A Washington Post article on the forces that drive housing prices higher cited new research by UCLA Luskin Urban Planning Professor Michael Storper.

Some housing activists fall in the “Yes in My Back Yard” camp, arguing that building more housing — especially in dense, transit-accessible neighborhoods — will lower prices for everyone, thanks to the laws of supply and demand.

In a newly published paper, “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis,” Storper and his co-authors directly challenge the foundational assumptions of the YIMBY point of view. They call for “bold, comprehensive thinking about housing systems rather than relying on trickle-down affordability.”

The scholars recommend direct approaches such as publicly funded vouchers to help pay for housing; market protections for low-income households, including rent control and tenant protections; and housing decommodification, including cooperatives, community land trusts, and public housing.

“To put it bluntly, in America we haven’t actually been underbuilding,” Storper says. “The problem is demand is now split in a very unequal society. The supply you get is the wrong kind of supply.”