I love Jerusalem Demsas’ “Housing Breaks People’s Brains” article in The Atlantic from November 2022.
For me, it’s a trailhead for understanding why efforts and solutions aimed at the housing access and attainability crisis for so many Americans often short-circuit and fizzle before they can fix anything.
Demsas’ unflinching reporting on “localism and shortage denialism” homes in on the root – supply – causes of the crisis, offering what evolved into the Abundance movement a solid foundation for grasping housing’s vicious circle of challenges.
I was reminded of that work – and the book On the Housing Crisis that followed it – at a recent day-long gathering of people who love housing, work in housing, and are dedicated to creating more of it. Eight panels. Eight hours. Nearly 50 thought-and-practice leaders gathered in mid-March 2026 in Washington, D.C.
As elegant a phrase as “housing breaks people’s brains” may be, though, it ultimately has its cause-and-effect backward.
It’s people who break housing, not the other way around.
People stand in the way of “more” – because “more” ultimately means something they don’t want and choose not to allow.
Those choices show up in votes, lawsuits, community resistance, approval denials, delay tactics that run out the clock on capital, and countless other ways of saying no without quite saying no, and making decades disappear.
And in that context, too many priorities, too many would-be solutions, amount to no priorities at all – because any one of them can clash with the others, at any given time, to stop progress.
Which leads to a harder question that sat just beneath the surface of the Washington gathering:
What if the housing crisis is no longer primarily a problem of insufficient ideas, but of too many?
A housing supply summit
At some point in almost every serious conversation about housing, the answers start to pile up. That moment came early and often on March 18 at the National Housing Supply Summit: Applied Innovation in Washington, D.C.
Over a full day hosted and organized by Matt Hoffman, managing partner of HousingTech, and Dennis Steigerwalt, president of Housing Innovation Alliance, nearly 50 leaders – policy experts, capital providers, developers, technologists, and operators – moved through a speed-dating-style agenda of ideas aimed at addressing America’s structural housing shortage.
No one in the room doubted the scale and chronic nature of the problem. The United States remains underbuilt by millions of homes (pick a number between 3 million and 8 million), even as affordability pressures suppress demand and inventories rise in certain local markets.
The Summit’s purpose was not to diagnose the issue, but to trailblaze ways forward – how to build faster, finance more efficiently, streamline approvals, deploy technology, and expand the workforce needed to produce housing at scale.
The ideas arrived like waves, a tidal surge throughout the day. Zoning reform strategies. Construction innovation. AI-driven efficiency improvements. New financing methods. Workforce pipelines. Consumer-focused business models.
Each makes sense. Each addresses a real constraint. Each, in isolation, would open doors to more.
The rule of three
Taken together, they pointed to something more complicated – and more uncomfortable.
The housing challenge is no longer a shortage of solutions.
There is a surfeit of them.
And that excess might be part of the problem.
The instinct, when confronted with a crisis as large and persistent as housing, is to add. Add tools. Add policies. Add incentives. Add requirements to ensure that outcomes are equitable, sustainable, resilient, and politically viable.
But housing has become a system where addition carries a cost.
Every new priority introduces another layer of friction – another approval, another condition, another delay, another risk factor that must be priced into a deal. Each requirement, on its own, is defensible. Together, they accumulate into something that increasingly prevents projects from penciling, from moving, from existing at all.
In that sense, the Summit echoes a deeper truth that has been building across the industry: the constraint on housing production is not simply capital, land, labor, or demand.
It is complexity. And it is political will.
Complexity, at scale, behaves like resistance. And political will is made, at least in part, of resistance.
It is not that housing “breaks people’s brains.” It is that people, through layered decisions and competing priorities, break housing. Each differing view may reflect a rational interest. Collectively, they form a system that defaults to “no” far more often than it enables “more.”
There is a strategic principle that helps explain this dynamic: when an organization has too many priorities, it effectively has none.
Housing, today, operates in precisely that condition.
At the federal level, the system is asked to deliver affordability, climate resilience, equity, safety, and economic growth. At the state and local level, those objectives are layered with zoning controls, infrastructure constraints, and political considerations. At the project level, developers and builders face capital costs, entitlement risk, construction challenges, and uncertain demand.
Priority clash and how to solve it
Each layer adds goals that range from noble and heartwarming to pragmatic and doable. But the cumulative effect is algorithmically-multiplicative friction.
The result is not better housing outcomes.
It means there are fewer housing outcomes.
That tension – between ambition and execution – was present throughout the Summit.
It surfaced most clearly in a panel focused on financing innovation, where Jonathan Lawless, now with Bilt Rewards and a longtime leader at Фанни Мэй, pointed toward something deceptively simple.
Rather than proposing another comprehensive framework, Lawless highlighted a pair of overlooked or underappreciated realities.
One is the fragmented nature of housing production. A large share of homes in the United States are built by small operators – often firms with five or fewer employees – who, especially in today’s capital lending context, lack access to scalable, repeatable financing structures.
The other is that, in many cases, land is not the binding constraint it is assumed to be. A meaningful share of listings – particularly in urban and inner-ring locations – are for vacant lots. The issue is not their existence, but their usability.
The system struggles to connect land, capital, builder capacity, and consumer demand in a way that is consistent and scalable.
Lawless’s answer is not to add complexity, but to remove it.
His concept centers on private-sector, market-rate, low-hanging-fruit aggregation: bringing together small builders under a common platform, pairing them with standardized home designs, aligning those designs with pre-approved zoning and permitting pathways, and connecting the entire system to construction-to-permanent financing that can operate at scale.
On the demand side, the idea extends to how land is presented. Instead of listing vacant lots as abstract opportunities, they would be marketed with “what-it-could-be” renderings – complete with a home design, a price point, and a financing path that turns speculation into a product.
None of these elements is individually novel.
What is novel is the discipline of combining them – and, more importantly, of subtracting the variables that typically disrupt them. What Lawless’s model does, in effect, is reduce the number of moving parts.
- It limits design variability by standardizing plans.
- It mitigates entitlement risk by working within known frameworks.
- It lowers financing friction by aggregating projects into investable pools.
- It simplifies the consumer experience by turning land into a finished offering.
- In doing so, it makes a trade that the housing system has historically resisted: it gives up a degree of flexibility in exchange for speed, certainty, and scale.
More requires trade-offs
That trade is not without cost. It runs against long-standing preferences for customization, local control, and bespoke development approaches.
But it aligns directly with what the system lacks most.
Throughput.
If there was an undercurrent running through the Summit’s conversations, it was the recognition that friction – more than any single constraint – is the defining challenge of housing today.
That friction is not purely technical. It is human.
It lives in incentives, narratives, risk tolerance, and institutional inertia. As Lawless has noted in other contexts, markets do not change simply because better solutions exist. They change when the perceived benefits of those solutions exceed the costs—organizational, cultural, and political—of adopting them.
Housing, as a system, is particularly resistant to that shift.
- Local stakeholders protect neighborhood character.
- Policymakers balance competing constituencies.
- Capital providers price uncertainty conservatively.
- Builders avoid projects where timelines and outcomes are unclear.
Each actor behaves rationally within their own frame.
The system, as a whole, produces less housing than it needs.
This is where the idea of alignment becomes critical. A functional housing system requires participants to accept partial trade-offs in order to achieve a shared outcome. Without that alignment, the default condition is gridlock.
The takeaway from Washington is not that the industry lacks innovation. If anything, the Summit demonstrated an abundance of it. The deeper insight is that innovation alone is insufficient.
What matters is execution, action, and the willingness of the unlike-minded to agree to work on one thing.
That kind of execution, at the scale required to impact the housing gap by building more, depends on simplification.
- Fewer steps in the approval process.
- Fewer bespoke elements in design and delivery.
- Fewer layers of financing complexity.
- Fewer competing mandates imposed on each project.
Less.
Not as an ideological stance, but as an operational necessity.
Because in a system as interconnected and friction-laden as housing, every additional variable increases the likelihood of delay, cost escalation, community opposition or failure.
For leaders across the housing ecosystem – builders, developers, policymakers, capital providers—the strategic challenge ahead is not to identify more solutions.
It is to choose. To decide which priorities are essential and which can be deferred. To recognize that attempting to optimize for everything simultaneously results in optimizing for nothing.
That is a difficult shift. It requires trade-offs that are often politically and economically uncomfortable. But it also offers a path to something the industry has struggled to achieve for decades: sustained, scalable production.
No reason why not now
There is an old proverb that captures the moment.
The best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago. The second-best time is today.
Housing missed the first opportunity. Years of underbuilding, layered with increasing complexity, have created the deficit the industry now confronts.
The question is whether it will miss the second.
The National Housing Supply Summit made one thing unmistakably clear.
The knowledge is there. The tools are there. The applied brilliance and career-long passion are there. The urgency is there. What remains in question is whether the system can do something far harder than inventing new ideas. Whether it can simplify.
Only by doing less – fewer priorities, fewer constraints, fewer competing objectives – can the housing business and industry community finally deliver what it has long promised, and what the country urgently needs:
More.
It’s what abundance is made of.
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