Derek Thompson

And if you add enough supply, prices can actually go down.

It's why you have in so many places where people want to live prices going through the roof because we've simply made it too hard to build.

It is really, really important to me that whatever explanation that people have for this phenomenon, some people say it's about billionaires or corporate interests.

I say, look to Texas.

Texas has billionaires.

Texas has corporate interests.

But Texas also has an entirely different set of rules and customs and permitting regulation that simply makes it easier for supply to respond to demand.

And as a result...

We have outcomes in Texas that are better than the rent freeze that Mamdani has promised New York and other left-wing politicians have promised their own cities and states.

We have something better than a rent freeze.

We have rents going down because we've made it easier to build.

Mark, you've written about this explicitly.

Among liberals, input was considered a costless virtue.

It was considered costless to have long periods of input, to prize input, to say that the ultimate expression of democracy is people standing up and telling their city council, don't build this thing anywhere close to me.

That was seen as more democratic in some places.

And the actual vote for the mayor who promised to deliver housing to that city and actually found that the people who showed up on Tuesday night at the city council meeting were the veto point that prevented him from allowing housing.

The polling outfit Blue Rose recently did...

in this survey where they asked people whether they liked abundance messaging or populist messaging.

And it turns out that the most popular messaging was a synthesis of abundance and populism.

It was things like, quote, working Americans can't afford the basics, and it's because we stopped building them.