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.

Apologies for not publishing anything last week. I was wrapping up edits on my forthcoming book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It. The good news is, the book is done! You can preorder it now from Bookshop.org. Now that I’ve gotten it in the best shape I can, back to our regular publication schedule.

Remember “The Flight 93 Election?” Almost exactly 10 years ago, the right-wing intellectual and tailoring aficionado Michael Anton penned an essay for the Claremont Review of Books that soon became one of the defining texts of the Trump era. Writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Anton framed the 2016 presidential election as an existential battle; electing Hillary Clinton would mean certain destruction for the American republic, whereas electing Donald Trump would ensure that the United States retained at least a fighting chance.

Here’s the essay’s now-famous opening:

“To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic,” he confesses. And not just to ordinary conservatives! Revisiting the essay this past week, I found it overheated to the point of unreadability. Here are just a few examples of the social ills that Anton attributes to liberalism: “the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers”; “Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents [and] the gaslighting denial by the media”; “the wars on ‘cis-genderism’—formerly known as ‘nature’—and on the supposed ‘white privilege’ of broke hillbillies”; “the flood of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism”; you get the idea. As with a lot of what passes for the Right’s more intellectually sophisticated output, this is basically Limbaugh-ism seasoned with a few scattered references to Livy.

And yet I’ve found myself thinking about “The Flight 93 Election” a lot recently. Not so much the essay itself, but its central conceit: the notion of an election that, depending on its outcome, augurs either the end of the American experiment or the thin possibility of its renewal. As the reference to Flight 93 suggests, the patriots who stared down that choice would be obliged to take extraordinary measures in order to prevent disaster.

Which brings us to last week’s election in Virginia, where voters narrowly signed off on a partisan gerrymander that advantages Democrats. This, like last year’s California gerrymander, was a tit-for-tat response to Republicans’ own efforts to rig the 2026 midterm map in their favor. My sense is that most Democrats have reconciled themselves to this sort of hardball politics, but a certain squeamishness remains, even among some of those who voted for the redistrictings. A common view holds that Democratic gerrymandering is an unpleasant necessity to check Republican gerrymandering.

I don’t disagree with this view, but I would add one more consideration. It’s not just that refusing to gerrymander Democrat-controlled states would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament; it’s that the stakes in 2026 and 2028 are so high that the Democratic Party must be permitted to play legal and constitutional hardball—in fact, that it has a moral obligation to play hardball.

Consider just a few of the outrages we’ve collectively witnessed since January 2025. Trump has turned ICE into his own secret police force and had them conduct what can only be described as a series of state-sanctioned pogroms. The administration has built concentration camps and sought to turn asylum seekers into stateless peoples. Pete Hegseth has been systematically re-segregating the armed forces. Trump launched an illegal and unprovoked war against Iran and then publicly threatened genocide against the Iranian people. Elon Musk’s DOGE illegally dismantled USAID, a move that may ultimately kill 14 million people.

In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton writes that the United States has been sliding into terminal decline for at least the past 20 years. “If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988,” before trying to remind us all of his erudition with a reference to the Carthaginian commander Hannibal. As with Anton’s notion of an existential election, we can easily apply this declinist narrative to the Left/liberalism’s current predicament. The United States has only been a full liberal democracy since, at earliest, the mid-1960s, and that democracy has been under attack from the Right since more or less the moment of its birth. In the 1980s, Reagan—the last president under whom the Right wasn’t “losing,” according to Anton—helped cement the conservative movement’s monopoly on the GOP and ushered in a post-New-Deal-coalition political order that saw the steady erosion of the New Deal social contract.

Trump is sui generis, but he is also a culmination and the climactic figure in this political order. He is also an avatar for the dark forces that the Reaganites once relegated to junior partner status, which is no doubt part of his appeal to Anton. Similarly, “The Flight 93 Election” presents Hillary Clinton—Hillary Clinton—as a radical whose administration would be “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments.”

Trump doesn’t have a consolidated, authoritarian regime, and he probably lacks the temperament and competence to build one. But in the unlikely scenario that Republicans retain unified control of Congress after November, and/or that they elect a successor to Trump in 2028, regime consolidation will stay within the realm of possibility. And it’s no great mystery what MAGA would do with a firm lock on federal power. After the 2020 election, in a piece for another Claremont publication, Glenn Ellmers wrote that “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” JD Vance has endorsed a book by a regime ally that goes even further, referring to progressives as “unhumans.” They are creating a permission structure for domestic terror on an unimaginable scale.

If that isn’t a “Flight 93” scenario, I don’t know what is. Things have reached a point where it is no longer sufficient for Democrats to win back the House this year and the presidency in two. If the current structure of American politics remains basically unaltered, and thermostatic politics sweeps Tucker Carlson or JD Vance into the Oval Office in 2032 or 2036, then the United States will have only delayed catastrophe, not averted it. What makes the next couple of elections into “Flight 93 elections” is not just the stakes of defeat, but the scale of the political challenge that would follow victory: restructuring the American political system to establish a revitalized social contract and lock fascists out of power.

Which means that we don’t just need victories but generational blowouts. With those stakes in mind, it scarcely makes sense to ask whether time-limited Democratic gerrymanders are going too far; they can both increase the likelihood of such a blowout and act as a demonstration of Democrats’ newfound willingness to do what is necessary to preserve (small-r) republic government. To quote Michael Anton: “I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.” Truer words, etc.

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 is just a quick one because I’m neck deep in final edits for Build or Die. But I did want to post a few reflections on the sorry state of California’s gubernatorial race.

That race took an especially sordid turn late last week when the San Francisco Chronicle reported credible allegations that Eric Swalwell, the Democratic frontrunner, had sexually assaulted at least one staffer in his congressional office. (Swalwell resigned over the weekend.) But even before the evidence against him came to light, the Democratic field was in a sorry state. On the merits, all the candidates hovered somewhere in a narrow band between “absolutely not” and “okay, fine, I guess?”. The failure of any one of them to break ahead of the pack—along with the failure of the California Democrats’ half-hearted attempts to persuade some of the no-hope contenders to drop out—raised the odds that the two main Republicans in the race could grab the top slots in the jungle primary, locking Democrats out of the November runoff and forcing the voters of a deep blue state to choose between a MAGA candidate and an even more MAGA candidate. Only Trump’s inexplicable decision to endorse one of the Republicans and thereby anoint a clear frontrunner on the GOP side may have saved Democrats from a lockout.

All of which makes one wonder how Democrats ended up in such an embarassing (or, as of last week, far worse than embarassing) position. California is a big state with no shortage of talented, ambitious Democrats. So why does the party’s gubernatorial bench look so dire?

One reason is that we currently find ourselves in a very Californian version of the Year of the Four Emperors that followed the collapse of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty. The Julio-Claudians had ruled Rome since the establishment of the empire under Augustus circa 27 BCE; in 68 CE, the dynasty came to an ignominious end with the assassination of Nero, leaving no obvious successor. Over the course of 69, various claimants marshalled their armies and jockeyed for the throne, but no one was able to consolidate power until Vespasian finally restored some semblance of order near the end of the year.

No one has been assassinated, but California similarly finds itself foundering in the aftermath of a dynasty’s extinction. For the state’s entire post-war history, every single Democratic governor has been either a member of the Brown family or someone connected to the Browns: Pat Brown from 1959 to 1967, Jerry Brown from 1975 to 1983, Gray Davis (Jerry’s former chief of staff) from 1999 to 2003, Jerry again from 2011 to 2019, and finally Gavin Newsom (Jerry’s lieutenant governor) from 2019 to the present day.

Of the four, Newsom had the weakest dynastic claim; lieutenant governors and governors do not run on the same ticket, and by all accounts Jerry did not think much of his heir apparent. But Newsom was closely connected to another Brown: Willie Brown (no relation), the former Assembly Speaker, San Francisco Mayor, and foremost practitioner of machine politics in the California’s modern history. It was Willie who helped mold the early political careers of both Newsom and Kamala Harris.

So Newsom is a sort of transitional figure, poised between the end of the Pat/Jerry Brown dynasty and whatever comes next. But he has shown little interest in succession planning, much less California politics in general. Kamala Harris would have been the obvious choice for a successor, but she opted not to run, probably because she wants to take a third crack at running for president in 2028. Attorney General Rob Bonta, another strong contender, also opted out of running; after it became clear that he was staying out of the race, some California Democrats made a hail mary attempt to draft Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, but she also demurred.

In an organized party system, Democratic elites might have been able to coordinate internally and put forth a consensus pick to replace Newsom; at the very least, each distinct party faction could have put forth their own candidate. (To my great frustration, the demurral of both Bonta and Wicks means there is no clear YIMBY favorite in the race, even though most of the candidates are making pro-housing noises.) But American political parties are anemic, and they’re especially anemic in California, thanks in part to institutions like the jungle primary. To borrow a term from the political scientist Julia Azari, the Golden State is a land of strong partisanship and weak parties; most voters and elected officials are Democrats, but the California Democrats have few mechanisms for enforcing anything resembling party discipline. No one is in charge.

A lot of readers will probably regard that as a good thing; isn’t it better to let the people decide, rather than party elites? But it’s difficult for voters to reach any sort of satisfying decision when they are presented with choices that are so underwhelming and indistinct. And that’s not even the worst case scenario when it comes to a weak party system; the worst case scenario is that an authoritarian demagogue like Trump pulls off a successful coup within one of the major parties.

That isn’t likely to happen in California, but the state may have just gotten alarmingly close to electing a serial abuser as governor. To be fair, Swalwell was the choice of many party elites as well: he snagged early endorsements from Senators Adam Schiff and Ruben Gallego, along with almost 20 other House members. He also rose to prominence in the House thanks in part to the stewardship of Nancy Pelosi.

All of which raises another question: what did all of these Democratic leaders know, and when did they know it? Since the news about Swalwell broke, a number of congressional staffers and journalists have suggested that his alleged misconduct was an open secret in Washington. His top supporters should be made to publicly explain whether they knowingly endorsed someone they knew might be a rapist to govern the largest state in the country.