools of segregation fell out of favor. Maintaining racial segregation in these communities was only partly an end in itself; it was also a way of maintaining the economic power of exclusive white communities by protecting their monopoly on well-funded schools and other key amenities.

And there’s another angle on the relationship between inequality and housing supply: while many local governments started radically downzoning their cities in the 1960s and 70s, many of these cities didn’t start experiencing real shortages until the 80s or 90s. That’s because demand for housing in places like New York was relatively low during the era of white flight and the urban crisis, when professional-class families took off for the suburbs, the resulting urban tax base proved inadequate to fund even basic municipal services, and violent crime spiked across urban America. The housing shortage in these cities only emerged when the yuppie generation returned to the city and started bidding up rents on a relatively fixed supply of housing.

This is also, not coincidentally, when street homelessness first became a widespread phenomenon in American cities. There’s a good paper on the relationship between housing supply, inequality, and homelessness that I turn to often; it finds evidence that “inequality affects homelessness … by crowding out low-income households from the rental market,” which is particularly likely to happen in areas where the rental market is inelastic.

I suspect that the problem with this argument, at least from a left-NIMBY perspective, is what it suggests about the nature of inequality. Economic populists tend to implicitly frame the American class system as a two-tiered affair: there are the elites and the billionaires, and then there is the 99 percent. Taking the relationship between housing supply and inequality seriously complicates that dichotomy. Most of the high-wage tech workers who bid up the rents in San Francisco are not billionaires; if they were, then they would own mansions in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, or Silicon Valley suburbs like Los Gatos or Atherton. Instead, they are high-wage renters from the professional-managerial class who have more in common with anti-YIMBY journalists and nonprofit employees than with the tech industry’s billionaire masters. By the same token, the homeowners who often put up the biggest fight to preserve exclusionary zoning are lowly millionaires, not multi-billionaires. (Marc Andreessen is an exception.) Taking housing supply seriously forces us to think about inequality in fractal, not manichean, terms.

But thinking about inequality in fractal terms is an discomfiting prospect because it risks exposing divisions within the economic-populist coalition. What do you do when the actual obstacle to housing affordability in a city like Berkeley looks less like Sam Altman and more like Robert Reich? (To be clear: Sam Altman sucks for other reasons.) How do you approach class conflict when it turns out that the offending class is, in this case, both far larger and much closer to home than populist rhetoric would suggest? YIMBYism does not dodge the subject of power, but instead raises questions about power well outside the economic populist comfort zone.

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center

“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.” — Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Preorder Build or Die now from Bookshop.org.

Let’s say you’re a public health expert investigating why a certain town experiences far more lung cancer deaths per capita than any of its neighbors. One possible factor is that many of the town’s residents don’t have good health insurance, so they miss out on the regular screenings that might catch lung cancer when it is still treatable. Or maybe the town’s one hospital is itself inadequate, with an understaffed and under-resourced oncology department that is incapable of providing effective cancer treatments to most patients. That would certainly contribute to a higher-than-average mortality rate for cancer patients. But it wouldn’t explain why so many town residents get cancer in the first place.

Clearly, you would need to get to the bottom of that question. And it would be strange—in fact, it would be grotesquely negligent—to try and explain the town’s high cancer rate without considering environmental factors. Especially if there were a massive industrial plant in the center of town that constantly belched chemical byproducts out of its smokestacks. If you tried to account for the town’s rate of cancer deaths without closely scrutinizing the plant’s emissions, your colleagues would rightly chalk the elision up to either extreme incompetence or a bribe from the plant’s owners.

And yet ignoring environmental factors is precisely what a shocking number of serious commentators do when they analyze California’s homelessness crisis. In this case, the industrial plant is the state’s land use system, which has, over the past several decades, locked the state into a massive housing shortage. And the toxic contaminant released by this land use system is housing cost inflation, which has forced millions of Californians into chronic housing instability and a smaller subset of that unlucky group into chronic unsheltered homelessness.

The subhed to economist Lee Ohanian’s “How Los Angeles Lost the War on Homelessness,” published last week by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, nods at the persistent haze shrouding the city: “high housing costs share the blame” for LA’s homelessness epidemic, according to Ohanian, or at least according to his editor. But apparently they don’t share much of the blame, because the essay itself has nothing to say about the housing market. Instead, to return to our earlier metaphor, Ohanian’s sole focus is on blaming the oncologists.

Or, rather, it’s on blaming the usual litany of conservative bugbears. Housing First, harm reduction, corruption, and inadequate policing all take their licks. Not everything Ohanian says is wrong (it is true that building permanent supportive housing in California is far more expensive than it should be and that proper oversight of homeless services contractors is severely lacking), but most of it is.

The problems start with how Ohanian understands the state’s Housing First strategy—or how he fails to understand it. He writes that Housing First-aligned agencies prioritize “placing the homelessness [sic] in permanent supportive housing,” which is mostly false. The HF model emphasizes moving homeless people into permanent housing, but permanent supportive housing refers to a category of subsidized housing reserved for individuals with particularly severe behavioral and/or physical health conditions. An effective Housing First program is going to make a variety of housing options available, ranging from permanent supportive housing on one end of the spectrum to a simple rental subsidy on the other.

The looseness with which Ohanian deploys concepts like “Housing First” and “permanent supportive housing” is our first indication that he hasn’t done his homework. He also betrays no familiarity with the existing academic literature on Housing First, let alone the model’s track record in any city other than Los Angeles. Further, he gets the relationship between homelessness and mental illness wrong: while it is true that homeless people tend to suffer from mental health disorders or addiction at a higher rate than the general population, that is not because these conditions are a major cause of homelessness; as demonstrated in the book Homelessness is a Housing Problem, there is no correlation between an area’s rate of homelessness and its rate of addiction or mental illness. The stress of homelessness is as likely to induce mental illness or drug dependency as it is to be induced by them.

I’ve written about Housing First’s actual track record many times before. So instead of repeating myself here, I’ll direct curious readers to my 2022 report comparing Houston’s remarkably successful Housing First implementation to Los Angeles’s and San Francisco’s failures to substantially reduce homelessness. I also wrote a piece for MS NOW last year (back when it was MSNBC) that describes how the Department of Veterans Affairs was able to achieve substantial reductions in veteran homelessness using the Housing First model.

Both of the above pieces make the same point: Housing First is highly effective on a client-by-client basis, but it is not designed to address the structural factors that generate mass homelessness. So while there is a lot I would change about how Los Angeles implements Housing First, blaming LA County’s homeless services agency for the homelessness crisis is like blaming the oncology department for high cancer rates. There is a lot our hypothetical oncology department can do to improve the quality of care for its patients. But it can’t prevent people from getting cancer in the first place, and it can’t save everyone who does get it. The real solution is further upstream.

It’s odd that Ohanian doesn’t understand this, because he has written at length about California’s housing shortage. In a 2021 paper for the Cato Institute, he blamed the shortage for California’s extraordinarily high cost of living and urged the state to reform local zoning, cut construction costs, and overhaul its environmental laws. I didn’t agree with everything in the paper, but it was at least a serious effort to grapple with the housing crisis. High housing costs, he wrote, are “exacerbating homelessness and poverty and are squeezing household budgets to the point that they are significantly lowering the quality of life, particularly for low- and middle-income households.”

So why the disconnect between Ohanian the housing policy analyst and Ohanian the homelessness policy analyst? In part, it might be because he falls into the standard conceptual trap of treating housing policy and homelessness policy as two discrete domains of practice. This is a pervasive fallacy, and not just on the right; most cities, including Los Angeles, deal with land use policy and homeless services as if they have nothing to do with one another. (Which is why Mayor Karen Bass, for example, can talk a good game about reducing homelessness in Los Angeles while simultaneously doing everything in her power to halt multifamily housing construction in single-family neighborhoods.)

But I suspect the larger issue is a matter of ideology and moral intuition. It’s all well and good to say in the abstract that high housing costs lead to more homelessness. But when a lot of people see the actual fruits of the housing shortage up close—the homeless encampments and rough sleepers, the mental health crises and evidence of addiction—they instinctively default to individualist explanations for what’s in front of them. Surely this sort of thing wouldn’t happen to just anyone. And surely if I did somehow join the ranks of the chronically unsheltered, I would be able to keep my wits about me and resist the temptation to self-medicate with hard drugs. I’d be one of the good, deserving homeless people who seek out shelter, relocate to a cheaper area, and work hard to get back on my feet.

That’s a common enough illusion, and for a good reason. It’s comforting to think that the guy on Skid Row hunting for a usable vein is in a fundamentally different category of person from you and me. It’s less comforting to realize that, until Los Angeles finally starts taking the housing shortage seriously, Skid Row will remain a live possibility for any Angeleno who suffers enough bad luck.

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.” — Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Preorder Build or Die now from Bookshop.org.

A year and a half ago, Liberal Currents editor Samantha Hancox-Li presented a theory about gender relations and declining birthrates that I think about often. In her words, birthrates are declining because women now “have options outside the patriarchal bargain” under which they previously had to “provide reproductive labor in exchange for security.” Because they are no longer systematically excluded from the professions or the banking sector, women can now obtain that security for themselves without having to submit to patriarchal authority in the home. Meanwhile, men “haven’t figured out how to adapt” to a world where women don’t “need men for economic or physical security.”

It’s a compelling theory, and now we have some data to back it up. A new NBER working paper from economist Claudia Goldin argues the following, according to its abstract: “Men generally benefit more from maintaining traditions; women often benefit more from eschewing them. When the probability is low that men will abandon traditions, some career women will not have children and others will delay.”

I already used up all my free NBER downloads for this year, but I was intrigued by this abstract, so I decided to dig up an earlier version of Goldin’s paper, from spring of this year. It’s a fairly lengthy and dense piece of economic analysis, but one relatively easy-to-parse chunk of Goldin’s argument stuck out to me. It has to do with a comparison of two groups of developed countries: “Group 1” countries that have moderate (albeit still below replacement) fertility rates, and “Group 2” countries that have very low fertility rates.

Goldin identifies a couple of telling differences between these two groups. The first is that Group 1 countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have experienced sustained economic growth over the past century, whereas the Group 2 countries (Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and Spain) had stagnant economies until the second half of the twentieth century, when they started to rapidly gain on the Group 1 countries. See Figure 12 from the paper below.

Now here’s where things get interesting. The Group 1 countries saw fertility rates gradually decline in tandem with the relatively steady growth of their economies. On the other hand, fertility in the Group 2 countries went from well above replacement to an utter collapse right around the time their economies took off. See Figure 11 below.

Goldin hypothesizes that birthrates fell rapidly in these countries because their economic growth was too sudden for gender norms to catch up. In Hancox-Li’s terms, Group 1 countries had more time to acclimate themselves to the breakdown of the patriarchal bargain and develop new, relatively egalitarian child-rearing settlements. Women in Group 1 countries can therefore have children by male partners without having to sacrifice all of their hard-won independence in exchange. In Group 2 countries, men—unaccustomed as they are to the new reality of women’s economic liberation—are more likely to still demand subservience from potential mates.

Here’s one more chart to drive the point home:

The Group 1 countries are all clustered on the left side of the above chart, whereas the Group 2 countries are all clustered on the right side. Which is to say, men and women split household work (including care work) more evenly in the Group 1 countries, while women in the Group 2 countries still shoulder significantly more of the childcare and housework burden than their male partners.

(Some, though not all, of the Group 1 countries also have generous family leave and childcare safety nets. But the United States is a notable exception, and, as Goldin notes, “there is scant evidence that the birth rate has been much affected by policies such as subsidies for family leave, childcare, and housing, as well as cash transfers conditional on marriage or a birth.”)

That doesn’t mean the Group 1 countries are perfectly egalitarian. As you can see, the average French or German woman still does approximately 90 minutes more household work than her male partner on a daily basis, and she fares better than her American and British counterparts. But compared to Japan, Korea, Italy, or, especially, Portugal, these are still pretty feminist societies, at least going by the household work metric. And the more feminist societies are the ones with birthrates that are closer to replacement.

In other words, Goldin presents us with some inconclusive but highly suggestive evidence that feminism is not the reason birthrates have fallen below replacement in much of the developed world. Rather, it seems that birthrates have fallen because the feminist revolution remains unfinished. If you’re worried about population collapse, then I have two solutions for you: attract many more immigrants, and figure out how to loosen the patriarchal bargain’s grip on the masculine imagination. The second goal, while necessary, is going to be a lot harder to achieve than the first.

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.” — Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Preorder Build or Die now from Bookshop.org.

Emeryville, California, where I live, is a little city wedged up against the San Francisco Bay on its West and further hemmed in by Berkeley to its North and Oakland to its East and South. Though considerably smaller than Oakland, Emeryville actually has a higher population density, thanks to its healthy mix of rowhouses and larger apartment buildings alongside the usual single-family homes. When talking to friends back east, I sometimes compare Emeryville to Hoboken, New Jersey: another modestly sized but surprisingly dense city within a much larger and far more dysfunctional metropolitan area.

Like Hoboken, Emeryville is also uncommonly well governed, especially when compared to some of its neighbors (looking at you, San Francisco). Both Hoboken and Emeryville have remarkably good transportation infrastructure, making it safe and easy to get around without a car. And while neither city is really cheap when considered in a national context, both have managed to stay more affordable than the central cities they orbit.

When Emeryville makes its way into the San Francisco Chronicle, it’s usually because of the city’s relatively low housing costs, and the paper’s most recent Emeryville-centric article is no exception. Bizarrely, though, the latest Chronicle piece on Emeryville treats the city’s relatively decent record on housing affordability as if it’s a bad thing. Why, the Chronicle’s Christian Leonard asks, when Emeryville has so much going for it, “are its home values in a tailspin?”

Leonard ends up pointing the finger at the fact that so much of Emeryville’s housing stock consists of condos, not single-family homes. This appears to be the consensus among the realtors he interviewed for the piece:

But I’m not so sure that’s the best way to interpret Leonard’s own data. Here’s what Leonard came up with when he attempted to break out Zillow’s home value data to differentiate between condos and single-family homes:

Indisputably, Emeryville’s condos are dropping in price faster than the city’s single-family homes. But both are dropping. It takes until the article’s penultimate paragraph for Leonard to note why that is the case: Emeryville “has long encouraged housing construction, making it a bit easier for buyers to shop for deals.” In other words, Emeryville is a YIMBY success story; by building a lot of housing, including condos, the city has stayed more affordable than neighboring jurisdictions. Notably, all this homebuilding has also been effective in preventing displacement; as Darrell Owens noted in 2021, Emeryville is the rare Bay Area city that did not experience a net loss in its Black population between the 2010 and 2020 Censuses.

Naturally, a more affordable housing market isn’t going to benefit everyone. Good housing policy is, I believe, positive sum, but certain aspects of housing policy are inherently zero sum: if homebuyers gain leverage in the market, then sellers must necessarily lose leverage, and vice versa. For decades, sellers and landlords have been accumulating more and more leverage over buyers and renters, and the social and economic consequences for the United States as a whole—mass homelessness and displacement, environmental despoliation and throttled economic growth among them—have been grim.

But the housing crisis has been pretty good to realtors, which is why I’m not surprised to see them bemoaning Emeryville’s supposed overabundance of condos. After all, higher home prices mean bigger commissions. Little wonder that the California Association of Realtors has been a central player in the NIMBY alliance that tries to block pro-housing bills from making it out of the legislature. (Realtors, it should be noted, have directed considerable firepower against California legislation intended to make it easier to build condos.)

The fact that realtors are apparently unhappy with Emeryville’s housing market is a reason to celebrate. It’s further confirmation that the city’s efforts to preserve affordable, integrated neighborhoods are bearing fruit.

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

Partly because of the historian Gordon Wood’s recent death at the age of 92 and partly because of America’s imminent 250th birthday, I’ve finally been reading Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution. It’s a fascinating and, to my mind, convincing book—one that makes for particularly valuable reading given the dire state of the republic as it nears the 250-year mark.

To Wood, the American Revolution signaled a profound break from the aristocratic, monarchical traditions that still structured European politics and society. Enlightenment thinkers had prepared the way, and American society was already ripe in many ways for a decisive split from European monarchism, but that does not mean, as some have argued, that the revolution was a conservative one. It was, in fact, considerably more radical than even its chief ideological architects appreciated—which is why abolitionists, suffragists, and other successive liberation movements were able to keep pushing the implications of the Declaration beyond what the founding generation had intended.

But let’s stick with what the founders had intended, which was already plenty radical on its own. I was particularly struck by what Wood referred to as the founders’ cosmopolitanism:

Wood notes that many of the founders—including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin—were Freemasons. That’s important because, as Wood writes,

To my mind, this has always been the truly exceptional thing about the United States: that it was founded on an explicitly cosmopolitan creed. Adherence to this creed, and not ethnic lineage, is what constitutes our national identity.

Or, at least, that’s what cosmopolitan small-d democrats tend to think. The ruling party says otherwise. As I write in my forthcoming book, MAGA is foundationally an anti-cosmopolitan, and therefore anti-urban, ideology. Sam Francis, one of the most important intellectual ancestors of MAGA Republicanism, inveighed against the “abstract universalism” of cosmopolitanism and “its refusal to make any distinctions or discriminations among human beings” in his essay “Message from MARs.” Vice President J.D. Vance sneered at the proposition that America is “just an idea” and replied: “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” In a speech at the 2025 National Conservatism conference, Sen. Eric Schmitt claimed that America belongs to “the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.”

This is Blood and Soil fascism, but it is not a European import. Vance and Schmitt are pulling from a long intellectual tradition on America’s authoritarian right. But this tradition is mistaken, and not just on ethical grounds; as Wood’s scholarship shows, it flattens out the story of the founding and elides what was truly novel, truly exceptional, in it. Which is why American blood-and-soil nationalists like Schmitt need to obfuscate the issue, as he did when he paid lip service to the ideals of the founding before asserting that they “are rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life.”

My claim is not that the framers were 21st-century progressives. But there is little doubt that they understood themselves to be universalists and opposed to all distinctions conferred by birth, even as their own position within a patriarchal slave society blinded them to the full implications of this universalism. The fact that they failed to recognize these implications does not mean they didn’t exist; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., and Harvey Milk were among those who saw the Declaration of Independence’s full meaning even more clearly than Thomas Jefferson did. Each of them enlisted the Declaration in the liberation struggles of their own time. Closer to the present, even the late philosopher Charles Mills—one of contemporary academia’s sharpest and most eloquent critics of the latent racism in Enlightenment liberal thought—called for the left to embrace political liberalism.

If we accept the premise that the meaning of America’s creed goes further than its original authors grasped, that leads us to a couple of other conclusions. First, it suggests that the American Revolution is, in fact, unfinished; that the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal era, and the Civil Rights movement, among others, can be understood as efforts to bring this revolution to completion. Second, we can conclude that the cosmopolitan and egalitarian ideals of the founding, once unleashed on the world, are too powerful to stuff back in the box for very long.

This is going to be a dark and ignominious July 4. It is entirely possible that the next one will be even darker. But the Declaration is still there, and it will outlast Vance, Schmitt, and the rest of their ilk. They don’t have anything better to offer.

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

Here is a chart I think about a lot:

Source: Zillow

I like to whip out this chart (and the research it’s based on) whenever I’m trying to make the point that America’s homelessness crisis is the result of structural conditions in the housing market, not a mass epidemic of mental illness or fentanyl abuse. Homelessness, as the book says, is a housing problem.

But if we’re going to be hyper-pedantic for a moment (something I would never do unless I absolutely had to), then we might tweak the above formulation to say that homelessness is, more specifically, a housing affordability problem. There are many extremely high-cost suburban enclaves that have virtually zero homelessness. Similarly, there are many American cities with very high poverty rates but comparatively little homelessness. It’s not high housing costs or low incomes that produce homelessness on a large scale, but the interaction between those two phenomena. That’s the main reason an expensive metropolitan area’s anchor city (say, San Francisco in the Bay Area) is almost always going to have considerably more homelessness than its outlying suburbs: the original architects of those suburbs generally designed them to lock out low-income households. The anchor city may have caught up with or even surpassed many of its exclusive suburbs when it comes to housing costs, but it’s still where much of the metropolitan area’s low-income population resides.

Another way to put this is to say that the housing shortage is the result of a broken housing market, and widespread chronic homelessness is what happens when a broken market and a broken income distribution collide. I’ve pilfered this framing from Becky Chao and Mike Konczal’s Affordability Framework, which they wrote last year for the Economic Security Project. The interaction between broken markets and broken incomes structures their entire framework; I found it pretty clarifying, and not just when applied to housing.

So it was a real pleasure to work with Becky and Mike on a follow-up report that does tackle housing specifically. Last week, ESP published “Building Affordability: The Policy Agenda for America’s Housing Crisis,” our attempt at developing a comprehensive housing policy agenda that can fit within Becky and Mike’s affordability framework. Here’s a brief summary of where we landed:

On the “broken markets” side of the ledger, we incorporate the standard YIMBY land use reform toolkit. But we also look at how the public sector can take a more active role in financing housing production—especially housing targeted at low-income households, and especially countercyclical financing that can keep production humming along during economic downturns. (On both fronts, our report owes a debt to the work of Paul Williams and the rest of the team at the Center for Public Enterprise.)

On the “broken incomes” side, we focus on directly lifting the incomes of the low-income households who, even in a well-functioning housing market, would not be able to access decent market-rate housing without some kind of subsidy. We also call for stronger tenant protections that can act as a bulwark against sudden price shocks and predatory landlords.

Our recommendations will be broadly familiar to people who closely track housing policy discourse. They would reflect an emerging progressive consensus that the optimal housing platform combines aggressive pro-supply YIMBY policies with strong tenant protections, income supports for low-income renters, and public investments in new housing to be offered at below-market prices. Mike, writing for his own Substack, notes that our approach rhymes with Zohran Mamdani’s housing philosophy; he might have added that Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman has adopted a very similar posture as well. And they’re just two of the more prominent faces in a swelling crowd of progressive and democratic socialist politicians who now subscribe to an all-of-the-above left-YIMBYism.

That said, I think our report makes a couple of important contributions to this discourse. One is that it situates left-YIMBYism inside the broken markets/broken incomes framework—and therefore within the broader, national conversation about affordability of all types. The left-YIMBY agenda is probably least developed at the federal level, and we also discuss a few ideas for how a future Congress might put it into action. Two, I think it’s important that we put so much emphasis on interventions specifically for very low-income households—precisely the households that our current housing policy regime is pushing into homelessness at an astonishing clip.

The most important contribution probably has to do with the audience we’re addressing in the report. The Economic Security Project is not the Center for Public Enterprise or the Metropolitan Abundance Project; we didn’t produce this report for the urbanism nerds who by and large already agree with us. Nor is ESP like the Bipartisan Policy Center or the Searchlight Institute; we are pitching our ideas at a decidedly progressive audience that includes some advocates and policymakers who are not already bought into left-YIMBYism as a program. My hope is that this report speaks to their concerns and interests in language that they recognize, and that it can play a role in strengthening the consensus that has already powered Mamdani and Raman’s political careers.

Here’s a link to the full report again.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

This weekend brought the welcome—and to me, at least, unexpected—news that Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman will face incumbent mayor Karen Bass in the November election, having jumped ahead of ex-reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the jungle primary. Raman is going to be the underdog against Bass, but my sense is that she has a real shot. And if Raman does, in fact, manage to become mayor, it could augur the start of a genuine renewal for America’s most dysfunctional big city.

Raman gets a lot of comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and for good reason: both are young, highly charismatic DSA members running longshot campaigns. (Both are also of South Asian descent.) Their most significant commonality, in my view, comes down to how they think about city planning: Raman and Mamdani are both unambiguously of the left, but they reject the New Left-inflected allergy to private housing construction that remains prevalent among a lot of their ideological compatriots. Instead, their platforms are more reminiscent of the New Deal-era left: a left that builds things to advance the common good and raise everyone’s standard of living.

Like Mamdani, Raman is a YIMBY who understands that her city’s housing and homelessness crisis is the product of a severe housing shortage. They both treat private housing development, public investment, and tenant protections as complementary programs instead of mutually exclusive avenues. And they both understand that transportation policy and housing policy must necessarily move in the same direction: if Los Angeles needs much more dense housing construction, it also needs the transit and active transportation infrastructure that enables circulation through dense cities.

But Los Angeles has a steeper uphill climb than New York. The latter city has solid bones: it’s already the least car-dependent big city in the United States, with what is by far the most robust and extensive transit network. And even before Mamdani assumed office, the city had taken some important steps in the right direction; the long-delayed implementation of congestion pricing, Eric Adams’s City of Yes initiative, and the passage of Questions 2, 3, 4, and 5 in the same election that propelled Mamdani to Gracie Mansion. That means the new chief executive of New York started off with a few key things already going his way.

If Raman becomes mayor of Los Angeles, she won’t be similarly blessed. Los Angeles is a city built for cars, at least as much as it is built for people; unlike Mamdani, she’ll be working against the city’s existing layout and built environment as she tries to make it more hospitable to non-drivers. And Los Angeles has nothing like City of Yes or Questions 2-5 in its recent past; the closest equivalent is probably Executive Directive 1, a Bass administration measure that streamlines 100% affordable projects. (Characteristically, Bass substantially pared back ED 1 after it threatened to produce a decent amount of new housing.)

But that just goes to show why electing a YIMBY in Los Angeles would be so transformative. The city has been stuck for a very long time; the existing Democratic establishment has spent decades fighting dense housing construction, even as the city’s shortage has led to widespread overcrowding and a large-scale epidemic of unsheltered homelessness. Things have been a little better on the transportation side, but not by much.

When Bass was first elected in 2022, I held onto some dim hope that she would be different from her predecessors. ED 1 in its original form seemed promising. But everything since—including the confounding decision to defang ED 1 just when it was starting to work—has demonstrated Bass’s firm commitment to the untenable status quo in Los Angeles.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a work trip to downtown Los Angeles for the first time in a little while. Every time I visit that neighborhood, it feels a little more broken. The unsheltered homelessness, poverty, and human suffering is a little bit more in your face on each visit; Skid Row always seems a little bit larger than the last time I was there. And while individual LA neighborhoods are eminently walkable, I’m always struck by how hazardous getting between neighborhoods can be. One late afternoon, I decided to take a walk to Echo Park to meet up with a friend, and quickly found myself marooned on a dead-end sidewalk with no crosswalk to the other side, cars whizzing by at high speeds.

Bass is the candidate of letting conditions continue to deteriorate. Spencer Pratt was the candidate of reactionary LA’s shrieking id, a creature of the same malarial swamp that gave us Howard Jarvis. Only Raman has real ideas about how to bring down housing costs, house the city’s enormous homeless population, and open up the city to people who don’t own cars.

One might reasonably wonder how much she can accomplish in the face of such long-metastasizing crises and a deeply entrenched NIMBY political culture; the answer is probably not enough, but a lot more than anyone else has done for the city. For starters, she could restore ED 1 to its original strength. And perhaps even more importantly, she could reverse the city’s long-running official opposition to the YIMBY legislation coming out of Sacramento. Under Bass, Los Angeles fought SB 79 (last year’s big transit-oriented development bill) tooth and nail; she also moved to nullify the state’s duplex construction law in post-fire Pacific Palisades. Raman could instead endorse pro-housing bills that would benefit her city, giving them a boost on their way to passage. Even if she implemented them faithfully instead of actively undermining them, that alone would be a significant change. Simply getting Los Angeles out of its own way would be a huge improvement. Doing more than that could bring about a new era for the city and the people who live there.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

 Last week, the political scientist Seva Gunitsky, whose Substack I highly recommend, posted an interesting summary of recent research on the features that contribute to autocratic regime stability. As Gunitsky sums it up, “The central technology of autocratic rule is not repression but administration.” The dictators with the most staying power tend to be the ones who are most concerned with the boring day-to-day work of keeping the regime humming along smoothly. The more dramatic spectacles that people tend to associate with tyranny—purges, violent suppression of protests, and so on—are often symptoms of regime weakness, not strength.

Longtime readers know that I am a big believer in the power of bureaucratic administration to make or break governments, so the findings Gunitsky highlighted were not hugely surprising to me. But it was nonetheless clarifying to explore the details and nuances of some of these findings. And they once again got me wondering how to classify whatever it is that the Trump regime is up to.

On the one hand, we have a pretty straightforward answer to this question: fascism. The years-long “fascism debate” about Trumpism has been settled. No less an authority than Robert O. Paxton, the foremost English-language scholar of fascism, said after January 6 that calling Trump a fascist “now seems not just acceptable but necessary.” Trump’s own former chief of staff agrees. Even some dead-enders have been forced to concede that, at minimum, Trump has moved in the direction of fascism during his second term.

On the other hand, “fascist” is a broad and, at times, sort of fuzzy category. Trumpism is not Nazism or Francoism; it is its own thing, and it emerged out of a very different set of circumstances. That difference in material conditions forms the basis of Adam Tooze’s argument against the fascism thesis; in 2022, he wrote:

I don’t find this especially persuasive; successful ideologies always outlast the material conditions that gave rise to them in the first place. You might as well say that the 21st century is so different from Enlightenment Europe that it makes no sense to speak of modern American liberalism.

But we should grant Tooze half a point. The modern United States is a very different place from 1920s Italy or 1930s Germany, and those differences are critical to an accurate understanding of Trump’s fascism. So we should ask ourselves: what kind of fascism is MAGA fascism?

I would like to suggest that Trumpism is best understood as a species of what I’m going to call hyperfascism. By “hyperfascism,” I don’t mean “superfascism” or anything like that. Instead, I’m using the hyper- prefix in a way similar to how Baudrillard deploys it in his definition of hyperreality as a sort of representation that is more “real” than whatever it was originally meant to represent. (He uses Disneyland as an example of the paradigmatic hyperreal space.) I’m also influenced by Anton Jäger’s suggestion that “hyperpolitics”—or constant and frenetic political activity in the absence of any structures that might convert this activity into real institutional change—is the dominant political register in 21st-century Western democracies.

So what is hyperfascism? It is hyperreal, hyperpolitical fascism. It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found. It’s the signs and symbols of fascism detached from the machinery of the Nazi war economy or the large-scale, organized street violence of the Italian blackshirts.

Make no mistake: hyperfascism is still fascism. But it is a shallow sort of fascism, obsessed with outward appearances and completely uninterested in everything else. It is as if the architects of the Trump regime had cribbed their entire governing agenda from cheap cyberpunk thrillers about fascist dystopias. They certainly haven’t given much thought to how authoritarian regimes consolidate popular consent; in fact, they’re acting like the 2024 election represented the end of politics, and therefore the end of any need on their part to modulate their behavior in order to ensure regime stability.

This helps to explain the key difference between the Trump regime and the more successful, long-running authoritarian regimes that appear in Gunitsky’s literature review. As Gunitsky notes, “the most resilient autocracies are those that look the most ‘normal’, with somewhat functioning bureaucracies, legislatures where people sometimes argue, and cabinets with ministers rotating in a way that, if I take my glasses off, kind of resembles the churn of democratic governance.” Trump’s regime has a dysfunctional bureaucracy, tolerates no dissent, and is prone to erratic firings and staff purges. And it kicked off Trump’s second term by voluntarily plunging into the sort of fiascoes that typically signal profound regime weakness: violent confrontations with protestors, open and unpredictable campaigns of terror, and needless provocations against other countries. Why? Well, one possible explanation is that violent purges and jackbooted pogroms are the sort of thing that fascist bad guys do in movies and TV.

That is why I say Trump is practicing a form of hyperreal fascism; its models are less prior fascist regimes than lurid media representations of those regimes. If you think I’m being a little glib when I say that Trump’s acolytes are self-consciously imitating pop culture supervillains, don’t take my word for it. Government departments now regularly post winking references to cinematic monsters like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, to say nothing of outright Nazi iconography. Everything else—the threats to invade Greenland, the concentration camps for undocumented immigrants, the invasion of Minneapolis—exists on the same continuum. It’s all part of the show.

The fact that all of this is being done for the sake of spectacle sometimes leads liberal elected officials and talking heads to mistake it for a “distraction” from real issues like the Epstein files or the price of gas. But that’s a mistake, and not only because the spectacle of ICE raids ruins real human lives. Spectacle is not a distraction from Trump’s real agenda; it is Trump’s real agenda. That does not make it any less dangerous. In some ways it is more dangerous, because the logic of spectacle is the logic of constant escalation.

We live in a hyperpolitical age, and so hyperfascism is not today’s only major hyperpolitical movement. The streamer Hasan Piker, for example, is probably better described as a “hyperleftist” than a bona fide socialist; his work bears little resemblance to what used to be understood as the meat and potatoes of socialist movement-building, with its emphasis on building up trade unions and other tightly organized institutions. Like the vast majority of political influencers, he is not a leader or organizer but an entrepreneur offering parasocial identification with a charismatic celebrity in place of anything resembling organized political action.

This is the form so many self-identified radical movements take at the end of history. They may advertise themselves as concrete alternatives to liberalism, but there’s nothing inside the tin. The good news is that this means hyperfascism can’t survive long as a governing ideology, because it has no program for long-term institution-building. The bad news is that there may be no limits to the damage it can cause if left unchecked. Hyperfascism’s sole imperative is to produce one horrible, transfixing image after another; the images themselves may be hyperreal, but the cost of creating them is all too real.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the titular character, a 20th-century French poet and essayist, sets out to “compose the Quixote.” Not a translation of Don Quixote, much less a contemporary spin on the original; in the words of the story’s narrator, Menard goes through a series of mental and physical exercises that will make it possible for him to "produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes."

The story’s humor and central idea come from the narrator’s insistence that Menard has written a better Quixote than Cervantes, even though the two texts are literally identical. The only difference between them is the context in which they were written. For example: "Cervantes crudely juxtaposes the humble provincial reality of his country against the fantasies of the romance, while Menard chooses as his 'reality' the land of Carmen during the century that saw the Battle of Lepanto and the plays of Lope de Vega."

The story is essentially an extended parody of modern literary criticism, or at least one strain of literary criticism. And it’s a pretty funny parody. But when I read the story now, I can’t help but think Borges’s unnamed narrator has a point. The context in which an artwork is created and the means of its creation are both part of the final product. When we read a novel or poem, or listen to music, or watch a movie, part of what we’re doing is absorbing the hyper-concentrated accretion of an artist (or group of artists’) life experiences, choices, and artistic practice. That’s what makes good art so personal and idiosyncratic, and it is also why there is some truth to the cliché that all writing is a form of autobiography.

I’ve been thinking about what goes into artistic creation ever since I learned of the recent death of jazz giant Sonny Rollins at the age of 95. Rollins was one of the greatest saxophone players of all time; some of this greatness might have come from his native genius, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that he drilled himself on the saxophone relentlessly. Famously, between 1959 and 1961, Rollins spent up to 16 hours a day practicing his instrument alone on the Williamsburg Bridge. He also developed a disciplined spiritual practice built around yoga.

I think you can hear the fruits of both these disciplines in his music, and not just because he was extremely technically proficient. This is a man who really knew his saxophone and was dedicated to exploring the full range of its rhythmic and melodic possibilities. Like any good jazz practitioner, he was also clearly interested in timbre, and subtle variations in sound and color that are untranscribable in Western musical notation.

In other words, Rollins was a consummate artist. His life is, in fact, an object lesson in what it means to be a true artist. Compare his obsessive self-discipline with the sort of just-one-click artistic output promised by generative AI’s boosters. If you ever pop over to X (which, to be clear, I don’t recommend), you’re likely to encounter some venture capital guy talking about how generative AI democratizes art by allowing people to “draw” without learning how to draw, or “compose music” without knowing a single thing about the art of composition.

But that’s not really artistic creation, no matter how convincing the results may be. Because the point of creation is never just the end product; it’s the practice. Rollins didn’t spend 16 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge trying to achieve a particular outcome. He was exploring musical possibilities and changing himself in ways that even he may not have understood. That process of exploration and self-definition is itself the point. It’s also the reason why his music conveys something meaningful, something irreducible to a verbal synopsis.

It’s possible to imagine a generative AI program that can perfectly reproduce a Sonny Rollins track that isn’t in its training data. We’re already years past the point where such programs can create “new” Bach compositions. But the narrator of “Pierre Menard” would pan these compositions, and he’d be right to do so.

That isn’t to say you can’t make art with generative AI. Another favorite musician of mine, Brian Eno, was developing procedurally generated soundscapes well before the current AI boom. But the process by which he arrived at these soundscapes is extremely important. He didn’t just type “give me a very long track that sounds like Brian Eno” into a chat box. In the case of his 2017 piece Reflection, a procedural algorithm that endlessly generates new musical variations, the app itself is part of the work of art. It is the result of a theoretically infinite number of subjective taste judgments and micro-adjustments made by Eno and his collaborators. It is also the product of one man’s more than 50 years of restless experimentation with ambient music. Eno, the artist, permeates Reflection; in a sense, he is offering an example of how generative models can be part of an artistic practice instead of serving as a hollow substitute.

Those years of work, that development of an idiosyncratic taste and sensibility, and all of those small choices are where art comes from. It originates somewhere in the hazy territory between mastery and surrender: mastery of one’s craft, but also surrender to one’s own instincts about what “feels” right. The generative models being pushed by those aforementioned X denizens minimize the role of both personal mastery and personal taste; instead of democratizing the ability to make art, they encourage people to fake artistry without engaging in the set of practices that gives art its meaning.

From one perspective, “Pierre Menard” is a sort of prank on literary critics, but from another, there’s something very admirable about its title character: he understands that to produce Don Quixote, he first needs to undergo a set of personal transformations. Borges makes clear that he isn’t trying to become Cervantes: he is trying to become the version of Pierre Menard who would write Don Quixote, a subtle but rich distinction.

Sonny Rollins was engaged in a purer artistic practice because he wasn’t trying to reproduce anything; he was exploring the possibilities of his own sound so that he could create Sonny Rollins’s music. There’s a lesson there, and not just for full-time artists.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

Way back in March 2023, the Urban Institute released a paper that broke new ground in the study of how pro-housing land use reforms affect housing supply. For the first time ever, the paper’s authors wrote, they would “use a machine-learning approach to identify a diversity of reforms, and then examine their effects in multiple cities simultaneously.” Finally, we would get something like a generally applicable formula describing how zoning changes relieve—or fail to relieve—housing supply shortages.

The results were disappointing. Based on their analysis of 180 different pro-housing reforms, they found that upzoning was associated with a mere 0.8 percent increase in housing supply within three to nine years. Worse, “this increase occurs predominantly for units at the higher end of the rent price distribution; we find no statistically significant evidence that additional lower-cost units became available or became less expensive in the years following reforms.” In other words, YIMBY land use reforms don’t benefit low-income households.

This finding was, of course, catnip to left-NIMBYs. In the three years since the study’s publication, numerous supply skeptic pundits and journalists have held it up as Exhibit A demonstrating that YIMBY reforms are, at best, futile. Supply skeptics Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan (who I later debated in Dissent) cited it in their anti-YIMBY Harvard Business Review essay. Michael Friedrich relied on the study in his New Republic essay, “The Case Against YIMBYism.” And it was featured in not one but two pieces from the Washington Monthly: one on “the meager agenda of abundance liberals” and another on why policymakers should “ignore the YIMBY playbook” (which, strangely, endorsed strategies that are very much part of the YIMBY playbook).

I always found the paper’s methodology to be suspect at best. Here’s what I wrote about it in my response to Friedrich, “The Case Against the Case Against YIMBYism”:

As it turns out, I was being too kind. The Urban Institute study doesn’t just fail to capture the nuances of land use reform; it’s also rife with serious factual errors.

Recently, researchers at the center-right American Enterprise Institute went back and checked the Urban Institute’s work by examining each data source and zoning reform in the study. The results of AEI’s own research are damning; so damning, in fact, that I think it’s fair to say I’ve never seen anything like it in the annals of academic debates over housing policy.

Here’s what the AEI researchers found after looking at all 180 of the Urban Institute’s data points [emphasis mine]:

No less than a fifth of the 180 land use changes were “attributed to the wrong city.” For example, the Urban Institute researchers said that a height limit increase in Aventura, Florida had actually taken effect in Miami. Why? Because the article about this increase appeared in the Miami Herald. (The article’s lead sentence is: “Developers who had plans to build in Aventura on hold can now proceed, but face stricter zoning laws.”)

As mentioned, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. There’s a whole cottage industry for anti-YIMBY academic papers with shoddy methodology, but this specific combination of poor methodology and pervasive data entry error is a novelty. As best as I can tell, it’s because the Urban Institute researchers were so confident in their machine learning tool that they didn’t bother to check the computer’s work. There’s a lesson here for anyone using large language models or machine learning for social science research: always check the computer’s work.

There’s another lesson, too. The academic consensus is that eliminating restrictive land use rules will generally lead to more homebuilding in high-demand areas, which will consequently drive down housing costs. There’s nothing wrong with publishing research that challenges an academic consensus; but in the case of this particular consensus, very few, if any, of the countervailing studies hold up to serious scrutiny. Because, as it so happens, YIMBYism does actually work.