Why Your City Is Expensive

The Price Tag on Your Life

Your rent is too high. You know this. Everyone knows this. But here's what most people don't know: it didn't have to be this way.

Housing costs in most American cities, and increasingly in cities worldwide, aren't the result of natural market forces. They're not inevitable consequences of desirable locations or limited land. They're policy choices. Deliberate ones. Made by people who benefit from keeping things exactly as they are.

The Zoning Scam

Every American city has a zoning code. Most people never read theirs. They should.

Zoning determines what can be built where. On its face, that sounds reasonable; you probably don't want a slaughterhouse next to an elementary school. But modern zoning goes far, far beyond separating incompatible uses. It's become a tool for enforcing artificial scarcity.

In most residential areas of most American cities, it's literally illegal to build anything other than single-family homes. No duplexes. No small apartment buildings. No corner shops. Nothing but detached houses on individual lots, stretching to the horizon.

This is insane.

Think about what this means. You take a city, a place where people gather specifically because density creates opportunity, and you legally mandate that most of it remain low-density forever. You freeze the built environment in amber, ensuring that supply can never catch up with demand.

And then people wonder why housing costs keep rising.

Who Benefits

Here's the thing about expensive housing: someone's making money on it.

Existing homeowners, people who already bought in, benefit enormously from rising prices. Their property values go up. Their net worth increases. They can refinance, take out equity, feel wealthy. Every new restriction on building, every rejected development proposal, every downzoning that reduces allowed density, it all makes their investment more valuable.

This isn't speculation. It's the explicit motivation behind much of local housing politics. Homeowners show up to city council meetings and planning commission hearings to oppose new construction. They form neighborhood associations dedicated to blocking development. They hire lawyers to challenge building permits.

They call themselves concerned citizens protecting neighborhood character. But let's be honest about what's happening: they're protecting their property values by restricting supply.

The NIMBY Coalition

NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) has become a term of derision. But the movement it describes is enormously powerful and politically sophisticated.

NIMBYs span the political spectrum. You'll find conservatives worried about traffic and liberals worried about gentrification. You'll find environmentalists claiming density destroys green space and preservationists claiming it destroys historic character. The specific arguments change depending on the audience, but the outcome is always the same: nothing gets built.

This coalition is remarkably effective because it unites people who agree on almost nothing else. A neighborhood association fighting a proposed apartment building might include elderly homeowners worried about parking, young parents worried about school crowding, and activists worried about displacement, all working together to block housing that would lower costs for everyone else.

The genius of NIMBYism is that it operates at the local level, where organized opposition has maximum impact. City council members and planning commissioners are exquisitely sensitive to constituent pressure. A few dozen angry emails can kill a project that would house hundreds of families.

And so nothing gets built.

The Consequences

The housing shortage isn't an abstraction. It's people sleeping in cars. It's families doubled up in apartments designed for half as many occupants. It's young people unable to form households, move out, start their lives.

It's also economic stagnation. When housing costs consume most of people's incomes, they can't spend money on other things. When workers can't afford to live near good jobs, labor markets don't function properly. When the most productive cities price out everyone except the wealthy, human potential gets squandered.

Some economists estimate that restrictive zoning in major American cities has cost trillions in lost GDP. Trillions. Because we collectively decided that neighborhood character matters more than human flourishing.

The Solutions Nobody Wants

The fix is obvious: build more housing. Allow more density. Legalize apartments in residential neighborhoods. Let developers respond to demand by increasing supply.

This isn't complicated economics. It's the same logic that applies to any other scarce good. If there's not enough of something people want, you make more of it.

But obvious solutions require political will that doesn't exist. Every potential housing site has neighbors who will oppose development. Every city council member has constituents who bought houses expecting their neighborhoods to stay exactly the same forever.

Some states have started overriding local zoning to allow more housing. This helps, but it's swimming against a powerful current. Homeowner politics remains dominant at every level of government. The people most harmed by housing scarcity (renters, young people, those not yet living in a place) are systematically underrepresented in local political processes.

It's a Choice

Maybe the most frustrating thing about the housing crisis is that it's entirely self-inflicted.

We didn't run out of land. We didn't run out of materials or labor or know-how. We simply decided, through thousands of local political decisions each defended as protecting something valuable, that we wouldn't allow enough housing to be built.

The housing crisis is a policy choice. It's defended by people who benefit from artificial scarcity. And it will continue until enough people decide that human beings matter more than property values.

Your city is expensive because the people who live there decided it should be. Because existing residents have more political power than potential ones. Because protecting what exists takes precedence over creating what's needed.

This could change. Zoning codes can be rewritten. Development can be allowed. Supply can increase. Costs can fall.

But it won't happen by accident. The forces defending the status quo are organized, motivated, and deeply invested in keeping things exactly as they are. Changing that requires understanding what's actually happening, and who's actually responsible.

Your rent is too high because someone decided it should be.

Maybe it's time to decide differently.