This event is part one in the ongoing program series: Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus.

This series is co-sponsored by the City Club of New York.

New York City’s and the nation’s affordability crisis has revived a powerful idea: if we build more housing, prices will fall. This has led to a widespread diagnosis: the reason we’re not building enough is because our housing market has too many rules! Over-regulation, especially zoning, is holding back construction and driving up prices — or so the theory goes. 

It’s a clean, simple story. And it has attracted strange bedfellows, from free-marketiers to developers to housing advocates. But does the evidence support it?

This series brings together housing experts to examine research, including their own, that challenges this popular narrative.

In Part 1 of Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus, we speak with planner and housing researcher Alan Mallach and disentangle the knotty relationship between housing prices, household incomes, and development costs in New York and elsewhere. We discuss who is most affected by the affordability crisis (maybe not who you think), why it is different depending on where in the U.S. you live, and why zoning is mostly a red herring when it comes to understanding the causes of the affordability crisis.  

Moderators:
Juan Rivero, Special Projects Director, Village Preservation
Andrew Berman, Executive Director, Village Preservation

Alan Mallach is the author of The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America and A Decent Home: Planning, Building and Preserving Affordable Housing. A senior fellow with the Center for Community Progress in Washington DC, he was director of housing and economic development in Trenton, New Jersey, has worked at the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and taught at Rutgers University and the Pratt Institute.

The City Club of New York, founded in 1892, is one of the oldest civic organizations in the City.  From the beginning, its mission has been to promote sound urban policy and to protect the City’s essential character.