Physicists have longed for a theory of everything, a single framework that would explain every force in the universe. After the better part of a century, they’re still looking. But social science, improbably, may have beaten them to it.
In 2021, three British writers — John Myers, Sam Bowman, and Ben Southwood — published an essay in the progress-minded site Works in Progress arguing that a startling share of what ails the modern West comes down to one thing: too few homes built where people want to live. Slow growth. Widening inequality. Falling fertility. Obesity. Even climate change. They look like separate problems with separate causes, until you notice that each one gets worse when housing gets scarce. The authors called it “the housing theory of everything,” and five years on, the case has only gotten stronger.
The mechanism is simple: where you can afford to live determines your job, your commute, your family size, your neighbors, your politics. Make homes scarce where opportunity is, and every one of those suffers.
As I wrote back in 2022, once you begin to understand the housing theory of everything, you start to see it everywhere. One estimate from the essay puts the cost of building restrictions in just three cities — New York, San Francisco, and San Jose — at 8.9 percent of US GDP, about $8,775 per American worker per year. And today a record 22.6 million renter households, or half of all renters, now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
It’s not supposed to be this way. Since the 1970s, nearly everything material in American life has gotten cheaper measured in hours of work — a television fell from 60 hours of labor to 7 — while the house you put it in went the other way. If you’ve ever wondered why decades of genuine progress don’t feel like progress — a major obsession of this newsletter — housing is a big part of the answer. The gains are real, but our rents and mortgages are eating them.
That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news.
A new law for our single biggest problem
What made all this feel so depressingly unfixable is that no one seemed positioned to fix it. Zoning is controlled by thousands of city councils and planning boards, each answerable to neighbors with a vested interest in scarcity, since for most American homeowners, the housing shortage bolsters their net worth. And Congress had simply left the field, going roughly 30 years without passing a major housing law.
Then, over about three weeks this summer, lawmakers acted. On June 22, the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 85-5. The House followed a day later, 358-32, and after President Donald Trump chose not to veto it, the bill automatically became law on July 11. The ROAD Act is the most significant housing legislation in decades, and the first built squarely on a basic YIMBY premise that cuts to the heart of the housing theory of everything: Homes are expensive because America made them too hard to build.
The act stitches together more than 60 separate bills, 36 of them bipartisan, negotiated by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) along with Rep. French Hill (R-AR) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). Its centerpiece, the Build Now provision, ties federal block-grant money to results: cities that add homes get more, cities that block them get less, and a $200 million annual innovation fund rewards measurable increases in supply.
The rest of the bill takes scissors to the red tape strangling housing. The law streamlines federal environmental review for housing the federal government itself helps fund. It directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development to write guidelines for single-stair apartment buildings up to six stories — a small-sounding change that my colleague Rachel Cohen Booth has called “a deceptively simple reform that could unlock more housing.” And it ends a 1970s-era rule requiring factory-built homes to sit on a permanent wheeled chassis, a mandate that added thousands of dollars per unit and helped keep the cheapest form of American housing out of most neighborhoods.
What’s revolutionary here isn’t the elements of the bill — which are still largely small-bore compared to the scale of the problem — but the acceptance of the basic YIMBY idea that, as Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said, “If we had more housing, the price would go down.” Ben Metcalf of UC Berkeley’s Terner Center told the New York Times the law was “catch-up on 30 years of policy,” while Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, put it more simply: the law is a triumph “simply because it exists.”
The states ran the experiment first
Congress may be late to these YIMBY ideas, but it has the benefit of knowing they have been tested. One of the best examples is in Auckland, New Zealand, which upzoned three-quarters of its single-family land in 2016, rewriting the rules so those lots could hold apartments, not just one house each. Construction roughly doubled within five years, and a study published last year estimates Auckland rents are now about 23 percent lower than they would have been without the reform.
The American version of Auckland — with better tacos — is Austin, which spent a decade legalizing apartments, killing parking minimums, and shrinking minimum lot sizes. The Texas city added 120,000 homes between 2015 and 2024, growing its housing stock by 30 percent. As my colleague Marina Bolotnikova reported this spring, Austin rents fell 6 percent in a single year, more than any other large US metro, with the fastest declines in older, cheaper buildings — exactly where relief matters most.
Other states have noticed. California exempted most urban infill housing from its famously litigious environmental review law. Montana passed its “Montana Miracle” package, legalizing duplexes and backyard apartments on land that had allowed only single houses. Texas legalized homes in commercial zones statewide.
Red states and blue states are coming to the same diagnosis about solving the housing problem: build more. The new federal law mostly just tells them to keep going.
Why your rent won’t drop tomorrow
It’s a sign of just how terrible federal housing policy has been for so long that what is ultimately a pretty modest law is being greeted so rapturously.
The ROAD Act notably contains almost no new money — its final section is literally titled “No Additional Funds Authorized.” Zoning, which can make or break housing, remains a local power. The law mandates nothing; it nudges with grant formulas, which a determined city council can shrug off. The New York Times’ Conor Dougherty, one of the top reporters on housing, judged it “unlikely to do much to blunt the high cost of rent and ownership in America anytime soon.” Mortgage rates have been stuck above 6 percent since 2022 — as I could show you from my own mortgage statements. National homebuilding has barely moved, and forecasters expect little change this year.
Experience shows that a problem big enough to be a viable theory of everything is going to need more than one reform. Minneapolis famously ended single-family zoning in 2018, and only got a modest building response, because a dozen other rules still stood in the way. What worked in Auckland and Austin was the full stack — density plus permitting plus parking plus lot sizes. Housing, as advocates put it, is a door with many deadbolts; this law unlocks the federal ones and hands the states a better set of keys. The others are still bolted.
Usually with this newsletter I like to point at progress that has already arrived but gone unnoticed. Housing is the opposite case: The problem is exactly as bad as everyone feels it is, and what arrived this month is agreement about why. America spent 40 years treating expensive housing like the weather: unfortunate, unchangeable, nobody’s fault. It has taken five years for that diagnosis published on a magazine website to become a universally praised act of Congress.
The ROAD Act won’t pour a single foundation. What it did do was build the consensus upon which the next few million of them will be built. And consensus, in American politics, is the material that takes the longest to set.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
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