Supply and the Housing Crisis: A Debate
Supply and the Housing Crisis: A Debate
How do we achieve housing for all?
After decades of relative stagnation, American housing policy is now several years into a period of radical change and experimentation. In California, where I am policy director for the state-level organization California YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard), city planners will often gripe (with, I have to admit, some justification) that state housing law is changing too quickly for them to keep up. Several other states—including Washington, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Florida, and Rhode Island—have enacted their own ambitious housing reforms, with more following each year. Cities like Minneapolis, Sacramento, Austin, and Spokane have redrawn their zoning maps and removed non-zoning barriers to housing production such as minimum parking requirements; meanwhile, New York City is moving ahead with its pro-housing “City of Yes” plan, though its ultimate fate remains uncertain.
At the same time, researchers have been steadily adding to our understanding of the relationship between land use rules, housing supply, and housing costs. Evan Mast’s pathbreaking “chain of moves” research shows how new housing production can set off a cascade effect throughout the market, lowering rents for everyone. Xiaodi Li has isolated the effect of new housing on prices within a block radius. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern have explored the relationship between homelessness, housing costs, and proxies for housing supply such as vacancy rates. And a number of contemporary scholars—including but not limited to Jessica Trounstine, Jacob Anbinder, Sheryll Cashin, and Richard Rothstein—have illuminated the forces that shaped America’s housing crisis in the first place.
The balance of this research firmly supports the YIMBY analysis that legalizing more housing development in supply-constrained cities will ease the housing crisis. But despite the growing evidence and the shifting politics of housing, intra-left debates over the crisis remain oddly stuck in place. To supply skeptics, YIMBYs are still “market fundamentalists” pursuing a right-wing, deregulatory agenda. Their technocratic, market-based plans cannot possibly end the housing crisis; the only solution is massive public investment and decommodification.
The empirical case for the supply-skeptic argument is thin and getting thinner every year; mostly, supply skeptics on the left are forced to rely on a small handful of already debunked studies with deeply flawed methodologies. But that’s OK, because the core of their argument is philosophical, not conceptual: deregulated markets exist to enrich capitalists, and so any policy that relies on market instruments will inevitably tend to benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else. As Dave Madden and Peter Marcuse wrote in In Defense of Housing, a foundational text for supply skeptics of the left, “Removing the regulations that rein in property owners shifts power towards capital and away from residents—while also, not coincidentally, making land more valuable and more amenable to speculation.”
Embedded in this argument is an odd sort of inverted market fundamentalism. Both bona fide market fundamentalists and supply skeptics tend to describe “the market” as a single coherent entity, locked in a zero-sum struggle with the forces of economic democracy. Because neoliberals believe that expanding the market is an end unto itself, leftists must adopt constraining the market as an end unto itself.
Instead of simply reversing the moral polarity on folk neoliberalism, the left should think its way out of neoliberal habits of mind entirely. Ironically, Marcuse and Madden hint at how to do this when, invoking Karl Polanyi, they note that markets are neither self-regulating nor independent of the state. “The state cannot ‘get out’ of housing markets because the state is one of the institutions that creates them,” they write. “Government sets the rules of the game.”
Though Marcuse and Madden fail to take their own insight seriously, there’s nothing to stop us from doing so. If government sets the rules of the market, then the market does not have to inherently be any one thing or satisfy any one set of goals; the state can establish and tinker with various markets in the interest of producing certain outcomes. Whether these are the right outcomes is a political question. Whether market mechanisms are the best instrument for producing them is both a political question and a technical one.
Nor do we need to accept an either/or distinction between using market tools and employing non-market state intervention to achieve our ends. In fact, these two approaches are complementary. Consider the city of Houston, which was able to reduce homelessness by nearly two-thirds within the space of a decade. They did this by providing deeply subsidized housing to unhoused residents without preconditions. But this “Housing First” approach was successful only because Houston has a thriving private housing development industry; the city’s abundance of private housing kept rents down, which prevented future increases in homelessness and lowered the per-person cost of subsidizing rents for people just exiting homelessness. Compare Houston’s experience to that of San Francisco—a city with highly restrictive land use rules, billions of dollars in subsidies for affordable housing, and chronic mass homelessness.
Pairing market instruments with non-market tools may be emotionally unsatisfying to those who would prefer a more direct confrontation with capital. A common complaint among the left’s YIMBY skeptics is that legalizing the production of more homes is not in any way redistributive and, worse, does nothing to punish the capitalist class.
This is simply untrue. A city that builds enough housing to bring down rents is effectively taking money from landlords and returning it to their tenants. The root of this misconception is another conceptual error: a dogmatic belief that every conflict in the housing market can be reduced to a clash between labor and capital. In fact, much of the real estate sector comprises actors with wildly divergent interests: large developers who are satisfied with land use rules as they currently exist, smaller developers who want to be able to build a wider variety of housing, institutional landlords who profit off of housing scarcity, and homeowners who have become wealthy off of home price inflation, to name just a few. (Real estate investment trusts will often be explicit in their investor statements about the fact that when developers are unable to build new housing, REIT investors benefit.)
We should be unromantic about what this means. If we remove barriers to market housing production, some capitalist firms will benefit; if we don’t, other capitalist firms—the ones that profit off of housing scarcity—will benefit instead. Prioritizing housing for all as an objective over penalizing particular enemies in the capitalist class is both more strategically coherent and, ultimately, more morally righteous. And in the fight to achieve more housing for all, we should not dogmatically insist on using only certain means to get there. With the stakes so high, we can’t afford that kind of indulgence.
—Ned Resnikoff
Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan Respond
The YIMBY movement insists that raising the supply of housing is the master key to reducing upward pressure on housing costs. If supply increases, the argument goes, competition among property managers and owners for buyers and tenants will reliably lower housing costs. YIMBYs focus on one particular barrier to increasing supply: public restrictions on housing construction, such as parking minimums and single-family zoning rules. Remove these barriers and free developers to do their thing, YIMBYS claim, and the market will deliver. A more progressive YIMBY program augments deregulation with subsidies to developers to build housing for low-income households.
The empirical evidence on the YIMBY program so far is decidedly mixed, suggesting upzoning (raising allowable density on a plot of land) alone may not dramatically increase supply or reduce rents. While we agree that upzoning may be necessary, and we recognize zoning’s racist and classist origins and effects (particularly in the suburbs), zoning reforms by themselves are unlikely to be sufficient. Indeed, the existing evidence suggests that while removing government land use regulations can result in a somewhat increased housing supply, it is simply not up to the scale of the challenge of providing housing for all. While a study of Auckland, New Zealand, widely hailed by YIMBYs for its citywide upzoning in 2016, found an increase in permits for home construction in the following six years, studies of other upzoning efforts have come to different conclusions. A study of a major upzoning program in Chicago found that it failed to stimulate construction in the short or medium term, but it did raise the transaction values of affected parcels. Similar results seem to have followed upzoning in Brisbane, Australia. These results reveal the important distinction between upzoning, which provides the option to build more, and a mandate to build more.
Moreover, while increasing the supply of housing is one way to discipline landlords into lowering rents, it is far from sufficient in a relationship characterized by a power imbalance as fundamental as that of landlord and tenant. Housing markets, like labor markets, are power-laden. Simply increasing the number of landlords in housing markets is not enough to eliminate this market power, just as increasing the number of employers is not enough to eliminate their power over workers.
Drawing on the theories of economic sociologist Karl Polanyi, Ned Resnikoff tries to shift the housing debate away from what he views as an unhelpful dichotomy between pro-market and anti-market reforms. He diagnoses the roots of progressive opposition to the deregulatory aims of the YIMBY movement in what he views as an ideological fetishization of non-market solutions to the housing crisis. He accuses non-YIMBY “supply skeptics” of failing to grasp what he sees as a major insight of Polanyi’s: markets don’t exist in the abstract but rather are embedded in social institutions. It follows that debating whether a policy is pro- or anti-market is a distraction from the more important question of how these markets are structured and governed. By ignoring the nuances of specific market arrangements, he argues, the left is led to the opposite extreme of the pro-market right: knee-jerk rejection of market solutions.
As an antitrust economist and lawyer, we fully agree that the details of market governance, rather than vague constructs, are paramount. Indeed, we have repeatedly argued that markets are neither monoliths nor abstractions, but rather deeply structured and created by power and policy. In our view, democratic policymaking has the task of steering markets in publicly favored directions (more innovation, lower prices, higher employment and wages) and away from publicly disfavored directions (fraud, product adulteration, low wages). Labor laws protect the right of workers to unionize, bargain collectively, and strike; antitrust laws prohibit monopolization and unfair methods of competition; and landlord-tenant laws give residents protections against dangerous housing conditions and unfair rent increases.
Where we diverge from Resnikoff is when it comes to his conclusion that the modest program of deregulation of land use rules and subsidies to private developers are sufficient to make a major dent in the housing crisis, particularly for working-class families and individuals. He neglects Polanyi’s other key insight: that certain commodities, specifically labor, money, and land, are not ordinary commodities. Rather, they are what Polanyi called “fictitious commodities.” Unlike cell phones or candy bars, they are not produced for sale in the market in the first place: indeed, land preexists not just markets but humanity itself and is generally fixed in supply. Being truly Polanyian about housing markets means taking seriously the housing justice movement’s emphasis on the special nature of land.
While Resnikoff uses his interpretation of Polanyi’s ideas on the social embeddedness of markets to critique the YIMBY skeptics, he does not grapple with how this widely expands the scope of possibilities. Given the legal and social construction of markets, potential policy reforms are not confined to upzoning and provision of new tax credits. The federal government, states, and localities can radically remake housing markets to end the multidecade affordability crisis, which has become more acute in recent years.
Resnikoff highlights Houston, a city with virtually no zoning rules, as a YIMBY success story compared to more restrictive San Francisco. But Houston is far from the dense, walkable, “fifteen-minute city” YIMBYs promise to create. San Francisco’s density is over 17,000 residents per square mile. Houston’s is 3,600. Houston has built out, not up: developers, chasing cheap land and inexpensive builds, have constructed leapfrogging tracts of low-density housing on the outskirts of the city, leaving many infill parcels undeveloped. Moreover, these suburban developments are not free of land use regulations. Rather, they are governed by private zoning rules, enacted by developers and enforced by homeowner associations. In fact, Houston might benefit from restrictions on suburban sprawl, to direct more development to the center of the city.
At the end of the day, private developers and landlords are motivated by profit and stand to lose from lower rents. That’s why landlords across the country have allegedly colluded with one another to raise rents, facilitated by the rent-setting software provider RealPage—further blunting the effect of zoning reforms.
Competition policy, then, in addition to land use reform, has a major role to play in housing policy. But the role of policy goes beyond antitrust. As we argued recently in Harvard Business Review, the overarching problem is that private developers and landlords simply lack the incentives to provide an adequate supply of decent housing at fair prices for all. Merely enticing private actors to build more, let alone just getting out of their way, will not suffice. To deal with this reality, the state has no choice but to take a more active role in the housing market, both by establishing and enforcing fair rules for market conduct—disciplining private actors through antitrust, tenant protection rules, and rent-regulation policy—and also through direct provisioning of decent housing, or social housing. (As an aside, a federal housing authority building homes on federally owned land would not necessarily be bound by existing local zoning rules, meaning zoning reform is neither required nor sufficient.)
The YIMBY agenda lacks a serious commitment to housing for all as a social right. By contrast, for those who see housing as a right, the role of the state in structuring markets expands beyond the YIMBY vision of increasing supply at the margin through deregulation. In our view, the creation of rights such as rent controls and protections against at-will eviction and increasing public investment in and social provision of housing are key examples of public market governance, not wholesale challenges to the basic idea of a market in housing. These reforms recognize the inevitable shortcomings of relying on profit incentives to allocate housing based on one’s ability to pay.
Ultimately, while accusing others of anti-market ideology, the YIMBY program is in apparent denial about its own ideological commitments. Although representing their movement as pure-and-simple pragmatism, or competent technocracy devoid of ideology, Resnikoff, by embracing Polanyi’s conception of markets and society, ironically exposes the ideology informing the YIMBY cause. A Polanyian worldview greatly broadens, or should broaden, the political imagination: markets are not fixed but plastic and subject to reconstruction by the state. Even as he embraces Polanyi, Resnikoff limits himself to subtracting public restrictions on construction and adding new subsidies for home developers. Critics understandably might call this program “profits for all” rather than “housing for all.” A true housing for all program demands more—rent control, just cause protections, and social housing—to meet the scale of the crisis we face.
—Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan
Ned Resnikoff Replies
Callaci and Vaheesan write that “the YIMBY program is in apparent denial about its own ideological commitments.” It is a strange thing to be told you do not know your own beliefs.
But perhaps it is Callaci and Vaheesan who are confused about the YIMBY program. They write that YIMBYs lack “a serious commitment to housing for all as a social right,” citing the fact that “Resnikoff limits himself to removing public restrictions on construction and adding new subsidies for home developers.” Except that I do no such thing. Instead of responding to what I actually wrote, Callaci and Vaheesan are engaging in a time-honored tradition: making up a guy to get mad at.
Against the cramped vision of this imagined Ned Resnikoff, Callaci and Vaheesan propose a housing reform agenda that includes “the creation of social rights such as rent controls, protections against at-will eviction, and increasing public investment in and social provision of housing.” Never mind that I support all three, or that the whole point of my first essay was that non-market interventions like tenant protections and public investment in housing are entirely compatible with the YIMBY program. In fact, YIMBY groups across the country—very much including my employer, California YIMBY—have spent years pushing to strengthen tenant protections and social investment in housing.
In California, YIMBYs supported the passage of the Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which for the first time instituted statewide rent stabilization and just cause eviction protections. Similarly, YIMBYs have repeatedly turned out to support funding measures for affordable housing and the creation of state and local social housing programs. None of this is a secret; if you visit California YIMBY’s website and navigate to the Policy Framework section, you can find recommendations such as “Create a permanent social housing developer” and “Create and fund a statewide right to counsel”—both of which were written by yours truly.
Granted, the YIMBY movement is a big tent that includes everyone from dedicated socialists to free-market conservatives. Not every member of the coalition is on board with these proposals. And even among those who generally support rent control or social housing development, there is plenty of healthy debate over the details of proper policy design and implementation. But there is nothing in the fundamental YIMBY diagnosis of America’s housing crisis that precludes such measures.
Notably, Callaci and Vaheesan don’t contest the fundamental YIMBY diagnosis. They admit with palpable reluctance that “upzoning may be necessary,” tacitly accepting the premise that the United States has a shortage of housing in high-demand areas. Where we disagree is over the relative importance we each assign to land use reform. As Callaci and Vaheesan formulate their position, “upzoning alone may not dramatically increase supply nor reduce rents.”
That claim includes a revealing conceptual error: Callaci and Vaheesan casually identify upzoning with land use reform in general, as if restrictive zoning is the sole regulatory obstacle to housing development. I can think of no prominent YIMBY who thinks “upzoning alone” will solve the housing crisis. Again, the recent history of California YIMBY belies this claim: our sponsored legislation in 2023 and 2024 featured bills on permitting, environmental review, impact fees, and historic preservation, among other things.
Callaci and Vaheesan’s conflation of zoning and land use regulation writ large leads them to overinterpret the results of Yonah Freemark’s Chicago upzoning study. The reforms under examination in that study did not touch aldermanic privilege, the longstanding custom that grants Chicago aldermen untrammeled veto power over any construction within their districts. But in many jurisdictions, removing these choke points is as important as changes to local zoning; after all, increasing the allowable building height in a particular neighborhood won’t have much of an impact if local power brokers can still unilaterally kill any projects they decide are too tall. All the Chicago study indicates is what YIMBYs have already known for years: that upzoning needs to be paired with permit streamlining and other land use overhauls to be successful.
Indeed, when multiple land use reforms are combined into a coherent package, you do see housing supply growth in high-demand areas. So far the clearest proof of concept is California’s accessory dwelling unit (ADU) reforms. (ADUs are additional housing units that homeowners can add onto a main residence.) My colleague M. Nolan Gray has found that ADU reform facilitated the entitlement of nearly 84,000 housing units over a six-year period. That’s nowhere near enough to end the housing crisis, but it is a hell of a lot of new granny flats and backyard cottages. In San Diego, some ADU projects are miniature apartment complexes in their own right.
Given the clear success of the ADU reforms and the complementarity between YIMBY policies and Callaci and Vaheesan’s preferred interventions, alert readers might reasonably ask what we are even arguing about. I have to admit to some confusion myself. Why are my interlocutors so attached to their conception of YIMBYs as unreconstructed market-worshippers that they’re left insisting that I can’t possibly believe what I say I believe?
I suspect the answer is that committed anti-YIMBYs of the left are now fighting a rearguard action. It is no longer possible to deny the existence of the housing shortage; similarly, no one can credibly dismiss the evidence that draconian land use rules are the main cause for this shortage. The final refuge for anti-YIMBYs lies in minimizing the importance of reversing those draconian land use rules—and in pretending that the YIMBY program is incompatible with other ambitious housing goals, despite the years of work many YIMBYs have put into realizing these goals.
This is shadowboxing, and it’s a waste of time and energy. Our effort would be better directed toward achieving a greater synthesis. We should be assembling the political coalition that will end the housing crisis, not inventing reasons to keep one group or another out of the coalition. Housing for all is far more important than empty point-scoring.
—Ned Resnikoff
Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan Reply
In a surprisingly strident rebuttal to our first contribution to this exchange, Resnikoff accuses us of “making up a guy to get mad at.” We leave it to the reader to determine whether we have committed that sin, or otherwise misrepresented the views expressed in his initial essay. In our latest contribution, we attempt to separate the heat from the light and clarify our areas of agreement and disagreement more.
Our initial piece recognized some truth in the YIMBY position: namely, that land use reforms are likely necessary, particularly where the wealthy have used zoning rules to exclude poorer would-be neighbors and indirectly keep out people of color. While Resnikoff’s rebuttal accuses us of making the acknowledgement with “palpable reluctance,” we can assure him that his attempt at mind-reading is mistaken. We mean what we write.
Likewise, in his latest contribution to this exchange, Resnikoff acknowledges some virtues in our position. For example, he agrees that “rent controls, protections against at-will eviction, and increasing public investment in and social provision of housing” are also necessary policies, in addition to land use reform. It appears there is some common ground to be found after all, although we wonder why he hardly mentioned these policies in his initial essay, which focused on land use reforms.
Since we seem to agree on so much, why such a heated exchange? In our view, it comes down to our diverging diagnoses of the root problem, and thus our policy priorities for fixing it. Indeed, Resnikoff hits the nail on the head when he writes, “Where we disagree is over the relative importance we each assign to land use reform.” Resnikoff believes land use reform is the single most important policy change in the basket of reforms. We would place land use reform closer to the bottom of the list.
Land use reform, of course, is broader than zoning. Resnikoff dings us for using the phrase “upzoning” as shorthand for all land use reforms, reminding us that his own organization, California YIMBY, supports not only upzoning but also legislation on “permitting, environmental review, impact fees, and historic preservation, among other things.” In response, we note that we highlighted removing “public restrictions on housing construction” as the main part of the YIMBY program. Of course these public rules encompass more than zoning and other limits on quantity and type of construction. So, to rephrase: we do not believe the land use reform agenda—deregulating not only zoning but also permitting, environmental review, impact fees, and historic preservation—is sufficient to curb the power of landlords and solve the housing crisis.
To ensure we both agree on what disagree about, at this point it would be helpful for us to summarize the YIMBY viewpoint as we understand it. YIMBYs argue that there is a housing shortage driving the affordability crisis, and land use restrictions are the root cause. It follows that freeing developers from these burdensome regulations, and allowing them to build (and landlords to lease) a greater quantity of housing units at market rates, will bring about broad housing affordability. YIMBYs further argue that even if developers, chasing market demand, build mostly luxury housing, the increased supply and subsequent lower rents at the luxury level will eventually filter down to the poorest as people move, hermit crab-style, into incrementally better housing.
Our main objection to YIMBYism is not that we oppose all land use reforms. Rather, we reject the YIMBY movement’s laser-like focus on land regulation over other, we believe more important, causes generating unaffordable rents. We already mentioned one of these other factors in our first reply: the market power of landlords as individuals and a class, supercharged by rent-fixing software, to control access to basic shelter and raise rents even if more housing gets built. Land use reform, as we argue in that essay, is not enough to rebalance the fundamentally unbalanced landlord-tenant power dynamic.
Additionally, liberalizing regulations on land use is not a cost-free policy. Because these reforms raise a plot’s expected profits, they can trigger the speculative buying and selling of land, enriching landlords and displacing existing residential and commercial tenants. Ironically, the class that YIMBYs claim to target with their program—landlords—may pocket a handsome windfall when their property is rezoned for, in the language of land-use law, “the highest and best use.”
Profit expectations, which guide investment decisions, are shaped by income distribution, interest rates, demographics, land prices, and costs of construction. As we noted in our initial reply, YIMBYs elide the critical difference between a legal right to build housing and building housing: developers may have the right to build housing but not exercise it for years due to forecasts of insufficient profits. In Sunbelt cities like Phoenix, developers have left infill parcels of the central city undeveloped in pursuit of cheaper land and greater profits in the exurbs. Recently, builders in Melbourne, Australia, demolished apartments to make way for mansions.
The YIMBY movement’s focus on liberating developers from public regulations ignores the most fundamental feature of market exchange: markets allocate goods, including housing, according to ability to pay. Since it is people with dollars, not simply people, that buy apartments and pay rent, what private developers do is supply a quantity and diversity of housing that reflects the underlying income and wealth distribution, not human need.
YIMBYism focuses singularly on the incremental effects of local regulatory policy changes, holding all other factors in the broader economic context equal. But broader policy changes, not regulation, are what caused the current crisis in the first place. A major factor putting pressure on housing markets in the nation’s leading cities has been the rich outbidding the middle class and poor in those housing markets. Skyrocketing demand for luxury real estate not only assures construction skewed toward the rich; it also disrupts the filtering mechanism YIMBYism relies on to make housing affordable for the middle and working classes. The surge in inequality over the past forty years is one driver of the housing crisis about which YIMBYs have little to say. In New York City, developers act on profit expectations when they build pencil towers that serve as largely unoccupied investment vehicles for domestic and foreign oligarchs over constructing apartments for middle- and lower-income residents.
While housing policy cannot fix the issue of inequality, it can alleviate its effects. But it should do so by pushing against the forces of rising inequality rather than working with them—by prioritizing rent control, tenant protections, and social housing over facilitating more luxury housing for the rich.
Beyond urban inequality within cities, YIMBY policy is also silent on regional inequality and the policies concentrating income, wealth, and opportunity (and therefore housing demand) in a handful of cities on the coasts in the first place. YIMBYs naturalize the policies that generated this regional inequality as the preordained outcome economic forces (“agglomeration”), while treating the local policies governing housing markets as wholly artificial. But regional inequality is an outcome generated by a complex of policy and institutional changes since the 1970s including trade deals, financial deregulation, deunionization, the dearth of antitrust enforcement against mergers and monopolies, and generous federal support for certain segments of the economy (like the military-industrial complex and elite colleges and universities).
These policies—one might call them “neoliberalism”—decimated regional economies throughout the middle of the country while concentrating wealth in a few financial, tech, and government hubs on the coasts. When the YIMBY answer to the neoliberal deregulatory agenda of the past forty years has been more deregulation, it is understandable why the overwhelmingly deregulatory thrust of the movement has been met with skepticism from potential allies on the left. The wariness is confirmed when prominent members of the YIMBY movement, including California YIMBY, say that land use reform is only the first step: next up in the “whack-a-mole” (their term) fight against regulation is building codes. Others in the movement propose extending the deregulatory agenda to target construction unions and even safety requirements, like rules mandating that there be two stairwells for egress in case of fire. The United States is several orders richer than it was a century ago. Is bringing back tenement buildings really the best we can do to solve our housing needs? This policy package would not necessarily increase the supply of housing, let alone affordable housing, but it would strengthen the hand of private landlords and developers at the expense of public market governance.
This gets us back to the core disagreement between YIMBYs and non-YIMBYs that we tried to articulate in our initial reply. Should housing be treated as an ordinary commodity, or should it be, yes, “decommodified” so that the profit motive is dampened and even replaced by considerations of public need? How do we provide housing for those who can’t afford it? Even some in the YIMBY camp, while they blame land use regulations for holding back total housing production, acknowledge that the barrier to production of affordable housing is the investment of public dollars. YIMBY policy may offer some relief from high rents for those in the middle and top of the income distribution. What it does not do is establish a right to housing for all.
—Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan
Ned Resnikoff is the policy director of California YIMBY.
Brian Callaci is the chief economist at the Open Markets Institute.
Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute and author of Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States.
