Jerusalem Demsas
I enjoyed Ms. Demsas’ twitter feed, which in my experience was mostly about housing, and was glad to see she’d published a book.
This is a quick read, fairly short. I was not expecting that it was actually an anthology of a number of her articles from the Atlantic on housing.
I agree with the overall gist of what she says: we don’t have enough housing, this is a supply problem, the reason we don’t have enough housing is that we refuse to build any, etc. But I feel she is too ready to excuse the behavior of the bad actors in the system. Allowing that incumbent homeowners have perfectly good reasons for opposing new housing, for example. (While I think their reasons are understandable, I don’t think they are in any way excusable.)
“Americans have reason to doubt the wisdom of empowering Big Government to build or permit large developments.” (p22)
I just disagree here. It’s not obvious to me that city renewal or highway projects are the root cause of incumbent homeowners protesting new housing being built.
I was also a bit taken aback by a lack of a theme running through the book, and the lack of sourcing/notes/evidence. But this is because I expecting a book and not an anthology – there is a mix of themes for these essays.
I’d love to see her develop the case against NIMBYism in a book length treatment, cite all her sources, footnotes, the whole bit. In the meantime, this wasn’t a huge investment of time, though I’m not sure I got that much out of it (ironic, since I mostly refuse to read Atlantic articles online, since they are too long)