Ugliness has more to do with the housing crisis than you think.



The root of America’s housing affordability crisis isn’t complicated in the abstract: We need to build more homes (4 million more, to be more or less precise). More sprawl isn’t working — our dependence on it is part of what’s gotten us into a housing crisis in the first place.

We’re nowhere close to climbing out of this hole. Tariffs certainly aren’t helping, and making things more challenging is, as ever, the vocal minority of residents across American cities and suburbs who oppose new apartments, duplexes, or anything denser than a detached single-family home being built near them.

Housing advocates and social scientists alike have long attributed NIMBYism to, at best, personal financial stakes (like property value) or logistic concerns (like traffic), at worst deeply rooted racism or classism. And all of those explanations are, to varying degrees, surely an important part of the picture.

But there might also be something more foundational at play here. People like neighborhoods with consistency and, it turns out, style.

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