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The most important thing about the big new federal housing law

Congress’s new housing law won’t fix your rent. It still matters.

Physicists have longed for a theory of everything, a single framework that would explain every force in the universe. After the better part of a century, they’re still looking. But social science, improbably, may have beaten them to it.

A weekly dose of stories chronicling progress around the world.

In 2021, three British writers — John Myers, Sam Bowman, and Ben Southwood — published an essay in the progress-minded site Works in Progress arguing that a startling share of what ails the modern West comes down to one thing: too few homes built where people want to live. Slow growth. Widening inequality. Falling fertility. Obesity. Even climate change. They look like separate problems with separate causes, until you notice that each one gets worse when housing gets scarce. The authors called it “the housing theory of everything,” and five years on, the case has only gotten stronger.

The mechanism is simple: where you can afford to live determines your job, your commute, your family size, your neighbors, your politics. Make homes scarce where opportunity is, and every one of those suffers.

As I wrote back in 2022, once you begin to understand the housing theory of everything, you start to see it everywhere. One estimate from the essay puts the cost of building restrictions in just three cities — New York, San Francisco, and San Jose — at 8.9 percent of US GDP, about $8,775 per American worker per year. And today a record 22.6 million renter households, or half of all renters, now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.

Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country

It’s not supposed to be this way. Since the 1970s, nearly everything material in American life has gotten cheaper measured in hours of work — a television fell from 60 hours of labor to 7 — while the house you put it in went the other way. If you’ve ever wondered why decades of genuine progress don’t feel like progress — a major obsession of this newsletter — housing is a big part of the answer. The gains are real, but our rents and mortgages are eating them.

That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news.

A new law for our single biggest problem

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