Physicists have longed for a theory of everythinga single system that would explain every force in the universe. After the better part of a century, they are still searching. But social science, perhaps, can overcome them.
In 2021, three British writers – John Myers, Sam Bowman, and Ben Southwood – published an essay in development minded website Work In Progress saying that a surprising part of what ails the modern West comes down to one thing: too few houses built where people want to live. Slow growth. Increase balance. Maternal collapse. Overweight. Even climate change. They seem like separate problems with different causes, until you realize that each one gets worse as the house shrinks. The authors called it the “homogeneous habitat theory,” and five years on, the case has gotten stronger.
The process is simple: where you can afford to live determines your job, your commute, the size of your family, your neighbors, your politics. Make the houses few where the opportunity is, and every one of them suffers.
Like I wrote again in 2022once you begin to understand the theory of the habitat of everything, you begin to see it everywhere. One estimate from the essay puts the cost of building blocks in just three cities — New York, San Francisco, and San Jose — there. 8.9 percent of US GDPabout $8,775 per American worker per year. And today record 22.6 million of rental householdsor half of all renters, now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
It shouldn’t be like this. Since the 1970s, almost everything in American life has been reduced to the measure of working hours – television. reduced from 60 working hours to 7 – when the house you placed went the other way. If you’ve ever wondered why decades of real progress don’t feel like progress – the great passion of this magazine – the house is a big part of the answer. Success is real, but our taxes and mortgage are eating away.
That’s the bad news. Here is the good news.
New rules for our biggest problem
What made this all feel so irreparable was that no one seemed to have a chance to fix it. Zoning is regulated by thousands of city councils and planning boards, each accountable to neighbors with a vested interest in the shortage, since for many American homeowners, the housing shortage increases their value. And Congress was just left the field, going roughly 30 years without passing the main housing law.
Then, over three weeks this summer, lawmakers acted. On June 22, the Senate passed a decision 21st Century Residential Roads Act 85-5. The house followed a day later, 358-32and after President Donald Trump chose not to pass it, the bill became law on July 11. The ROAD Act is the most important housing legislation in decades, and the first to be built squarely on a YIMBY foundation that cuts to the heart of the housing theory of everything: Houses are expensive because America made them too hard to build.
The action is joined together more than 60 different bills36 of them bipartisan, talks with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) with Rep. French Hill (R-AR) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). At its core, the Build Now feature, ties federal grant money to results: cities that add housing get more, cities that block them get less, and a $200 million annual innovation fund rewards measurable increases in supply.
The rest of the bill takes the scissors to the red tape hangman’s house. The law facilitates federal environmental reviews for housing that the federal government itself helps fund. It directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development to write guidelines for one-story to six-story apartment buildings — a subtle change that my colleague Rachel Cohen Booth has. to be called “deceptively simple reforms that could open up more housing.” And it ends a 1970s law requiring factory-built homes to stay in permanent wheeled chassisan order that added thousands of dollars per unit and helped keeping the cheapest form of American housing out of many suburbs.
What is revolutionary here is not the elements of the bill – which are still small compared to the scale of the problem – but the acceptance of the basis. YIMBY that idea, as a Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said“If we had more houses, the price would go down.” Ben Metcalf of UC Berkeley’s Terner Center told the New York Times the law was “regarding 30 years of policy,” while Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, put it more simply: the law is a victory “just because it exists.”
The states ran the experiment first
Congress may be late to this YIMBY opinion, but it has the benefit of knowing it’s been tested. One of the best examples is in Auckland, New Zealand, which converted three-quarters of its single-family land in 2016, rewriting the law so that those lots could contain apartments, not just one house. Construction roughly doubled within five yearsand research published last year estimates Auckland rents are now about 23 percent less than they would have been without evolution.
The American version of Auckland – with better tacos – is Austin, which spent a decade legalizing apartments, killing minimum parking, and shrinking minimum lot sizes. Texas City was added 120,000 homes between 2015 and 2024boosting its housing stock by 30 percent. As my colleague Marina Bolotnikova reported this spring, Austin rents fell 6 percent within one yearmore than any other large US metro, with the fastest decline old, cheap buildings – where relief is most important.
Other states have seen it. California exempted most urban settlements from his famous environmental audit law. Montana adopted “The Montana Miracle” package, legalizing two bedrooms and backyards on land that only allowed for one house legalized houses in commercial areas across the state.
Red states and blue states are coming to the same conclusion about solving the housing crisis: build more. New federal law often tells them to continue.
Why your rent won’t go down tomorrow
It’s a sign of how bad federal housing policy has been for so long that what is a perfectly normal law is greeted with so much glee.
The ROAD Act has almost no new money – its last part is called “No Additional Funds Authorized.” Zoning, which can make or break housing, remains a local force. The law does not command anything; it faces subsidy regulations, which a determined city council can ignore. Conor Dougherty of the New York Times, one of the leading housing reporters, judged that “it is unlikely to do much to offset the high cost of rent and ownership in the United States anytime soon.” Credit rates have been stuck at more than 6 percent since 2022 – as I could show you from my mortgage statements. National housing construction barely movedand soothsayers expect little change this year.
Experience shows that a problem large enough to be a possible theory of everything will require more than one solution. Minneapolis finished famous for single-family zoning in 2018, and he only got the normal response of the buildingbecause several other laws still stood in the way. What worked in Auckland and Austin was a whole bunch – density plus parking permitting plus lot sizes. Housing, as advocates say, is a door with many bombs; this law unlocks the federal ones and gives the states a better set of keys. Others are still closed.
Usually with this magazine I like to mark that progress already arrived but not recognized. House is the opposite: The problem is as bad as everyone feels, and what arrived this month was a consensus about why. America spent 40 years treating expensive housing like the weather: unfortunate, unchanging, nobody’s fault. It took five years for the recognition published on the journal’s website to become an act praised by Congress.
The ROAD Act will not add a single foundation. What it did was build a consensus upon which the next few million would be built. And consensus, in American politics, is the material that takes the longest to set.
A version of this story originally appeared in Habari Njema magazine. Register here!
