Jerusalem Demsas's On the Housing Crisis explained: local democracy, vetoes and the missing homes

Jerusalem Demsas has a simple claim at the centre of her book: America has plenty of land and knows how to build, so the housing shortage is a political choice. On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy came out in September 2024 under Zando's Atlantic Editions imprint, a 160-page collection of her journalism for The Atlantic. The publisher sums up the thesis in one line: local democracies have become "coconspirators in the anti-development aspirations of the very few."

For a radical centre looking at Spain, the book matters because it moves the housing debate from economics to institutions. Who decides whether a building goes up, and who gets heard when they decide. That is exactly where Democracia 21's launch speech placed the Spanish problem too, as we noted in our overview of the party's proposals.

Who Demsas is and how she got here

Demsas studied economics at William & Mary, wrote about housing for Vox, and joined The Atlantic in 2022 as a staff writer covering housing and the economy, where she also hosted the Good on Paper podcast. She later founded The Argument, an online publication. In an interview with The Urbanist when the book appeared, she traced her interest to her own childhood. Her family, Eritrean refugees from Ethiopia, lived in townhouses in a good school district that existed because of inclusionary zoning, and after her parents divorced she could stay in the same school because an apartment building had been built nearby. In college she studied why Americans were moving less, and the trail led to housing.

The argument

The book's essays come from 2022 and 2023. Their common thread is that the people who block homes are a minority, and local institutions hand them the power to do it.

Demsas told The Urbanist she began by thinking opposition to new housing was about protecting property values. Her reporting changed her mind. She now reads "property values" as shorthand for a whole idea of the good life, with greenery, quiet and single-family streets, and a fear of change, including a fear of renters and young people moving in. The cost falls on people who never appear in the debate: those who can't live where they want, can't send their children to the schools they want, and can't live near family.

One of her best-known essays argues that community input, as it works today, does more harm than good. Its target is the public hearing, the meeting where neighbours speak for or against a project. Demsas leans on research by Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick and Maxwell Palmer, published as Neighborhood Defenders (Cambridge University Press, 2019). As Salim Furth summarised it for the Manhattan Institute, people who comment at hearings in Massachusetts were more likely than their neighbours to be older, white and homeowners; 41% lived on the same block as the project and another 41% in the same census tract; and only about one comment in seven supported the investment. These defenders rarely kill a project outright. They delay it with studies, lawsuits and repeated objections, and use the delay to bargain. A duplex in Ipswich was held up for over a year; a Brookline project shrank from 140 homes to 59.

Demsas sums this up by saying that local land-use decisions involve too much democracy and too little accountability. Every town has a reason to keep newcomers out, while the region as a whole needs homes, a classic collective action problem. Opening more channels for objection does not change the balance of power. It amplifies those who already have it.

What she proposes

Her main remedy is structural. Shift power over housing from local governments to state governments, and make housing a core demand that voters put to state politicians. She describes the pro-housing movement in the US as bipartisan, and she says plainly that social housing and market-rate housing can both be part of the solution. She calls herself an opinion writer who advocates for ideas, not for parties or candidates.

What Spain can take from it

Spain's system differs from the American one in obvious ways. Planning is shared between regions, which write the laws, and councils, which draw the plans and grant licences. Spain also has its own version of the hearing problem: plans go through periods of public information and objections, and our explainer on developable land shows how court challenges can bring a whole general plan down. The point carries over intact. A council answers to the people already registered in its town. The young couple who would move in if a new neighbourhood got built have no vote there yet.

The radical-centre reading of Demsas combines three things. From the left we keep her own starting point: housing is about who gets to live where, and social housing belongs in the toolkit next to market homes. From the market-liberal tradition we take the core economics: where homes are scarce because rules forbid them, letting people build is what brings prices down. And from neither camp comes her institutional insight, which is the most useful part for Spain. The number of homes a metropolitan area needs should be set at the level where future residents count, the region or the metropolitan area, with binding targets that each council then delivers in its own way. Councils keep their say over design, streets and neighbourhood life. They lose the power to decide, on behalf of people who don't live there yet, that nobody else may come.

That is also why Demsas pairs well with David Madden and Peter Marcuse, whom we set against her in an earlier piece. They worry about who owns housing; she worries about who is allowed to build it. A Spanish housing programme needs answers to both, and the next articles in this week's series take her diagnosis down to the level of licences and paperwork.