Pritzker Fellow Matthew Yglesias on "The Housing Crisis"

(Current UChicago Students Only)

Tuesday, March 28

3:30-4:45 PM

At this point, the idea that America’s housing woes are rooted in large part in overregulation - especially in coastal liberal states - that makes it too difficult to build is no longer particularly strange or unfamiliar. This narrative has been embraced by leading politicians including the governors of New York and California and the President of the United States. Actually doing anything about it remains controversial, of course.

It's also a very different conclusion from the one reached with heroes & villains and “moral clarity” as the main frame of journalism. What could be more clear-cut than fights pitting rich, greedy developers against sympathetic community activists fighting for their neighborhoods? Except scholarship and dispassionate analysis increasingly reaches the conclusion that these “neighborhood defender” activists, whether well-intentioned or not, are actually at the root of many American problems. It’s important journalistically to listen to activists on the ground, to understand what they want and how they feel.

But the activist and advocacy communities around housing - to the extent that they exist - have traditionally focused on affordable housing subsidies and tenants’ rights organizing, not general land use. And there is simply a difference at each turn between trying to decide whose cause sounds most sympathetic and trying to understand which policy prescriptions will have which impacts.

Pritzker Fellows seminars are off the record and open to current UChicago students only. Seating in the IOP Living Room is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. 

If you have any questions about accessibility, please contact Ashley Jorn (ashleyjorn@uchicago.edu).