This event is part two in the ongoing program series: Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus. 

This series is co-sponsored by the City Club of New York.

San Francisco and Houston are the twin poles of the American housing debate. San Francisco: high regulation, scarce housing, sky-high prices. Houston: permissive zoning, abundant construction, relative affordability. The lesson seems obvious: deregulate and build your way to affordability. But does the evidence actually support this characterization and that lesson?

In Part 2 of Cracks in the YIMBY Consensus, we speak with Federal Reserve economist John Mondragon, whose recent research challenges the premise underlying this popular contrast. Examining decades of housing data across hundreds of U.S. cities, Mondragon and his co-authors find that measured supply constraints, such as zoning regulations, do not explain differences in the growth of housing prices or quantities across metro areas. The reason for the divergence between San Francisco and Houston, they argue, is found in the composition of economic growth, and not in the relative permissiveness of each city’s zoning code.

We will discuss what this finding means for our understanding of the affordability crisis, compare the actual national housing picture to the predominant representation of it, and consider what it would mean to treat demand, rather than supply, as the starting point for affordable housing policy.

Moderators:

Juan Rivero, Special Projects Director, Village Preservation 

Andrew Berman, Executive Director, Village Preservation

Presenter:

John Mondragon is a research advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, where he works on the mortgage and housing markets and empirical macroeconomics. He is the co-author of “Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth across U.S. Cities” (February 2026) with Schuyler Louie and Johannes Wieland.