NY Times Editorial Board Says America Must Build More Housing to Solve Affordability Crisis

A new editorial from the The New York Times editorial board is arguing that the United States cannot solve its housing affordability crisis without dramatically increasing housing production, directly challenging decades of restrictive zoning policies and anti-growth politics that have dominated many affluent coastal communities.

The editorial, published May 18 under the headline “America Needs to Build More Housing,” argues that soaring home prices are fundamentally the result of a prolonged mismatch between supply and demand, particularly in high-opportunity metropolitan regions that failed to build enough homes over several decades.

“The mismatch between supply and demand has caused home prices to soar in the 21st century, damaging both our economy and our social fabric,” the editorial board wrote. “High prices prevent families from buying homes, feeling fully invested in their communities and building wealth.”

The piece comes as California cities, including Davis, continue to grapple with fierce political debates over growth, affordability and land-use restrictions, while state housing officials increasingly pressure local governments to produce more housing at all income levels.

Central to the editorial is a graphic comparing housing production rates to home-price-to-income ratios across metropolitan areas nationwide. The chart shows that regions which built more housing over the last decade generally maintained lower housing costs, while regions that built less housing experienced some of the nation’s highest levels of unaffordability.

The editorial specifically points to cities like San Francisco, New York City and Boston as examples of places where housing production lagged while prices skyrocketed.

“The San Francisco Bay Area has built even fewer homes, resulting in one of the nation’s highest price-to-income ratios,” the board wrote.

By contrast, the editorial highlights Austin as an example of a metropolitan area that permitted substantially more housing construction and consequently maintained comparatively lower housing costs.

“Over the past decade, Austin has broken ground on 140 homes for every 1,000 households, compared with only 22 in San Francisco, 23 in New York and 27 in Boston,” the editorial board wrote. “Austin’s construction boom is one reason that, even as the local population has grown, home prices have fallen 13 percent in the past several years, and rents have fallen, too.”

The board added that Austin’s growth included both dense urban construction and suburban expansion, citing projects such as “a 66-story downtown skyscraper known as 6G” and “Easton Park, a suburban-style community where two-bedroom homes can sell for less than $325,000.”

The editorial does not claim Austin is inexpensive by historical standards. Instead, it argues the city avoided the much more severe affordability crisis facing many coastal metropolitan areas by allowing substantially more housing production.

“To be clear, Austin’s real estate market remains expensive,” the editorial board wrote. “Austin, too, would benefit from more construction.”

One of the most politically significant elements of the piece is its direct critique of progressive coastal cities that identify as liberal while maintaining restrictive housing policies.

“The situation in expensive coastal areas, however, is far worse,” the editorial board wrote. “They have enacted onerous zoning and building rules that limit home construction. They have allowed the ‘not in my backyard’ instinct to prevail.”

The editorial continues: “Many of these areas vote Democratic and identify as politically progressive, yet their housing policies have increased inequality.”

According to the board, restrictive housing policy has disproportionately benefited incumbent property owners while excluding younger and lower-income residents from access to high-opportunity communities.

“By maximizing home prices, these parts of blue America have benefited existing homeowners, who tend to be older and richer, at the expense of everyone else,” the editorial board wrote.

The board argues that the national relationship between home construction and affordability is stronger than many Americans recognize.

“Basic economic principles point to the solution: More supply of an item tends to lead to lower prices,” the editorial states. “Cities like Austin, Texas, have remained more affordable largely because they have built so many more homes.”

The editorial advocates two broad categories of reform: loosening zoning restrictions and streamlining permitting and approval processes.

“First, they should loosen zoning laws to allow more multifamily homes,” the board wrote. “In many places, it is legal to build only single-family houses, not apartment buildings, town homes or duplexes.”

The editorial argues these restrictions are particularly harmful in older metropolitan areas that lack significant undeveloped land and therefore require denser forms of housing to accommodate population growth.

“Older cities like Boston, New York and San Francisco rarely can…” the board wrote regarding outward expansion. “In these cities, the efficient use of space is even more important.”

The board points to recent reforms in states such as Oregon, where lawmakers moved to effectively eliminate single-family-only zoning in many areas.

“In 2019, Oregon became the first state to pass a law effectively ending single-family zoning,” the editorial notes. “Several other states, including Maine and Washington, have since passed similar laws.”

The editorial also criticizes lengthy and expensive permitting systems that can delay or kill housing projects even when zoning technically allows construction.

“Obtaining permits can be so labyrinthine that builders hire consultants whose sole job, for months or years, is to navigate the process,” the board wrote. “All told, permitting can raise the cost of development more than 30 percent and extend construction time by two years, according to a recent study of Los Angeles County.”

The editorial additionally warns that some well-intentioned policies can unintentionally suppress construction if they make projects financially infeasible.

“When officials insist that a development include too many affordable units, it can become unprofitable and never get built,” the board wrote, citing a decline in apartment permit applications in Denver following a new affordable housing mandate enacted in 2022.

The piece prominently quotes Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who framed the affordability crisis primarily as a production problem.

“Higher building costs and restrictive zoning have made it all but impossible in many places for builders to put up homes at price points that most Americans can afford,” Zandi said. “The key to solving the housing crisis is resolving the reasons why builders have been stymied from putting up more homes.”

The editorial also embraces the idea that even market-rate and luxury housing can indirectly improve affordability by reducing pressure on older housing stock.

“Austin highlights the alternative approach,” the editorial board wrote. “Its leaders understood that expanding the housing stock in any way, even with luxury apartment buildings, would ease pressure for renters or buyers at lower income levels.”

The board continued: “Higher-income residents move into the new construction, creating less demand for older buildings and reducing the prices to live there.”

That argument directly challenges a common criticism made by anti-growth activists who contend that market-rate construction does little to improve affordability.

Instead of emphasizing constraints, the editorial says Austin encouraged development through incentives.

“Instead of constraints, Austin offered perks,” the board wrote. “If an apartment building included affordable units or its design was environmentally friendly, the city relaxed restrictions on building height and size.”

The editorial concludes by arguing that the country already possesses decades of evidence demonstrating what policies are necessary to improve affordability.

“Americans are rightly frustrated about the high cost of housing,” the editorial board wrote. “Fortunately, the country has decades of evidence about how to bring down those costs: We need to build more homes.”

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