A natural disaster can do in one day what decades of public zoning fights cannot: Erase entire neighborhoods and force thousands of decisions, all at once, about what will replace them. 

That’s the question now — still — hanging over Altadena, the Pacific Palisades, and other Los Angeles-area communities that burned in the catastrophic January 2025 wildfires. More than a year and a half later, rebuilding remains painfully slow. All this is unfolding in a region already desperately short of homes, with one of the most expensive housing markets in America. 

Now, California’s legislature is set to vote on a law bowing to local anti-density pressure that could make that all the worse, and set an ominous precedent for housing affordability. This is, on one level, a regional story about a fire-traumatized community trying to get back on its feet and shape its future, but it reflects something much larger, too. It highlights the kind of zero-sum politics increasingly pervasive nationwide, that casts ordinary homebuilding as something sinister, and that elevates local control above all else. These instincts help explain why it’s become so hard for the US to build the things we need, and why the fight for affordable, abundant housing remains so fraught, in California and nationwide.

The roots of this dispute go back well before the fires. For the better part of a decade, California has been trying to solve one of the central contradictions driving our national housing shortage: Almost everyone agrees that the country needs more homes, yet almost everyone has a reason they should go somewhere else. The state has passed laws weakening exclusionary zoning, legalizing denser “missing middle” housing, and taking some housing decisions out of the hands of local governments that refuse to permit enough homes. 

That push included, in 2021, a now-famous statewide law, Senate Bill 9, which overrode local zoning to enable homeowners statewide to build up to four housing units on their lots. Another pair of laws, SB 684 and a subsequent expansion, SB 1123, made it possible to subdivide vacant lots zoned for single-family houses and build up to 10 smaller homes on them.  

The 2025 fires are now testing California’s pro-housing progress. In Altadena, an unincorporated suburb about 14 miles north of downtown LA, the Eaton Fire destroyed a huge share of homes. Many survivors are now rebuilding the single-family homes they lost in the disaster. Others, facing meager insurance payouts and massive construction costs, have sought to rebuild at higher densities to make doing so financially feasible, or sold their lots to developers and moved elsewhere. 

Only a small share of rebuilding applications so far have relied on SB 9 or SB 1123, but a revolt has nevertheless ensued among opponents of denser developments. Lawmakers in Sacramento now want to stop the use of one of California’s pro-housing laws in the community. By August 31, the state legislature could pass yet a new law: SB 1090, which would suspend SB 1123 in Altadena until 2030, blocking the additional housing it would have allowed.   

Altadena is by all accounts idyllic, lined with storybook bungalows bordering the San Gabriel Mountains. The impulse to want it to be built back as it was before is only human and understandable. Neil Tyler, a fire survivor who supports SB 1090 and is currently rebuilding his home, told me that many in the community are deeply anxious and angry that a developer could buy burned lots and transform them into clusters of 10 homes that would feel alien to the Altadena they’re trying to recover. It “exploded into the community’s fear and opposition and pretty much outrage over someone trying to profit off the backs of all of our pain and suffering,” he said. 

I’ve written extensively on the national housing shortage and the local zoning laws that help cause it. Altadena offers an unusually sympathetic case for the desire to maintain hyper-local control — it’s terribly unfair for your community to burn down overnight. And it challenged me to think more deeply about what is owed to a community suffering such incredible loss. 

Ultimately, the fight over SB 1090 clarified to me more strongly why the local level is the wrong one to make decisions about housing supply, and why it’s important for California’s hard-won housing laws, along with similar state laws elsewhere in the US, to withstand the very local resistance they were enacted to overcome. The metro LA area, including Altadena, is extraordinarily expensive in large part because local control has already caused it to underbuild housing for decades. SB 1090 would convert some fire survivors’ desire to preserve Altadena’s low-density form into restrictions on other people’s rights and choices, while blocking homes the region desperately needs. 

The case for rebuilding…more

Debates over arcane laws with names like SB 9, SB 1123, and SB 1090 might sound abstract, impenetrable, and boring. But the principles are fairly straightforward, and they explain a lot about what feels so wrong with American life right now. 

The economics of housing is not so different from that of any other good: When lots of people want a thing but we don’t make enough of it, it will become ever more expensive. This has happened in LA and many other parts of the US over the last century. Starting in the 1960s, LA used local zoning laws to sharply decrease allowed densities for new housing in the city. By 1990, the city’s theoretical population capacity had fallen from roughly 10 million to about 4 million, even as its economy and demand to live there grew. Sure enough, LA’s population today is just south of 4 million, and housing costs are predictably out of control. 

Those numbers are just LA proper — but housing markets are regional, and LA’s suburbs have been just as responsible for the area’s chronic housing scarcity. One of the most pervasive drivers is single-family zoning, a form of “exclusionary zoning” that makes it illegal to build anything other than a single-family house on most residential land in the US. 

Altadena, where the median home is valued at around $1.12 million, is zoned overwhelmingly for single-family dwellings — a policy California has sought to chip away at with state laws like SB 9 and 1123. The idea is that allowing more homes on a single lot will expand supply, which helps lower housing prices; in tandem, it allows physically smaller homes to be built instead of just large single-family houses, which also lowers housing prices.  

Reforming exclusionary zoning in this manner also does something that can help fire survivors trying to rebuild their lives. It tends to raise land values, because a parcel that can support several homes is worth more than one where only one can legally be built. 

Consider a hypothetical: An empty lot might sell to a builder for $500,000 if it’s only zoned to support a single-family house. The builder might then spend $1 million on construction and other development costs and sell the house for $1.8 million, making $300,000 in profit. If the plot could instead support six smaller homes under SB 1123, the builder could pay $800,000 for the land, spend $3 million on construction, and sell each home for $750,000, making $700,000 in profit. This is a simplified example, and real-world comparisons are much more complicated, but the underlying principle is basic land economics: Increasing a parcel’s development capacity increases what a developer can justify paying for it. Allowing greater densities can be positive-sum — the original homeowner can get a higher price for their sale, the new home buyers can get much less expensive houses, and the builder can make a greater profit.  

“These small-scale density tools could in fact be a financial lifeline that allows some Altadena homeowners to fill what is often a six-figure gap in their financing in order to rebuild their home and provide some housing for some other folks,” said Azeen Khanmalek, executive director of Abundant Housing LA, one of several California pro-housing groups opposing SB 1090. 

Caroline Paules, an Altadena resident who also opposes SB 1090, noted that rebuilding to modern fire-resistant standards is expensive; building densely can help mitigate that cost. Paules is a mechanical engineer and co-founder of a startup that builds small prefabricated cottages, and had hoped to use SB 1123 to build in Altadena, with seven cottages each on lots previously reserved for single-family homes. If SB 1090 passes, she said, she may not be able to. “I completely resonate with the desire for Altadena to be what it was, because it was beautiful and perfect,” she said. But “no matter how traumatizing and painful it is, I think we have to release trying to shove Altadena into what it was before the fire.”

How California’s pro-housing push swerved

Last year, after the fire destroyed between one-third and one-half of Altadena’s homes, the Los Angeles County planning department promoted SB 9 and 1123 as rebuilding options in a brochure for fire survivors. But earlier this year, as neighbors became increasingly concerned about rebuilding plans, LA County abruptly changed course and voided applications filed to build under SB 1123. The county now took the position that the Altadena lots didn’t qualify under SB 1123 because so many surrounding homes had burned that the parcels couldn’t be considered infill projects.

The reversal echoed what happened last summer, when Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass suspended SB 9 in the Palisades after residents had already begun submitting applications — a midstream rule change that made an already grueling rebuild harder. Most of Altadena wasn’t included in that order because much of it isn’t designated as a very-high-fire-hazard zone, so residents who oppose the higher-density developments have sought other routes to block it. 

Much of the recent backlash has centered on plans to build under SB 1123 by Stone West Homes, a Southern California-based developer. Between summer 2025 and early 2026, the developer was involved in buying seven Altadena lots where homes had burned, planning to redevelop them into about 10 small houses each — 70 homes total. These were large lots, most of them between two to four times the size of a typical new single-family lot. The developer has said the lots were purchased for more than single-family development could have justified, but opponents have disputed that. (That is a complicated question to adjudicate, and not one I’ll pursue here.)

In March, LA County told the developer its application was being canceled. “They basically flipped a switch,” Chris Manasserian, a lawyer for the developer, told me; they then sued LA County for what they allege was an illegal reversal.  

The fight soon moved to the state’s capital. By June, California state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, whose district includes Altadena, rewrote an existing bill, SB 1090, to include a moratorium on SB 9 and SB 1123 in the community, setting this whole episode into motion. 

The LA County planning department did not respond to a request for comment. Pérez did not make herself available for an interview. LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents Altadena and has vigorously promoted SB 1090, also didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. 

The SB 9 suspension was eventually dropped from the bill, leaving only the moratorium on SB 1123, which would take effect only for applications submitted after October 1 of this year. To some residents, 1123 is much more threatening: It allows greater densities, and it’s more likely to be used by outside developers than pre-existing Altadena homeowners. Suspicion of developers has been central to the campaign for SB 1090. A website run by SB 1090 supporters portrays Stone West’s planned developments as “disaster capitalism” by “out-of-town speculators.” 

I find this hard to compute. It feels of a piece with a broader, slopulist zero-sum turn in American politics that treats any transaction in which someone profits as evidence of an injustice. Developers, for all the suspicion attached to the word, are people who build things, including homes — if we want homes, we need them. “It seems like we’ve just been demonized for something that makes perfect sense to do,” Manasserian said. Developers can just as well buy Altadena lots to build large single-family homes, but I haven’t seen the same anti-developer sentiment leveled against that possibility. 

I asked Neil Tyler what exactly makes the prospect of living near an SB 1123 development similar to what’s proposed by Stone West, with 10 houses on it instead of one, so threatening. He mentioned one cul-de-sac street where, he said, most homeowners had previously planned to rebuild, but many were now considering selling rather than living near an SB 1123 development. Summarizing their thinking, Tyler said: “I can’t pour my time and money and resources that are so stretched to now build my home back at this property, where all of a sudden right next to me could be a townhome that blocks my kind of way of life that I just want to recapture.” (The street that he’s referring to is lined with single-family homes on very large, low-density lots.) 

As a result, he said, SB 1123 in Altadena “is very directly further displacing people that intended to come back.” He believes it’s wrong for an outside developer to take advantage of the law to abruptly alter neighborhoods while residents are still trying to make decisions about returning. But he emphasized that he and others who share his views don’t oppose all density increases or deny that there’s a housing shortage. He supports accessory dwelling units (ADUs), for example, which California has legalized statewide and which he and other fire survivors are now building on their properties. He also raised concerns about local infrastructure capacity and fire spread and evacuation, part of which I examine below, but worth noting here is that SB 1123 does not waive ordinary utility requirements. Infrastructure, particularly in a place like America’s second-largest metro area, can grow to accommodate more people; it’s not a fixed limit on density. 

Local control clashes with regional needs

So far, only a very small share of the nearly 7,000 homes that burned in Altadena have been put up for 1123 redevelopment. Although the level of density they represent is higher than what’s typical on an Altadena residential street, they’re hardly high-density by metropolitan standards, especially in such a high-demand area. “We’re not talking about allowing six- or eight- or 10-story apartment buildings,” Khanmalek said. 

As with other housing fights across the country, the development opponents are highly vocal, but it’s far from clear that their views are unanimous. “I have yet to see someone draw a connection between what developers are intending to do and it actively harming an Altadenan,” said Paules. 

It may be true that some neighbors would not like to live near denser developments, and it understandably feels unfair for a wildfire to be the occasion that accelerates that change. But it’s also unfair to deprive fire survivors of property rights, and it’s unfair that communities in metro LA have long banned (and continue to ban) denser housing and fueled a housing shortage in the first place. Many residents want to protect the ability to occupy a very desirable part of the city at low density — the emotional impact of losing that can be very real, but it’s not something residents are owed in perpetuity.

Neighbors disliking the presence of new development is the universally cited reason for opposing building, and opponents can always find a reason that a particular time and place is the wrong one in which to build. The perceived costs of new housing are concentrated among nearby residents, while the costs of blocking it are borne by society as a whole. That asymmetry is why the right to build housing cannot depend on securing neighbors’ discretionary approval.

Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research for California YIMBY, told me that his organization suspects SB 1090’s supporters want the three-year moratorium to eventually be made permanent. Though the bill’s supporters maintain that their circumstances are extraordinary, Gray and Khanmalek both fear it would create a precedent for more communities to seek exemptions from SB 1123. 

No growing, economically successful city can refuse to densify forever without ruinous implications for housing affordability that will eventually undermine its economy. California’s Gov. Newsom has generally stood firm against local governments seeking to defy state housing laws, but last year’s wildfires have tested that resolve. His office declined to comment on SB 1090, citing its general practice of not commenting on pending legislation. Should the bill reach his desk — which could happen as soon as next week if it passes the state legislature as many expect — the question will be whether he’s willing to supply the leadership that local officials have not. 

Southern California is already one of America’s most beautiful, sought-after places to live, and freed from its chronic housing scarcity, it could be better still: less punishingly expensive, and more capable of welcoming all those drawn to it. The fires have already taken enough from the region; they ought not be allowed to scorch the housing reforms that had begun to open up a more abundant future.

Popular conceptions of farming tend to associate good animal welfare with environmental virtue — an intuition so strong that researchers have described a “humane halo” effect, where consumers who are told that a farm uses better environmental practices also assume that it treats its animals well. So it might come as a surprise to hear that one way of making eggs better for the planet might be to make life a whole lot worse for the chickens who lay them. 

This, anyway, was the apparent upshot of a controversial and widely discussed new paper on the environmental impacts of different egg farming systems. Cage-free, free-range, and organic eggs, it found, are higher in greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and other environmental harms than confining hens in tiny cages. 

Consider the implications of that result: At any given moment, more than 8 billion egg-laying hens inhabit farms across the planet. The vast majority of them live in wire cages that severely restrict basic movements like spreading their wings and turning around. They barely have room to move around at all, which can induce depression-like states. “Hens represent the largest population of terrestrial animals housed in cages throughout their lives,” as the new study puts it. 

In animal agriculture, there is an unfortunate and well-known trade-off between environmental impact and animal welfare because, all else equal, animals who are allotted a bit more room to roam and express natural behaviors take up more resources. (Of course, that trade-off disappears if we simply replace animal products with plants.) That is why almost all animal products these days are produced on factory farms in the first place — factory farming doesn’t exist merely to be evil, but rather because it’s efficient, and the cost of efficiency is borne by the animals. 

Although the new paper may overstate the magnitude of this tension for eggs (more on that in a moment), it’s directionally right: Hens who are able to walk, flap their wings, fly, and perch will eat more calories than those trapped in cages, so their environmental footprint is generally going to be greater. 

But here is the thing: That doesn’t really matter. 

Eggs aren’t generally singled out by climate experts as a major decarbonization priority. Although animal agriculture is a significant contributor to climate change, making up about 12 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, eggs are responsible for a very small share of that — about 3 percent of all livestock emissions. As a back-of-the-envelope estimate, that is, on the high end, roughly 0.6 percent of all emissions. I think we can spend a tiny bit of our carbon budget to spare billions of animals a life of near-total immobilization. 

But it’s weird to think about this as an environmental question at all. Chickens aren’t merely resource burdens — they’re inhabitants of our planet who deserve to share in the benefits of a more sustainable future, too. And the most salient feature of caging hens is not that it’s marginally more environmentally optimized, but simply that it’s wrong.

Caging humans would reduce our emissions, too, as Lewis Bollard, managing director for farm animal welfare at the philanthropy Coefficient Giving, grimly remarked about the paper. No one would ever suggest doing that, because a lower carbon footprint cannot turn a morally indefensible practice into a good idea. 

Is there really a climate case for cages?

Over the last few decades, animal welfare advocates have sought to bring hens some relief from extreme confinement, passing laws that ban cages and persuading grocery stores, restaurant chains, and other food purveyors to source cage-free eggs. (When I was in college, I worked on one of these campaigns, helping convince my school to serve exclusively cage-free eggs in its dining halls.) Nearly half of egg-laying hens in the US and two-thirds of those in the European Union are now raised cage-free, and four-fifths of eggs in the UK come from cage-free hens. But cages still prevail in some high-income countries, including Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Israel.

This advocacy work has spread to low- and middle-income countries, too, where most of the world’s hens live and overwhelmingly remain caged. Cage-free eggs are still far from cruelty-free, but they likely represent a meaningful welfare improvement. 

The new paper, published in Royal Society Open Science late last month, used data from the UK to compare the impacts of five different egg farm types: battery cages, slightly larger “enriched” cages, cage-free indoor barns, free range, and organic free range. Fully indoor cage-free systems are by far the most widespread form of cage-free farming in the US and elsewhere in the world, and they’re generally the default large-scale system used in transitions away from cages, so they are our primary focus here. 

The researchers compared egg farming systems on four environmental metrics: greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient pollution in waterways, soil acidification, and land use. The lowest impacts across all four categories were found in farms that used enriched cages, which are one-third to two-thirds larger than the standard battery cages that dominate the global egg industry  — the latter had the second-lowest impacts. (From an animal welfare perspective, enriched cages are akin to slightly loosening a straitjacket — only a grotesque starting point could make them look generous. They afford each hen a living space not much larger than a sheet of printer paper, well below the area typically needed to perform basic behaviors like flapping her wings and grooming herself.) 

To produce the same number of eggs, the study found, cage-free barns emit about 56.1 percent more greenhouse gases than enriched cages and 33.8 percent more than battery cages. 

The authors have said that the paper isn’t meant to advocate keeping hens in cages, but rather to inform decision-making about cage-free transitions with accurate estimates of the environmental trade-offs involved. The findings have been presented as relevant to food sustainability discussions globally, more broadly than just in the UK. And, Bollard pointed out to me, the paper has come out as the EU and UK weigh fully banning caged egg production, raising the possibility that its findings could influence those policy fights. 

“We recognise that the transition toward cage-free production is important for improving animal welfare,” lead author Oliver Martinić, who recently earned a PhD in animal and food science from the University of Padova, told me in an email. “The long-term goal should be to develop cage-free systems that combine high standards of animal welfare with improved production efficiency and lower environmental impacts. If we can achieve that, the environmental gap between cage-free and caged systems could be substantially reduced.” 

It’s certainly important to have an accurate accounting of the environmental impacts of all types of farming. Whether or not the paper achieves that has been a subject of some debate. To make their calculations, the authors drew from data published more than a decade ago, but cage-free egg production has since become more environmentally efficient. 

“The paper is methodologically flawed,” Ilias Kyriazakis, a professor at Queen’s University Belfast and senior author of the earlier research whose data the new paper relies on, wrote in a critique of the study. “It relies on our data from 2010 to construct scenarios intended to represent national conditions in 2023, without adequately accounting for the substantial changes that have occurred over that period.” As a result, he added, “the authors are likely to have overestimated some of the impacts” of the non-cage production systems.

The authors have said that they used that dataset because it’s the most comprehensive one available, and Martinić told me that “production systems have continued to evolve, so newer data would be valuable for assessing the extent to which the gap [between caged and cage-free eggs] has changed.” Other peer-reviewed research, meanwhile, has found a smaller gap in climate impacts between caged and cage-free eggs. Even the makeup of hens’ feed may matter more for the climate impact of eggs than whether they’re kept in caged or cage-free housing: One US study found that cage-free farms were lower in emissions and other impacts because they used more environmentally efficient feed.

In the end, these differences may not be that big of a deal because the climate impact of eggs is small in the grand scheme of animal agriculture. Using the new study’s own emissions estimates for eggs, a single beef burger emits as much as about five dozen cage-free eggs.

“There’s no doubt that eggs are the least environmentally impacting animal product per unit,” Kyriazakis told me. So when considering whether caged or cage-free eggs are better for the world, their environmental impact is not very high on the list of things to agonize over. 

Martinić and his co-authors don’t ignore animal welfare entirely — they attempt to account for it, but they have an oddly narrow way of doing it. The paper’s welfare metrics leave out what it is actually like for a hen to live inside a cage. Instead, its chosen measures score cage systems more favorably, because the model assumes that they have lower mortality rates, and they require fewer total birds to produce the same number of eggs. The result is that cage farming ends up looking comparatively better on welfare, though the authors themselves acknowledge that their analysis leaves out many indicators of welfare and “should be interpreted with caution.” (Critics of the study have noted that its mortality numbers are more than a decade out of date, and that recently, as egg producers have learned to better manage cage-free farms, the gap in mortality rates has declined.)

Beyond the carbon ledger

There is a term for what happens when we reduce our biggest social problems to environmental or climate ones, and lose sight of everything else at stake: climate reductionism. 

The new paper and discourse surrounding it display how that trap can shape the way we understand and treat nonhuman animals. It also reflects a long-established tendency in animal agriculture research to view animal welfare through the lens of efficiency and productivity, rather than through the desires of the animals themselves. 

To contend more deeply with the ethics of mass-producing animals like egg-laying hens for food, we have to momentarily cast aside questions about efficiency and ask, what is life like for a hen from her own perspective? I happen to know a lot of chickens — in the right circumstances, they’re convivial, spirited, energetic animals. The widespread myth that they’re stupid has more to do with our own repressed guilt than with the animals’ capacities. Their experiences call on us to face not just the cruelty of cages, but also to look beyond cages to problems common to all forms of egg farming. 

To name just a few: Egg-laying hens have been bred to channel their bodily resources into laying extraordinary numbers of eggs, which takes a heavy toll on their bodies, depleting their skeletons of calcium, and making them prone to painful bone fractures and reproductive disorders. (The red junglefowl, the wild animal equivalent of the chicken, lays 10 to 15 eggs per year; farmed hens lay more than 300.) On cage-free farms, meanwhile, escaping the cage does not mean entering anything resembling a natural environment. Rather, the hens live in crowded, polluted, sometimes windowless sheds filled with thousands or tens of thousands of other chickens, where unnaturally large, dense social groups can intensify injurious pecking and other aggression. They are ultimately killed once their productivity wanes.

These conditions have even fueled a vigorous debate in the animal advocacy movement over whether pushing for cage-free eggs is a good idea at all, because they can give the public the false impression that the worst parts of egg factory farming have gone away. But cages are only one part of that system — modern animal agriculture is defined by a complex set of practices optimized to squeeze as much productivity out of animals as possible. Challenging more fundamental features of egg production, like the genetics of modern laying hens, would be harder than eliminating cages because it poses a deeper challenge to the value the industry elevates above all else: efficiency. We would have to demand less of their bodies, and that would very likely make each egg more expensive and more emissions-intensive. 

What, then, does that mean for you? On an aggregate, societal level, I think cage-free reforms have been a good thing, because they have made a terrible system that we can’t simply wave away with a magic wand less bad. But more profound change will require consumers to demand something more than cheap animal products. So if I’m addressing you, an individual, I’d say something different. The most obvious win-win is hiding in plain sight: Plant-based foods like tofu and beans are significantly lower in emissions than eggs, while avoiding the moral costs of egg production altogether. 

Everyone is wrong about Hank Green. 

In case you missed the controversy: The veteran YouTube star, writer, and science comms entrepreneur was recently “canceled” after he acknowledged using AI for research.

“I have been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid,” he wrote in a statement on Reddit. “It can be very useful for this task, giving me access to a lot of papers I didn’t know existed really fast, but I think that has been to the detriment of my work because it has not given me the freedom to find all of my own ways into and around a topic.” Although Green wrote that the words in his videos are his own, his reliance on AI as a research aid still gave the finished work an ineffable “AI feel.” And his relationship with AI, he wrote, had become “not healthy for me or good for the world.”

Some of Green’s followers, known by the cheerfully dorky moniker “Nerdfighters,” turned on him for daring to use AI in any capacity. Just as quickly, that backlash produced its own backlash, aghast not at Green’s use of AI but at his prostration before an anti-AI mob — “self-canceling,” as some put it, over a legitimate use of the technology. 

I think both of these camps are misguided and have flattened a complex issue into a set of binary extremes. And it surprised me that, despite robust societal debate on AI’s impacts on our ability to think, write, and produce original ideas, the debacle hasn’t prompted more thoughtful conversation about the limits of AI in creative work. 

I felt this because I recognized myself in Green’s statement: the feeling that even using AI for research can start to take over your creative process, that it can become hard to know where your own brain ends and where AI begins, and that the technology can simply push you to work too fast. I don’t use AI to generate writing and would not do so — but its use need not rise to that level to raise profound questions about how much of our work to automate, and what happens to our ability to think for ourselves when we do. 

In a follow-up video published late last week, Green laid out a new AI policy for his work. He wrote: 

1. No portion of any script will be written, edited, or outlined by an LLM.

2. The thesis of a video will always originate with a human. 

3. No image or music in a video will be generated by AI. If something is accidentally included, best efforts will be made to remove it. 

4. LLM outputs are not trusted as a source.

These are all good ideas for any creator trying to avoid AI creep in their craft. But still, they raise a bigger, harder-to-answer question: The very structure of generative AI makes it hard to use without offloading human thought and judgment, which can lead to a widely discussed phenomenon known as “cognitive surrender.” And it pushes us toward uses — like synthesizing research, brainstorming, generating ideas and angles — that short-circuit the original thinking and discovery that we ought to be doing ourselves. What, then, can we even responsibly use AI for? How can we set guardrails that allow us to avail ourselves of its usefulness, without melting our brains in the process? 

The most tempting uses of AI are precisely those best avoided

Remember late 2022, when ChatGPT first came out and everyone mocked its crappy research skills and propensity to hallucinate in every other sentence? I am so wistful for those days. 

Many people who abstain from AI may not know it, but in the time since, and especially in recent months, large language models have gotten way smarter (especially the paid premium versions). It’s become unnervingly good at summarizing niche, complex research areas and debates, and producing ideas, often without being asked, for further research or writing on the same subject. 

Whenever I have a research question these days (which is pretty much any time I’m working on a story), I’m more likely to fire up an LLM than a traditional search engine. If I ask, “Why are old-growth trees still being logged in North America?” it produces a synthesis of research, news, opinion, and whatever else its training absorbed on the subject: “We’re using an essentially nonrenewable ecological asset to smooth a temporary transition to a renewable timber resource,” it says. Probe it further, and it’ll suggest arguments for you: “Instead of conservationists having to prove that every old forest deserves protection, logging companies should have to demonstrate that cutting a centuries-old stand serves a need that cannot reasonably be met with second-growth or engineered wood.” 

LLMs are designed to make cognitive work effortless, but that feels so icky because for it to be worthwhile at all, it has to be effortful.

These aren’t particularly smart or creative ideas — they’re perfectly replacement-level, which makes them plausible substitutes for the thoughts of most people. The AI can supply pat answers to every conceivable question and follow-up you might have while working on a project, relieving you of the need to mentally engage with the shape of a problem. Contrast that with Googling in the pre-AI overview days, which, while certainly not without its problems, at least used to send you to a list of sources that you then had to read and make sense of on your own. 

Most of us who’ve engaged with LLMs know what this feels like. They make it easy for users to skate on the surface of a subject and feign understanding or insight, and in the process they can become involved in interpretive decisions that should be our own. In my experience, even more narrowly designed generative AI models don’t escape these problems. Google’s Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), for example, allows you to upload all of your sources for a project — books, reports, papers, audio and video recordings — and ask it questions based on what they contain, rather than searching the entire internet. It’s less prone to generating outright slop than general-purpose AIs. I use it for most stories I write — it’s an incredibly useful, time-saving tool. But it also enables me to engage with sources in a perfunctory, contextless manner: The AI can surface precisely the bit I need rather than forcing me to form the deeper connections that come from reading a text as a whole.

The best creative work (including not just art and writing, but also technological and medical breakthroughs) probably comes from having a wide range of background associations, and being able to combine them in unexpected ways. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré put this beautifully in his essay “Mathematical Creation,” where he wrote that it’s the tedious, sustained conscious effort that ultimately leads to flashes of insight. 

I think this is what Green meant when he wrote that AI can prevent him from finding his “own ways into and around a topic.” LLMs are designed to make cognitive work effortless, but that feels so icky because for it to be worthwhile at all, it has to be effortful. This argument has already been made about AI-generated writing: Letting an LLM write for you defeats the point, because writing is thinking. But it can also be true, as Green’s example has shown, of using AI for the research that feeds the creative process. 

If you use AI, consider creating a personal AI policy

Perhaps all these concerns are overblown — humans are hardly less prone to lazy and logically unsound thinking than AI. That’s absolutely true, but the point of doing our own thinking isn’t that we’re inherently good at it. To the contrary, it’s that we can only get better at reasoning by practicing it. 

I don’t want to suggest that using AI for research is illegitimate. It’s too useful a tool to take off the table entirely, and we can’t put that genie back in the bottle. It can be extremely helpful with identifying the best sources that you wouldn’t find otherwise, but those very abilities can make it double-edged, foreclosing a slower, more open-ended exploration process. But AI’s greatest strength — its endless variety and flexibility — can be used to steer it away from the most tempting uses, especially those that ultimately harm us.

There are very obvious things that any LLM user should do to that end, like never assuming that a claim from an AI is accurate and always reading original sources. Beyond that, the necessary guardrails depend on your own use patterns, but above all, I think it’s helpful to avoid training ourselves to expect immediate answers to difficult questions.

One of my colleagues refrains from using it to brainstorm ideas entirely, instead using it to provide sources for narrow factual questions and to aid in the fact-checking process (emphasis on “aid”) after a story is written. To generalize from this, I think it’s a good idea to resist having AI do much synthetic work on a subject before you have drafted your project yourself. The less you do that, the less you will, to paraphrase Green’s recent video, see every problem as an “LLM-shaped problem,” and the less you’ll feel like you’re in the singularity where your brain is merging with AI.

One way that I like to use AI is as an enhanced thesaurus, to find the precise word or short phrase to express what I want to say in a sentence. When done right, I don’t find this harmful any more than using a traditional thesaurus; I find that it can enrich my working lexicon. But it must be used carefully and surgically, by setting a clear limit on the length of a phrase used from AI — like two or three words max — and avoiding sharing much of your writing with the tool at all, lest it start recommending extensive rewrites. 

When interrogating the contents of specific sources or a body of work, or stress testing your own arguments, AI would be better for our intellectual development if it took a Socratic approach — pushing you to discover an answer rather than simply giving you one. It might say, for example, “there might be some relevant caveats to your idea on pp. 42-43 of the source.” LLMs can be directed to behave this way in their custom instructions. It also helps to simply touch grass — find the sources you need, and rather than interviewing the AI about what they say, just close the chatbot and read them from start to finish. 

Configuring AI in a way that’s healthier for our brains would also make it less addictive — when you find yourself getting sucked into a long back-and-forth with an AI, that’s often a sign that something has gone amiss. Green evidently struggled to set that boundary, referencing the unhealthy “level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs.” AI labs have very strong commercial incentives to want us to be addicted to their products, and unless they build different constraints into models themselves, it’s hard to expect the average person, who has far less autonomy over the terms of her work than Green does, to change these conditions on her own. 

Although researchers at some AI labs are thinking about the societal risks of cognitive atrophy, it’s another matter to expect these companies, which compete on ease of use, to introduce friction into their models. We shouldn’t count on that happening soon — but we’re far from powerless against AI’s impacts. We can set our own personal AI use policies, and we can enforce social norms against AI-induced brain rot. Like, at bare minimum: Don’t send me your AI-generated writing. It’s rude! 

Los Angeles offers one of the most vivid examples of our nation’s broken housing system: a quintessentially American expanse of traffic-clogged roads and single-family homes, coupled with the highest home-price-to-household-income ratio of any major city in the country.

To moderate prices, LA urgently needs to build more homes by allowing more density in its neighborhoods — but much of the city’s leadership has vigorously opposed it. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the fight over SB 79, a landmark California law that overrides local zoning to permit taller, denser housing near major transit stops. LA’s city council and its incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, have opposed it and sought ways to avoid complying with it. 

Now, as Bass seeks reelection, mayoral candidate Nithya Raman — one of the city’s, and perhaps the country’s, strongest advocates for building more housing — wants to oust her.

Raman has gained unusual traction in a city long resistant to growth and has become a nationally prominent YIMBY. How to accommodate LA’s need for more housing, Raman told Vox in a recent interview, is “a question that the city has actually turned away from.” She believes she can do better.  

Earlier this summer, Raman advanced in LA’s mayoral primary, setting up a November runoff against Bass. The race has resonated far beyond Los Angeles, because Raman is making one of the defining problems in American life — the punishing non-affordability of our most productive cities — the centerpiece of her campaign. Its outcome could shape the future of housing in America’s most populous state and help determine whether LA can become the engine of California’s pro-housing turn, or its most potent obstacle. If she succeeds, she might cut a path forward for better housing policy in high-cost blue cities elsewhere.

Just as core to Raman’s appeal is a commitment that’s often seen as at odds with housing abundance. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a forceful champion of tenant protections, including rent control. (Her relationship with the DSA is complicated, however.) She helped shape a stricter rent stabilization formula that was adopted in LA late last year, though it was strongly opposed by rental property owners. 

Many housing policy experts, as I recently wrote, believe rent control can worsen the housing affordability crisis it aims to solve, because it tends to reduce the supply of rental housing. But in high-cost cities and states, interest in it has been surging nonetheless. A rising cohort of progressive politicians, including Raman and Zohran Mamdani in New York City, believes cities must protect current renters from price shocks and displacement while adding housing supply. In doing so, they hope to mount the kind of political support that has long eluded YIMBYs.   

I spoke with Raman about how she thinks about these competing interests, and how she intends to combine them to make a meaningful dent where her predecessors have failed. I was struck by how cautiously she discussed one of the city’s most politically explosive housing policy questions — densifying single-family neighborhoods. Though she has previously pushed for legislation allowing midsize apartment buildings in some wealthier single-family neighborhoods, she emphasized gentler, more gradual change in our conversation. It reflected the core paradox facing housing reformers in LA and nationwide: the need for sweeping change, and the political pressure to make it feel gradual.

Our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below.

You’ve gotten an enormous amount of traction on housing issues in LA. If you win the election, then what? 

When I’m asking for-profit developers and affordable housing developers alike, “What is your biggest barrier to building in LA?” they say that the city of LA is their biggest barrier to building in LA. Whether it is extraordinarily long permit approval timelines, whether it is the failure of the Department of Water and Power [DWP] to be a good partner and to provide real predictability in the building process, both in timelines and in costs. The city of Los Angeles stands in the way of new housing. 

As mayor, I want to do everything in my power to change that. I want to set deadlines by which departments have to respond to applications. I want to bring DWP to the table early and to ensure that they’re a predictable partner for new development. I want to make sure that departments that need to talk to each other are talking to each other quickly and early on in the process, as opposed to providing conflicting answers and taking months and even years to respond. These are all within the power of the mayor to influence and things that this mayor has ignored.

Sometimes rent control and renters’ rights on one hand and new housing production on the other are treated as rival agendas, yet you have made them both central to your politics. What connects them for you?

I don’t think that you can have lower rental costs in a city like Los Angeles without having more housing being built. This is a city that has resisted the construction of new housing for decades, explicitly restricted new apartments from being built in many, many parts of the city for a very long time. We have among the fewest homes per adult of any major city in America and the highest rent-burdened population of any city in America, and to me those two facts are very deeply connected. We can’t really lower rents unless we have more housing here, and lower rents are a big part of how you protect renters.

LA has a rent control system, and you were a champion of a change that tightened that system last year. Do you worry at all that tighter rent control could do damage to housing supply through some of the well-documented mechanisms, like causing landlords to convert apartments to condos? Is that in tension with the goal of increasing housing supply?

Housing built after 1978 cannot be subject to rent stabilization [in LA]. So, making sure that renters in older buildings are protected and trying to incentivize new housing from being constructed to me are not in conflict with one another.

You talked about landlords potentially exiting the market. We’ve also heard concerns from apartment associations and from neighborhoods that there’s been increasing corporatization of housing, that smaller landlords are selling to larger corporate landlords, that being a mom-and-pop landlord is becoming increasingly unfeasible. What we’d love to see is more data on that. And, if that is actually happening, if we are driving landlords out of the market through these changes, if smaller landlords are selling to large corporate landlords, I want to know, and we should be looking at the impacts of this policy accordingly.

I’m very open to learning more. But, so far, what I see is that we have an extremely unaffordable city where all the data has shown us that rents have risen higher than incomes for a very long time. The regulations that we put in place are really trying to ensure that struggling renters are still able to stay in LA.

Is there one specific, concrete housing policy mistake made by Mayor Bass that you would point to? How would you have handled it differently?

There has been an overall lack of urgency in addressing housing supply in [Bass’s] administration, exemplified by the fact that we have not had a deputy mayor of housing for years.

The city has actually opposed and written letters to state officials pushing back against new mandates to build more housing. Instead of telling Sacramento, “How do you want to build that housing?” and trying to shape state laws to suit us — the largest housing market in the entire state — those laws should be written with our input, not written with our opposition. 

I think the most stark example [of Bass’s failures on housing] is this: We’ve had 100 percent affordable housing projects like Venice Dell that are fully funded, that the city has sued and opposed and stalled for years.

“I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing.”

To what degree do you think that LA voters see the housing affordability crisis as a problem caused by a lack of supply — a housing shortage? 

I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing. It’s not universally necessarily agreed upon, but I think if you were to ask people, “Is there a housing shortage? Is there a shortage of housing you can afford?” everybody would say yes.

Why should renters trust private developers?

I think that renters should trust the city to regulate private development such that we actually are building what we need here in LA and such that new building is actually enhancing what people love about their neighborhoods. I don’t think it’s the job of renters to trust developers. They need to trust that their city is going to make sure that we’re working hard to build neighborhoods that are beautiful, and welcoming, and beneficial, and can help families thrive. 

That’s part of why I talk about production and protection always in the same breath. If you see that new construction is going to displace you, I think you’re less inclined to support it or to accept it. But if you feel secure in your current housing, and you know that you’ll be able to stay there, then new housing is less of a threat and can actually be a boon for a neighborhood.

That relates to an argument I’ve heard a lot: that tenants who feel protected from displacement by rent control and eviction protections will be less afraid of new development and more willing to support it. Have you seen evidence of that happening in LA?

There is a very broad coalition of people who are fighting for more housing now, a much broader coalition than I’ve seen in many other places. And it includes renters’ rights organizations that have historically been some of the strongest advocates for tenant protections. They’re actually in council chambers testifying around the need for more density across the entire city, particularly around transit hubs. 

Do you see rent control as a temporary bandaid on a broken housing market, or is it something that should have a permanent place in housing policy?

I think protections against rent gouging are really important, and I think regulation in the housing market is really important. As a city, we have to be very careful about how we regulate these markets so that we are eliciting the best results and outcomes for our residents. I’m going to follow the research, and I’ll always engage with these issues closely. 

The Democratic Socialists of America, of which you are a part, has talked about wanting to “de-commodify” housing and take it out of the private market. The DSA’s Housing Justice Commission says, “the housing market is not necessary.” Do you think that’s a good idea? 

My approach to these issues is driven by how I can help Angelenos who are dealing with spiraling costs that’s driving working families out of the city. The city saw, I believe, a 16 percent drop in people under 18 over the past few years, because families cannot afford to live here anymore. That is a travesty for the city of Los Angeles. 

My question as I approach this is about what I can do to ensure that we can keep people here. We can build new housing through publicly funded housing. I want to be able to make sure that people who will never be served by the private real estate market have support from the city to rely on that can help them stay, whether that’s in the form of housing vouchers, whether that’s in the form of social housing, whether that’s in the form of permanent supportive housing or new public housing.

I’m supportive of measures that are bringing public dollars to the table to build. However, the money that we have available to us will never be able to satisfy the extraordinary demand that there is for new housing in Los Angeles. So now, we have to rely on the private real estate market to make housing available and affordable to a much larger number of Angelenos. 

Rent control primarily protects tenants who already occupy apartments that are covered by rent control. But building more housing is partly about people who don’t yet have a foothold in LA and who would move there if they could afford it. Is it possible to build a housing politics that gives those future residents real weight, even though they don’t vote in city elections?

I think that’s the question of this election in many ways. That’s been the question of my politics. But it’s not just about the future; it is also about our present. It’s also about parents whose children can’t live near them anymore, because it’s too unaffordable here. It’s about rising homelessness, which is inextricably connected to the cost of housing. All the impacts of not having housing are already felt by Angelenos. 

So much of LA is single-family homes, and there’s been research finding that the city’s housing shortage can’t be filled without densifying single-family neighborhoods. Is that politically possible?

Some of the largest numbers of new units being built are actually ADUs, which are densifying single-family neighborhoods. And duplexes and triplexes and other kinds of interventions are in many places already legal to build. That’s been happening and, largely, been non-controversial in neighborhoods. 

Around certain transit hubs, I think potentially greater density will be allowed in single-family neighborhoods through SB 79. So I think some single-family neighborhoods will have to change. But what I’m seeing in LA is a gradual process of adding more density that I think, in many ways, can be even beneficial for homeowners, because they’re able to make additional income or accommodate more people on their lots.

As homeownership slips further out of reach in America, more people are spending more of their lives as renters. Millennials and Gen Zs are less likely to own homes than older generations did at the same age, and the median age of a first-time homebuyer recently reached an all-time high of 40, up from 28 in 1991. 

That need not be a bad thing. Renting offers many benefits — flexibility, far lower upfront costs, never having to figure out what a “sacrificial anode rod” is — and homeownership is overrated as a savings vehicle. 

But being a renter in America (as roughly one in three people here are) can also be a very undignified experience. In most states, your landlord can kick you out when your lease ends for no reason at all, even if you haven’t done anything wrong. Many tenants live in fear of receiving their next lease renewal, not knowing if they’ll be displaced by the next rent hike. 

Some progressive policymakers, buoyed by the growing influence of democratic socialism and a resurgent tenant movement, are reviving an old, highly controversial answer to renters’ lack of security: simply ban steep rent increases through rent control. 

In June, New York City, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, froze rents on rent-stabilized apartments, which make up about 40 percent of the city’s rental housing stock. Rent control laws have been passed or tightened in recent years in places from Washington state to Los Angeles to Montgomery County, Maryland, and tenant advocates this year have pushed similar measures in Massachusetts, Washington, DC, Providence, Rhode Island, and Redwood City, California. 

Rent control’s advocates argue that the policy not only moderates prices, but also offers tenants stability and a firmer claim to their homes. It helps put “the landlord-tenant dynamic on different and more equal footing,” as Siraj Sindhu, executive director of Reclaim Rhode Island, which backed a Providence rent-stabilization ordinance that passed the city council before being vetoed by the mayor, told me. 

Those are really important goals. I’m a lifelong renter, having literally never lived in an owner-occupied home, and I hate that I can’t predict what my housing costs will be less than a year from now. But is rent control the best way to achieve stability? 

Housing economists have long hated rent control; the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously called it “the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.” Decades of research have found that it can have many unintended negative consequences, including depressing housing construction by making it financially impractical to build new rentals. And as we know from today’s crippling housing shortage, nothing is worse for long-term affordability than a scarcity of homes. More recent research, however, suggests that better-designed rent control laws can protect some tenants without having catastrophic consequences for housing supply. 

That rent control keeps coming back as a centerpiece of our housing politics reflects just how impoverished our policy ideas are for providing renters what they lack most: predictable costs and secure tenure. The US has an elaborate policy infrastructure to privilege and subsidize homeownership, while treating renting as an afterthought, like a condition of poverty or at best a waystation on the path to buying a house. That makes ever less sense in a country where millions of people will rent for life, whether by choice or necessity.  

The truth about rent control is somewhere between both extremes. It can, in some cases, certainly be worthwhile. But it remains a highly limited tool, and others can furnish some of the same benefits without fueling the very affordability crisis that they’re meant to address.   

Why economists (mostly) oppose rent control

Rent control polls favorably, and it’s not hard to imagine why — voters despise high prices. Capping rents might intuitively seem fair and costless: The tenant is protected from ridiculously high prices, the landlord profits a bit less, and society as a whole is no worse off. Who could object to that? 

In fact, though, many economists vehemently oppose rent control precisely because it isn’t cost-free — it merely moves costs onto others and makes them less visible.

In uber-expensive cities like New York and Boston, rents are so high because demand to live there far outstrips the supply of homes. In a healthy housing market, high prices signal to developers to build more homes, which then brings prices down and, just as importantly, grows the city’s population and economy by providing homes to people who want to move there. We’ve recently seen this happen in Austin, Texas: The city experienced a rapid run-up in rents during Covid, and builders responded (after the city eased some of its building restrictions) with a flood of new apartments. Rents have since fallen well below pre-Covid levels in real dollars. By contrast, policies that cap rents would diminish the incentive to build rental homes at a time when the US needs many more of them. 

Meanwhile, if rent caps fail to keep pace with landlords’ rising costs, owners may neglect maintenance or even pull apartments from the rental market if they no longer pencil out. One widely cited economics paper documented this dynamic in San Francisco, where the majority of rental housing is rent-controlled and annual rent increases are capped well below inflation. The city’s 1994 expansion of its rent control law, the researchers found, shrank the supply of rental housing among newly covered properties by 15 percent, largely because landlords converted rentals into owner-occupied units. The expansion made tenants 10 to 20 percent more likely to remain in their homes, but at the cost of making San Francisco’s rental housing scarcer and raising the rents of non-rent-controlled apartments. 

Rent control programs are generally not means-tested, meaning that tenants in eligible apartments receive it regardless of their incomes. So a higher-income tenant who happened to secure a regulated apartment can remain indefinitely at a steep discount, while a lower-income newcomer is left to compete for market-rate units, which are exorbitantly priced in part because of rent control.

As a result, rent control laws bear part of the blame for why San Francisco and New York City are so unaffordable, Arpit Gupta, a housing economist at New York University, told me. Trying to suppress rents in cities like these is like trying to hold the lid down on a boiling pot — the pressure inevitably spills over somewhere else. Gupta, who sits on the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, which sets maximum increases for the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, cast the lone “no” vote on the rent-freeze measure this summer. 

The freeze creates “a severe risk of financial distress” for many buildings, he told me. It could prompt landlords to leave apartments vacant after a tenant moves out if the cost to rehabilitate it cannot be recouped through the legally permitted rent. The number of vacant rent-stabilized apartments in the city has already been rising, and Gupta has argued that New York state’s 2019 overhaul of its rent-regulation laws, which further constrained landlords’ revenues, may be partly to blame.

Many leftists don’t like arguments like these because they’re uncomfortable with the idea that housing must be kept financially worthwhile for private owners. I sympathize with that instinct — housing is a human need, and it feels wrong for its availability to depend on profitability. But it doesn’t do us much good to ignore the structure of the economy we actually live in, where housing is overwhelmingly provided by the private market. 

Housing markets can be very good at providing for people’s needs, if we allow them to work better by legalizing more housing construction and pair it with targeted rental subsidies to people with low incomes. 

How rent control got smarter 

One of the clearest ways to understand rent control comes from Shane Phillips, a housing researcher at UCLA. It should be viewed not as a long-term affordability strategy, he has argued, but as a targeted stability tactic. For affordability, there’s no substitute for building enough homes. But in already broken, unaffordable markets, like many of America’s superstar cities, rent control can be a stopgap that lets some residents remain in their homes. It’s reasonable to expect that people’s homes shouldn’t be treated as crude commodities that they can be priced out of at any moment. The question is how to balance security for existing residents against the structural harms rent control can cause to the overall market.

Not all rent control policies are created equal. Old forms of it appeared in places from ancient Rome to imperial China to the Jewish ghettoes of Early Modern Europe. When describing modern rent control, however, researchers distinguish among a few different types. “First-generation” rent controls arose largely as emergency measures across Europe during World War I, becoming very widespread in the US during World War II. These typically froze each unit’s rent at a fixed dollar amount, with few avenues for adjustment as costs rose; over time, they tended to push homes out of the rental market and discourage maintenance, reducing both the quantity and quality of rental housing.

By the 1970s-80s, a “second generation” of rent control laws, often called “rent stabilization,” was adopted in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, municipalities across New Jersey, and numerous California cities. These introduced some important innovations: They allow modest annual rent increases, set by a formula or regulatory board and often pegged to the rate of inflation. They exempt new-construction buildings from price controls, which reduces the disincentive for developers to build new apartments. 

They also often include “vacancy decontrol,” which allows landlords to reset an apartment’s rent to its current market rate after a tenant moves out (after that, the unit remains subject to the annual rent increase caps). Vacancy decontrol is especially important for preserving rental housing supply, experts told me. But it also creates an incentive for owners to try to push tenants out so they can raise the rent. To combat this, most rent-control programs include “just-cause” eviction protections, meaning that landlords cannot arbitrarily evict tenants or refuse to renew their leases; they must cite a serious lease violation (or another legally recognized reason, such as removing the unit from the rental market). 

Second-generation systems remain in place in major US cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They tend not to distort housing markets as severely as first-generation laws, but they can still, as seen in the evidence from San Francisco, meaningfully damage housing supply. And Gupta has warned that New York City’s system has been regressing back toward first-generation rent control, with the recent rent freeze and the removal of vacancy decontrol under New York state’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.

Meanwhile, the recent revival of interest in rent control has produced some laws whose design may magnify the policy’s worst impacts. Montgomery County, Maryland, which includes some of Washington, DC’s most expensive suburbs, implemented a rent-control law in 2024 that lacks vacancy decontrol, while St. Paul, Minnesota, voters approved a 2021 ballot measure that initially lacked both vacancy decontrol and an exemption for new construction. Both places subsequently saw sharp declines in apartment construction, though the timing alone does not prove rent control was the sole cause. (St. Paul has since added partial vacancy decontrol and a permanent new-construction exemption.)

In a recent working paper, a pair of UCLA economists identified a “third generation” of rent control that is less restrictive than second-generation laws. California passed a statewide rent stabilization law in 2019, for example, that set a high ceiling on allowable annual rent increases: 5 percent plus inflation, or 10 percent, whichever is lower. It exempts new buildings for their first 15 years, and includes vacancy decontrol and just-cause eviction. Oregon passed a similar law the same year, as did Washington state in 2025. Using data from San Diego, the new paper found no discernible loss in housing supply there under California’s law. The implication is pretty intuitive: “The laxer the policy, the fewer the negative consequences,” as Phillips put it. 

The flipside, of course, is that the least restrictive laws also do the least to protect tenants — a 10 percent cap mostly just amounts to an anti-gouging measure, and landlords rarely raise rents by that much anyway. Still, double-digit rent increases do happen. And even a loose cap can offer renters peace of mind and insurance against a life-upending rent hike. 

We need a broader renter stability agenda 

Some current proposals may soon play out the tradeoffs of rent control. This November, residents of Redwood City, located between San Francisco and San Jose, will vote on a ballot measure that would cap rent increases at 60 percent of inflation, with a maximum increase of 5 percent.

Clara Jaeckel, a renter in the city and an organizer with the campaign, told me that the proposed law would allow landlords to petition for higher increases if it’s necessary to cover operating costs. It’s “designed to strike a fair balance between letting landlords have a fair return on their investment and keeping things affordable for renters,” she said. Under California law, the city would still be required to include vacancy decontrol and exempt housing built after 1995. “We believe building new housing goes hand-in-hand with rent control — so we want both of those things,” Jaeckel said.

Limiting rent increases so far below inflation, which is similar to San Francisco’s rent cap, has the potential to meaningfully reduce the quantity and quality of rental housing. But it’s also possible that its negative impacts remain muted. Gupta and Phillips both told me that vacancy decontrol substantially limits the harms of rent control, regardless of the exact percentage rent increase permitted, and the proposed Redwood City rent cap would apply to a smaller share of its rental housing than San Francisco’s law does. 

Voters and policymakers might decide that this tradeoff with housing supply is worth it if it can allow longtime residents to stay in their homes. The Bay Area has become so unaffordable that such laws right now represent one of the few ways that communities in the region can maintain some measure of class diversity. 

But it’s worth considering how to deliver the same stability and affordability without rent control, which for too long has been the fallback that expensive cities and towns reach for after allowing their housing markets to become dysfunctional. It can ultimately only offer tenants a cramped kind of security, trapping them in homes that may no longer suit their needs because leaving would mean surrendering their only affordable option. 

A better stability agenda for renters would give them genuine choices in where to live, and how long to stay. In places with broken housing markets, that means, first and most importantly, repealing exclusionary zoning laws and other barriers to building enough homes. That’s the foundation of affordability for everyone, but especially for renters, whose housing costs rise unpredictably with the market rather than remaining relatively fixed by a long-term mortgage. Renters with low incomes, meanwhile, need help affording housing even in a balanced market, and that ought to be provided far more consistently (Section 8 vouchers and other federal rental-assistance programs currently only reach a fraction of people who qualify).

Other policies can offer the long-term stability that rent control provides, too. “The ultimate issue that a lot of [rent control] interventions are trying to target is the challenge of being a renter and being faced with these cost shocks year after year,” Gupta said. Most American residential leases are one year long, but policy could encourage longer terms, which are common in some peer countries like Germany and Japan, and, Gupta noted, widespread in US commercial leases. 

Another step is to give tenants a presumptive right to remain in their homes — in the vast majority of states, landlords can refuse to renew a lease without any cause because the law simply defers to their private property rights. That is a bigger deal than it might sound like: If you’re a renter in one of the 40-odd states that don’t have a right to renewal, and you have, say, loud young children who irritate one of your neighbors, you can be forced out when your lease ends without any recourse. I’ve seen this happen firsthand as a renter in Wisconsin, and it’s one of many ways that cities can be hostile to families. Protection from arbitrary eviction would benefit renters regardless of whether their units are rent-controlled.

These sorts of policies also need to be balanced with reliable processes for removing tenants who seriously damage property, endanger their neighbors, or repeatedly violate their leases. “Sometimes landlords are taken advantage of. Sometimes they are lied to,” Phillips said. It’s rare to find a jurisdiction in the US that’s both “very concerned about tenants and very concerned about landlords,” he said. Instead, US housing policy tends to oscillate between either extreme, but protecting the rights and interests of both need not be mutually exclusive. 

America will remain stuck with a housing shortage for the foreseeable future, which not only makes housing unaffordable in our highest-demand cities and suburbs, but also gives landlords a structural advantage over renters because they’re shielded from competition. Until that changes, a limited form of rent control can redistribute some of that power back to renters. That may be a bargain worth making, but, Phillips said, cities should make it knowingly: with a clear idea of which renters they intend to protect, and who will bear the cost.

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

America’s housing supply was built for a world we no longer live in. But what will replace it? 

As the nation turns 250, that is one of the most important questions we face in the coming decades. Building enough homes, of the right kind, and in the right places is a prerequisite for economic opportunity and growth. Our crippling housing shortage is upstream of many of the problems that ail the US, from our cost of living and increasingly zero-sum politics to our seemingly intractable national bad mood. 

The root of the problem is that the United States governs housing under a nearly century-old paradigm that’s been cracking under growing strain. Since the end of the Great Depression and World War II, when the baby boom massively increased the country’s population and millions of Americans sought relief from derelict urban housing, suburbia has been the country’s default blueprint for development. Big single-family homes, two-car garages, and giant strip malls were not merely consumer preferences. They were also written into law by rigid zoning codes — the rules that dictate what kinds of things can be built where — incentivized by midcentury lending standards, and absorbed into the professional common sense of planners and builders. 

The system shaped not just the suburbs, but also many cities, and has kept homes scarce, expensive, and sprawling, resulting in a housing affordability crisis that has come to dominate politics. And in the decades ahead, this pattern will become even more misaligned with the reality of American life. Households are getting smaller, and Americans are getting older. If today’s low immigration rates continue, the US Census Bureau projects the country in 2076 will have fewer families with children and working-age adults, and far more seniors — the inverse of the demographic transition that drove the great suburbanization. Climate change and new technology, such as driverless cars, will also force cities and suburbs and populations to adapt.

US history offers reasons for optimism, showing repeatedly that we can reorganize ourselves with extraordinary dynamism when the occasion calls for it. Our cities have already lived many lives, growing from tiny outposts into world-leading metropolises, before receding again in the wake of suburbanization and de-industrialization, and then more recently gaining new life with influxes of younger generations.

The transformations ahead may not be as physically dramatic as those of the American past, but they call for equally monumental cultural and political shifts in our approach to housing. We’re already making progress: The ascendant “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) movement has persuaded states and localities to roll back restrictive policies that make it essentially impossible to build enough homes. The effects of those reforms are slowly making themselves felt in more affordable neighborhoods. 

But there is still far more to do. Housing reformers will need to turn their attention not just to removing bad regulations like single-family zoning and minimum lot sizes, but also toward reviving a role for government in shaping our communities through real, big-picture planning. Doing so would supply a missing piece in America’s housing agenda — making US cities and suburbs not just more affordable, but more vibrant and livable and helping us better use our existing infrastructure. That will matter even more as a shrinking working-age population makes endless outward sprawl harder to sustain.

A more abundant, more varied, and even more fun housing future is not inevitable, but it is decisively within reach. Here is what the future could look like by America’s 300th birthday, if we commit to making ourselves anew. 

Suburban retrofit abundance

Arthur Nelson, a professor emeritus of urban planning and real estate development at the University of Arizona, has a few words of warning for anyone trying to report on what cities might look like in a half-century: “You’re not going to be right.” 

Urban planners tend not to project many decades into the future because what that future will look like invariably hinges on factors we couldn’t possibly imagine today. The most important unknown for our future population and housing needs will be whether the US opens its doors to many more immigrants, as it has done at times in the past. Assuming immigration rates remain low, however, US population is projected to peak somewhere around the mid-21st century and fall thereafter; by 2076, it will have dropped back to today’s size, on the way to declining further. 

Despite that uncertainty, many of the housing abundance advocates, policy experts, and urban planners I spoke to for this piece expressed striking optimism that the future of housing will be better than the present, and enthused about how much can be transformed in 50 years. Start with the suburb, where the majority of Americans live today, and where the future of American housing will be decided. 

Imagine that, in 2076, you’re walking through a residential neighborhood in La Mirada, California, a midcentury, southeastern suburb of Los Angeles, one of the regions at the epicenter of today’s housing crisis. The bones look much like the suburbs we know today — gently curving streets, sun-baked yards, low-slung buildings set back from the sidewalk — but the old single-family monoculture in many neighborhoods has loosened: Houses built during the region’s mid-20th-century building boom now have small cottages, also known as accessory dwelling units (ADUs), tucked beside them. Some bigger houses have been subdivided into two homes. Other lots now hold triplexes, fourplexes, and small apartment buildings that sit comfortably among single-family homes. A few houses have become shared homes for seniors who want support and companionship without being cordoned off into a retirement community. (In 50 years, that will include people born in the 1980s, 1990s, and ’00s — me, and perhaps you, too.)

Even as the overall US population has plateaued, this late-21st century Greater Los Angeles might be home to millions more people than today, but it has not had to push all of them farther into the arid desert or the fire-prone hills. Because as many as two to three times more people are living on each acre of land, housing costs have eased. Many people rely on shared driverless cars, freeing up the space that would be needed for car storage, so land that had been parking can be put to better uses.

Perhaps most strikingly different from today’s suburbia, the hard wall between home and commerce — which is near-universally mandated by local zoning codes today — has softened. Near the neighborhood’s edge, where local streets meet a larger main road, a neighborhood grocery and clinic have opened on what used to be strictly residential lots. And, yes: That is a donut shop running out of a neighbor’s garage. A few doors down, an old three-bedroom has become a small co-working space, and a converted garage houses a bicycle repair shop. Housing has not only become more affordable, but with more of the rituals of daily life mixed in, the suburb has gained a richer, more connected public sphere. There are simply more people around — walking, talking, and lingering. 

Could we get there? Some experts I consulted predicted that simply easing regulations on what can be built in these neighborhoods will unlock a long-suppressed capacity for creative adaptation, allowing suburban areas to evolve in precisely this way. In the suburbs of superstar cities like LA, San Francisco, and Boston, land values are so high that property owners have strong incentives to redevelop single-family lots into more economically valuable uses, like multiple housing units. They just need to be legally allowed to do so. 

The YIMBY movement’s recent legislative successes have already put much of the country on that path. More than a dozen states, including California, have passed laws to allow building ADUs on residential home lots, and many others have new laws allowing denser housing, like townhomes and small apartment buildings in these areas too.

“I suspect it’s just a matter [of time] before the rest do the same,” M. Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research for the advocacy group California YIMBY, told me in an email. The upshot for the far future of housing is that “detached single-family zoning is dead,” predicts Gray, who is also an urban planner by trade. “I think the typical lot in a (non-HOA) suburb of a typical US city in 2076 will have at least a second unit; perhaps a manufactured ADU plopped in the back, perhaps a McMansion that has been converted into a duplex.” 

Such reforms also offer important tools for a graying population. As Nelson has argued, the number of senior households in the US is already growing faster than younger ones, and without zoning flexibility to redevelop single-family homes into smaller units or adapt them to the changing market in some other way, older homeowners would face the prospect of being stuck with large, hard-to-maintain houses. 

Even more dramatic suburban retrofits might come in commercial districts — think aging, abandoned malls, strip malls, and “power centers” built around big box stores and even bigger parking lots. As Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth has written, there is a growing movement to turn those sites into housing. 

An increasing number of states have started allowing apartments in commercial districts, where building multifamily housing is an easier sell politically than allowing it in residential areas where neighbors might resist. 

Meanwhile, Gray added, communities across the country have been very rapidly repealing parking minimums — the fixed number of parking spots required at every residence and business. As minimums are phased out, parking lots can be redeveloped  into housing and other uses better than acres of underused, heat-trapping asphalt.

“I expect most of today’s strip malls and shopping malls will gradually be converted into mixed-use pocket neighborhoods,” Gray predicts — a distinctly American version of a much older human pattern of development, where homes, shops, services, and public life are allowed to coexist. 

Maybe we need an urban planning revival

Despite early signs these reforms are nudging American housing toward a better future, the national rate of new home construction has barely moved, and forecasters expect little change in 2026. That owes less to the reforms than to the broader economy: mortgage rates largely stuck above 6 percent since 2022, which raise borrowing costs for builders and freeze existing owners in place; rising material and labor costs; and a thinning construction workforce worsened by President Trump’s immigration policies. Where YIMBYs have passed new laws, many local governments prove adept at finding ways to flout them. Housing advocates will have to commit themselves to a long fight, until change exists not only on paper, but also in the real world.

Even then, unleashing the free market alone won’t solve every problem with how American cities and suburbs are built and organized, or how they feel to live in.

Those failures are visible everywhere: Have you ever wondered why so many residential streets wind around in aimless, circuitous patterns, disconnected from the town around them? Or why you are forced to endure a nightmare commute to drive just 10 miles? These are all failures not just of too much regulation in the form of rigid zoning, but also of an absence of coherent urban planning. 

Robert Goodspeed, an associate professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, points to good planning as an essential missing element in today’s housing reform movement. “I think that the YIMBY movement has completely missed the importance of planning,” he told me. “Even if we repealed all zoning, it still doesn’t realize a well-designed, well-planned community that has high quality of life.”

The zoning approach works so poorly because it micromanages what can or cannot be built on any given parcel of land. It’s a set of prohibitions on what the private market is allowed to do (made without regard for how people actually want to live): No apartments can be built on this street, even if there’s an enormous amount of demand to live there; no coffee shop may be opened on that corner, even if it would fill up with neighbors delighted to make it part of their daily routine.

Urban planning, on the other hand, at its best is concerned with the public realm. It oversees the larger body of a city or area and provides the connective tissue of its infrastructure — roads, transit, parks, sewers, and other utilities — that links up the space, something the private sector can’t provide. It allows cities to function as a cohesive whole and has the potential to give the public access to what a community has to offer. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American planners were animated by real civic ambition, laying out future-minded street grids that could continue to grow and connect the residential and the commercial. One reason more recent development has been so poorly designed, Gray argues, is that planners have become so bogged down enforcing the tedious minutiae of zoning codes. “Zoning has utterly consumed planning, to the point that many city planning departments now do little that would resemble what a normal person might think of as planning,” he writes in his book Arbitrary Lines. Gray calls for abolishing zoning altogether, and freeing up municipal planning offices for more useful work that can accommodate the changes we know we need to make to our housing stock. 

Easier said than done, of course. The US comprises thousands of individual cities and suburbs, each with its own zoning code, and they will not surrender that authority willingly. 

But it’s not crazy to imagine that, in 50 years, planning in the US looks very different from today. Local governments derive their authority to zone from states, Gray points out. And just over the last few years, states from Montana to Maine to Oregon have been wresting certain zoning powers away from cities and suburbs. That shift could provide the seeds for a future where planning is run on a more unified, regional level, much like it is in peer countries like France and Japan. Local planners might then be empowered to focus on what matters — facilitating humane growth in places that people want to move to, and creatively solving the challenges that will arise from retrofitting a built environment that was not designed to accommodate that sort of evolution. 

Could we just…start over with all-new cities? 

One of the country’s most audacious attempts to revive American urban planning is unfolding in Solano County, California, roughly an hour north of San Francisco. There, a controversial, billionaire-backed company is advocating an iconoclastic solution to the Bay Area’s housing affordability crisis. 

Instead of fighting through red tape to get permission to add a few homes in Palo Alto or Marin County, the startup California Forever wants to build a new city from scratch. Forty years after construction begins, the company hopes, it would be more populous than the St. Louis, Orlando, or New Orleans of today, providing homes to around 400,000 people and jobs in advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, and other industries. 

The project has not yet broken ground, and, ironically enough, likely won’t be able to for several more years, as it moves through environmental review and other required regulatory steps. But it eventually hopes to prove that it’s still possible to build physical things in the world’s tech capital, the place that has transformed everyday life at extraordinary speed but still struggles with the elemental task of making room for people to live. The project has won support from many prominent housing reform advocates, who welcome it as a bracing challenge to an untenable status quo that has meaningfully damaged the US economy. (According to one widely cited study, restrictive housing policies in superstar metro areas, including San Francisco and San Jose, lowered overall American GDP growth by around 36 percent between 1964 and 2009 because they prevented more people from moving to those highly productive cities.)

Despite its Silicon Valley provenance, California Forever’s most interesting ambition is less futuristic than throwback. It hopes not merely to add a mass of badly needed housing stock to the Bay Area, but to deliver it in the form of a pedestrian-centered city of the kind that hasn’t been built in the US in a hundred years. Its architectural renderings show handsome mid-rise townhomes, apartments, and single-family homes along shaded, walkable streets with a bus rapid transit system, all organized around a traditional grid network of streets. Gabriel Metcalf, the head of planning for California Forever, told me he predicts the city will eventually have the lowest per capita rate of car travel anywhere in the US other than New York City.

Of course, the project in its full form might not get past regulatory hurdles. Even if it does, it could end up being too expensive for the people who work in its schools, grocery stores, and coffee shops to live in, especially with California’s high labor costs, environmental review, and other expenses baked in. It’s also very difficult to build a successful city from the top-down. 

But whatever becomes of this movement to build entirely new cities, it is tapping into a real gap that already exists in the US housing market: Despite our reputation for being car-loving suburbanites, many Americans want something different. A 2026 Pew Research Center survey, for example, found that 44 percent of respondents say they prefer to live in a walkable area — even if the homes are smaller (other estimates actually put the number higher). The surest prospect for making that a reality might not be new cities, but repairing existing ones. 

Alicia Pederson, a Chicago-based writer, researcher, and founder of the organization Courtyard Urbanist, predicts that, with good urban planning, we could in 50 years see a “golden age of American city-building.” With a graying and eventually shrinking national population, many cities will have to work harder to attract and retain residents by offering a better quality of life, she told me in an email. That might mean providing better housing options that make vibrant, walkable life accessible to more Americans without sacrificing the benefits of suburban single-family homes: spacious, sunny housing units and abundant green space. The kind of courtyard blocks common in some European cities offer one elegant solution: They occupy an entire city block, with a perimeter of mid-rise buildings and an interior yard. And they can accommodate homes in a range of sizes, which are more flexible and easier for aging people to maintain than detached houses. 

The future is still up for grabs

It’s entirely possible that sheer inertia keeps the US on its current sprawling trajectory as it approaches its 300th birthday, with reforms producing only a scattering of ADUs and boxy apartment buildings often derided as “gentrification buildings,” rather than any deeper transformation of the American built environment. 

Arpit Gupta, an associate professor of finance at New York University who I consulted because of his talent for poking holes in urbanist orthodoxies, predicted that the US by 2076 will actually see “a dramatic increase in sprawl” thanks to the future adoption of autonomous vehicles. That’s because he and many other transportation researchers believe many people would be willing to tolerate longer commutes in self-driving cars than they do in cars they have to drive themselves, providing one more reason to push housing ever outward. Minus the self-driving cars, that’s what’s happening in the hyper-sprawling and still growing Sunbelt, where new housing continues to be built farther and farther from city centers. 

But there are many other paths we might take. Domestic migration may begin shifting northward in the coming decades, amid a warming climate and water scarcity in the Southwest. Many Midwestern cities are showing signs of renewed growth (may I recommend moving to Madison, Wisconsin?), offering a chance to build more and better housing on the region’s extensive pre-war urban bones. And it’s much too early to assume that AVs will massively increase the amount we drive, Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, cautioned me. Different policy choices could lead to shared self-driving systems that encourage less car ownership and more density.

The future won’t vindicate every utopian blueprint — nor should it. Our housing system ought to be open and capacious enough to accommodate the country’s diverse and evolving preferences. The way we’ve organized housing for much of the last century has given us not only pervasive unaffordability, but also too few choices, too few versions of the American dream. That very scarcity is part of why Americans today are so angry at one another: It feeds the sense that we’re fighting over scraps. 

But if we make room for more ways of living together and think big about how to get there, we may find ourselves less trapped by the failures of the present than we think. Cities often surprise us: Fifty years ago, who could have predicted that places like New York City and Boston, then battered by population loss and disorder, would recover so dramatically? 

The trajectory we take in another 50 years will surely confound our predictions, too. And that’s reason enough to build something less brittle than what we inherited — a housing approach with enough room, variety, and imagination to enable American life to change again.