On the Horns

A quick followup to my previous post. What I hope I made clear is that U.S. cities are caught on the horns of a dilemma. If it were (politically) easy to build more housing, they could easily solve their affordability problems (at least in the short term). If it were easy to build more transit, they could easily solve their affordability problems (again, at least in the short run). You only need one of those things to be true in order to address housing affordability. The problem is that in the U.S. it tends to be difficult to do either of those things, and so we are left with very expensive housing in our most productive cities, with all that follows.