Progressives have welcomed migrants. Now they need to house them.

I’ll let you in on a dirty secret about journalism: Most of what we write — good, bad, or otherwise — is as evanescent as yesterday’s rain. Readers may get most of their news in digital form rather than paper these days, but the old adage still holds true: Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish wrap.

Every once in a while, though, writers on deadline produce something of lasting value, an insight that illuminates not just today, but the past and the future both, something that helps explain why we are where we are.

Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southwood’s article “The housing theory of everything,” published a year ago in Works in Progress, is just such a key. “Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment,” they wrote. From Covid to slow economic growth to climate change to falling fertility, they all had one root cause in common: “A shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live.”

Their argument was as simple as it was true: So long as housing supply remains constrained in the most economically productive cities in the US, so would the country’s potential. Whatever else the US wanted to do — solve climate change, reduce economic inequality, make it easier for people to have as many children as they wanted — fixing the long-running housing problem had to come first. Everything else was just hot air.