FREE EXCERPT! From "Zoning is Good, Actually" Supply and Demand: Does Building More Homes Faster Solve the Problem? The widely held belief that simply building more housing will solve high prices rests on the claim that zoning restrictions artificially limit supply, a view drawn from basic economic theory and entrenched by the neoliberal policy shifts of the 1980s. For most people, “just build more housing” seems the obvious solution to high prices and that simply letting builders build anywhere they want, at whatever density they want, would solve this problem. The conventional argument behind this claim is that zoning, by restricting how urban land can be used, is the real culprit. Zoning rules, the argument goes, prevent the new supply needed to meet demand at prices ordinary wage-earning households can afford. That view comes straight out of Economics 101 and rests on a faith in the commonly understood “rules of supply and demand” that has shaped housing policy since the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s—the so-called Reagan-Thatcher revolution. Across the English-speaking world, governments shifted toward the belief that the private sector would house almost everyone if only the state would “get out of the way” (Dadkhah 2009). Yet evidence from city after city undercuts the claim that simply releasing more housing supply will bring prices down. Metropolitan areas that have added large numbers of new units continue to see prices climb faster than regions that have not. Nor is the problem ordinary building codes. Construction costs, adjusted for inflation, have remained largely stable for three decades (Zarenski 2016b). Land values, by contrast, have surged. In Vancouver, the nominal value of a typical building held roughly steady between 2006 and 2025—a real decline after adjusting for inflation—while the assessed value of the land beneath it rose more than 500 percent. Crucially, allowing greater density on a parcel does not reliably dilute that land cost; it often triggers an immediate speculative increase in the land-price “residual,”—the price the developer can pay after deducting profit and building development costs from current market price for housing— driven by forces far beyond zoning (Condon 2020a). Far from delivering the expected per-unit savings, upzoning frequently inflates the price of the land itself.