Housing costs are high because cities let too little get built.

Comment “Housing” and we’ll send you the full video. In a 2021 paper, economists Kevin Corinth and Amelia Irvine estimated that rents could fall dramatically in places like San Francisco, Honolulu, San Diego, and Washington, DC if housing supply were allowed to respond more freely. Some argue that government should build, operate, and price housing directly. The promise is simple: public housing at rents ordinary people can afford. But that view runs into two hard problems. First, governments face political incentives, not profit-and-loss discipline. They can misallocate resources, delay construction, and hide costs through taxes and debt. Second, public housing does not repeal scarcity. Someone still has to choose where to build, who gets in, how rents are set, and who pays when costs exceed revenue.