Jerusalem Demsas on How Housing Became a Crisis

The Urbanist chatted with the author of a new book taking on exclusionary land use and political dysfunction.

Jerusalem Demsas has been steadily drawing attention to the root causes of sky-rocketing housing costs in the U.S. with provocative, thoughtful essays like “The Real Villain in the Gentrification Story” and “The Right to Move is Under Attack” as a staff writer at The Atlantic since 2022. Prior to joining The Atlantic, Demsas was a journalist at Vox, where she also co-hosted the popular policy podcast The Weeds. 

Now her essays have been compiled into a book entitled On the Housing Crisis, which goes on sale in early September. I had a chance to get a sneak peek at the book and chat with Demsas about her work. 

There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to understanding the housing crisis. As Demsas pointed out, “The housing crisis is a vast sprawling problem — you could probably say there are 70 different kinds of housing crises going on at any given moment.” Even so, what she has achieved in this book is deftly pinpointing some of the recurrent problems that have made it hard to build housing across the country, spreading the crisis from “superstar cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and New York” to places far away, “creating a crisis everywhere.”

Growing up in a family of refugees, Demsas has credited inclusionary zoning policies in Montgomery County, Maryland, for enabling her family to live in a good school district and ultimately launch her academic career. Her work never loses sight of the real people who pay the price of America’s housing dysfunction.

“[W]hen economists talk in terms of efficiencies lost when you don’t build enough housing, what we’re talking about is individual people are not able to live the lives that they want to live,” Demsas said in our interview. “They’re not able to move where they want to go. They’re not able to go to schools that they want to, or they’re not able to live near their families.”

Demsas offers a refreshingly candid voice on a generational crisis that cuts deeply into the lives of millions of Americans. After all, as she noted, “Housing is at the core of everyone’s life. It’s how you live, it’s where you live, and it’s how you feel safe in the world.”

Read on to learn more about her new book, how her perspectives on the housing crisis have shifted over time, and what she feels people can do to push for creating more housing. 

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Even a couple of years ago, while I was writing articles where it was clear that there were many people who did not believe in a housing shortage. Or they did not believe that the housing shortage was a central problem facing the United States. And so I think that we’re in a much different world now and that a lot of these essays have significant explanatory power for how we got here and where we’re going next.

Jerusalem Demsas

Natalie: As an author, what do you want prospective readers to know about your book? 

Jerusalem: It is a collection of essays called On the Housing Crisis. The housing crisis is a vast sprawling problem — you could probably say there are 70 different kinds of housing crises going on at any given moment. 

That has not been the story of America for most of our history – it has not been a problem we faced. And we know that we have the ability to have abundant housing. It’s not for lack of room in the United States, and it’s not for lack of know-how. So really the point of this book is trying to illuminate the political problems and the institutional changes that have made it really, really difficult for people to access housing in the places they need it.

If you were to ask people, do you think there should be abundant, affordable housing options for people to have, most people would say yes. It’s a broadly popular idea. Yet, why is something that sounds so popular not happening in reality? What is preventing that from occurring? Answering those questions is really the core of the book. 

Natalie: These essays were published in 2022 and 2023, so fairly recently. What was it like to revisit them and to look back on your body of work as you compiled it into a book? 

Jerusalem: It’s funny because it was such a dynamic time in housing. I mean, once the pandemic happened in 2020 and 2021, there was such a surge of interest in housing commentary and what was going on. A crisis that people had mostly thought was contained in superstar cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, was now a crisis everywhere —  in Idaho, in Utah, I mean, all over the country. You could see the problems sprouting up. And so, in many ways, there was just so much going on that when I was writing, I didn’t also have maybe the biggest picture of what was happening. 

Revisiting my essays was really interesting. I think any writer who’s revisited their work is just chock full of regret because they feel like there’s a better way to make this point or there’s a fuller way to make this point or something else that could have been added.

I think there was a bit of that, but there’s also really marveling at how far that the conversation has since moved on housing. I mean, recently at the DNC [Democratic National Convention], there was the centrality of the argument that there even is a housing shortage and that it needs to be taken very seriously. 

Even a couple of years ago, while I was writing articles where it was clear that there were many people who did not believe in a housing shortage. Or they did not believe that the housing shortage was a central problem facing the United States. And so I think that we’re in a much different world now and that a lot of these essays have significant explanatory power for how we got here and where we’re going next. 

Natalie: I’ve been reading your work in the Atlantic for a while, which was one of the reasons why I was really excited to do this interview. And I wanted to know, how did you first become interested in writing about housing? 

Yeah, I feel like it’s funny, once you are asked about your career, you can create so many different sorts of linear stories for how something happened. I think when I look back on my life, it’s really clear how much housing and housing policy, decisions in which I had no say, really shaped the course of my life. 

My family came here as Eritrean refugees from Ethiopia, and we were able to live in an area that had a good school district because it had some townhouses. And most of the people that lived in those townhouses were immigrants themselves, or they were Black or Hispanic Americans. At the time I didn’t really think anything of it, but later I would find out that the [townhouse] development only existed because of inclusionary zoning. And then later on in high school, when my parents divorced, I was able to stay in the same school because there was an apartment building that had been built that my father was able to move to, so we were able to live there and not disrupt our education.

If I really think back on when I really started focusing intellectually on this issue, it was in college, I really began reading a lot more about why it is so difficult for people to move to opportunity. I studied economics, and we would talk a lot about how people were moving a lot less in America. There are all these theories around it, and I started looking into some of the theories around whether it had to do with the constraints on housing in places where people wanted to move. And so actually the origin story for me is like really thinking about my own life and how much it affected me, but also just getting to learn about this large phenomenon [of people not moving] that was a big question mark for a while. 

Natalie: All of what you have said are good reasons for what would continue to motivate you [to write about housing], but is there anything you would want to add in terms of what makes you keep going with this work?

I think when people go on Zillow and they’re looking for an apartment, or maybe they want to start a family and they’re looking for a new house, they start out excited. But then you see people get just so sad, frustrated, and upset about the [housing] choices available to them. When you talk to low-income renters about wanting to send their kids to a good school, there’s no housing available near those schools. And I think about what that would have meant for my life, if my parents had not been able to send me to a good school.

What motivates me is the knowledge that there’s a real person at the end of every housing transaction. Like when we’re saying like there are, efficiencies lost – well, when economists talk in terms of efficiencies lost when you don’t build enough housing, what we’re talking about is individual people are not able to live the lives that they want to live. They’re not able to move where they want to go. They’re not able to go to schools that they want to, or they’re not able to live near their families. These people and the problems they face, that’s the core of housing to me. Housing is at the core of everyone’s life. It’s how you live, it’s where you live, and it’s how you feel safe in the world.

Natalie: As you’ve been deeply exploring the housing crisis, how have your viewpoints evolved or developed over time? 

I think the main way my viewpoints have developed is on the question of what causes people to be opposed to new housing in their communities. There was a prevailing theory for a long time that I really adhered to, which is that [the opposition to new housing] was really just about property values. You know, how much money is my house going to be worth? And therefore you could end up convincing people to be in favor of building more housing if you could convince them, it would make them materially better off. I strongly adhered to that way of thinking early in my writing career. 

But then as I did a lot more reporting and talked to a lot of people who were concerned about new housing in the neighborhood, it became really clear to me that when people say property values, they are talking about a catch all term about what the good life looks like and that includes someplace that looks clean or has grass or parks in certain areas. 

For some people [property values] might be racially coded or class- coded language, and that’s definitely part of it — I don’t want to pretend like that doesn’t exist. But a lot of it has to do with how we created a conception of what the good life looks like in America. It’s a white picket fence. It’s a separated single family home in a quiet neighborhood. It’s two cars in the garage. These are all cultural ideas on what makes a nice place to live. And when people are afraid of change, they’re afraid of that going away. They’re afraid that with an apartment building coming up, that there will be a bunch of people that are different in their neighborhood, whether it’s young people and college students, or just people who are not in the same stage of life that they are.

These people might think that because the people who live in the apartments are renters, they won’t care about their community in the same way. All of these things create a lot of fear in people. So I realized that a lot of what’s going on with opposition to new housing is really this inchoate sense that change might make things worse and that makes people become really, really risk averse with the way that their communities look. So that’s, I think, the biggest thing I’ve changed my mind on. 

Natalie: If you could put your book into the hands of one person who would deeply read it, who would that be? 

That’s a very interesting question, and it’s a hard question because anyone who studies housing realizes how much all of the power is decentralized into the hands of tens of thousands of local officials and state officials, individuals, nonprofit groups, and activists working at the local level. So it’s hard to pick just one. It’s also hard because for so many of the people that I would pick, it’s clear that they’ve come around to the pro-housing voices, such as the folks at the top of the Democratic Party. 

Honestly, what I would wish is that senior Republicans would probably come to the book as well. Whoever is advising Donald Trump on housing policy, I would love for them to read this book. I’m not sure it will convince them on its own terms, but I think that the biggest concern that I have right now is this question of this movement [to address the housing crisis], which has been broadly accessible to people on the left and the right from very different standpoints. Because accepting a housing shortage means that there are many ways to address that. You can address that with social housing. You can address that with market rate housing. All of the above can be a strategy. 

It has been a bipartisan movement for its entire existence. And so to me, there’s some concern when you see the Heritage Foundation and the Trump campaign turning against some of this sort of thing. I’m not really surprised by that because I think it is kind of in line with a lot of Trump’s own views. But we did have a moment, even with Republican leadership under Trump, when HUD [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] under the leadership of Housing Secretary Ben Carson promoted some YIMBY [Yes in My Backyard] ideas early on because it’s really in line with conservative ideology to kind of push back on regulations like this. So to me, it’s how I can get this into the hands of people also in the Republican Party who are working on these issues. 

Natalie: One of the things I wanted to talk to you about today is balancing the role of advocate and journalist. Do you see yourself as an advocate?

Jerusalem: I’m an opinion writer, so I think I’m a very clear advocate for the ideas that I think are really strong. But at the same time I draw a pretty hard line on advocating for specific groups or specific candidates or something like that. I think that’s outside the scope of what my job should be, and I think it allows me to retain a level of objectivity on individual people or groups that I think may or may not be doing good things in advancing those ideas. 

What I really love about working here at The Atlantic is that it allows me to make clear arguments. Sometimes I find it a bit hard to imagine that there are people who spend their whole lives working on a [reporting] beat and they don’t have really strongly formed opinions about what should happen or how it should look. And I get that there’s different kinds of journalists and that’s great for them. But I think for me, I definitely view myself as someone who entered into public writing because I wanted to figure out what I believed and what was actually true. And the way that I am able to do that at The Atlantic is by really exploring these ideas and making clear arguments, arguments that are shaped by people reacting and responding both in agreement and against them 

So when I think about what the bounds of my role are as a journalist, I want to be someone who can advocate for the things I believe in. But that also means setting a hard line between myself and advocating for specific groups or candidates or people who are often seen as avatars of an idea, but not the idea itself. At the Atlantic, for instance, there’s been a lot of articles written about the concern we have with Donald Trump and his election and what that might mean for democracy. But at no point has it become a “rah” festival for the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. In many ways, there are lots of critical arguments written about her. So I think that’s how I really think about my role.

Natalie: What are some actions that you would like to see people engage in to help solve the housing crisis?

Jerusalem: The core thing that needs to happen in order to address the housing crisis is that we need to move the levers of power from the local to the state level and there are a lot of ways that people can push for that. I think the most important thing is really getting involved in state politics and trying to make building more housing a core ask of your elected officials. I think a lot of this is going to happen in state houses around the country. There’s a lot that people can do at the local level, but when we’re talking about solving a housing crisis that spans regions, it’s going to take much more significant action. 

To me, the power of ideas is really, really the core of what I believe in, and in what I do in my job. I believe that if you can spread good arguments, it will inspire people to take the necessary actions that push back against bad ideas. That you can clarify how things get to be done in order to change the world in a positive direction.

I hope as many people as possible are able to continue to make this argument about why it’s important to build housing, about why it’s important to be pro-growth, and to be in favor of change, and to understand that the choices that we have in front of us are not to keep everything the way it is, or change in some negative direction. Change is happening; whichever way, whatever happens, change will come. And the question is, are you going to be pushing that in a positive and inclusive direction, or not?

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