The Anti-Abundance Critique on Housing Is Dead Wrong

The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business. In housing, for example, Ezra Klein and I write that a key bottleneck to homebuilding in the last few decades has been legal barriers to construction, including zoning laws and minimum lot sizes. This is a mainstream view supported by economists and scholars who have studied the issue for decades. The antitrust left, however, claims that the more significant factor is that big homebuilders abuse their power by holding back construction to juice their profits. “Big homebuilders withhold housing supply,” the antitrust advocate Matt Stoller has claimed. In their paper “Post-Neoliberal Housing Policy,” the law professors Christopher Serkin and Ganesh Sitaraman criticize market concentration in homebuilding and call for “tools from anti-monopoly policy.” T

The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business. In housing, for example, Ezra Klein and I write that a key bottleneck to homebuilding in the last few decades has been legal barriers to construction, including zoning laws and minimum lot sizes. This is a mainstream view supported by economists and scholars who have studied the issue for decades. The antitrust left, however, claims that the more significant