At the MassBudget panel titled “Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But the Rent,” much of the room wanted to talk about rent control; I wanted to talk about building more homes. The audience seemed shocked when I said I do not think rent control is the right response to the housing problems we are facing. I think I have been so YIMBY-pilled, meaning so focused on the role of housing scarcity, that I had missed how much of the statewide conversation frames the problem as landlords, or even capitalism itself (a subject for another post). But if the root of the housing crisis is a shortage of homes, then any policy that could shrink the rental supply makes me nervous. Here’s the concern:

In my view, the best modern U.S. evidence comes from San Francisco. Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian studied a 1994 rent-control expansion and found that it protected incumbent tenants, but landlords responded by reducing rental housing supply by about 15 percent. The policy helped some tenants stay while making fewer rental homes available for others.

Of course, San Francisco’s policy was not identical to what Boston, Somerville, or other Massachusetts cities are proposing. Boston’s version is more moderate, with vacancy decontrol and exemptions for new construction. Somerville’s proposal is tighter. But the basic tradeoff remains: when we regulate prices without addressing scarcity, people and firms adjust.

This is a basic principle of microeconomics – people respond to incentives. Owners can sell units as condos, owner-occupy them, shift them to other uses, defer maintenance, become more selective about tenants, or build less. My objection to rent control is not that rents are fine – they are indeed too damn high. My objection is that rent control treats the symptom in a way that can worsen the underlying issue – scarcity.

I see the policy framework, broadly, having three parts.

· First, we need a stronger safety net for households with the lowest incomes. That means moving housing vouchers toward an entitlement program: if a family qualifies, they get help.

· Second, we need to make it easier to build homes where people want to live. That means ADUs, MBTA Communities, smaller lots, office-to-residential conversions, and faster permitting.

· Third, we need policies that make existing residents more likely to benefit from (and therefore support) densification. I have been thinking about transferable air rights in New York, street votes in England, and TAMA-style redevelopment in Israel. Each deserves its own post.

That is where I want to go next – a housing politics built around abundance, stability, and incentives that are aligned. The rents really are too damn high. That is exactly why we need to build more homes and help people afford the homes we have.

I have lived in Philadelphia, New York, and now Boston, which is home. I bought a cargo bicycle to ride my children to daycare when they were small. We spend Saturdays at the MFA. I still feel a little thrill walking through a neighborhood where people are making food, music, homes, businesses, friendships, arguments, and lives in close proximity to one another.

Cities are testaments to human ingenuity: creativity, innovation, culture, history, and cooperation made physical. They are also full of hard problems. Housing costs too much. Commutes are too long. Schools are unequal. Care work is undervalued. Climate risk is unevenly distributed. These problems make me angry, yes, but more than that, they make me curious. They give me an ikigai, a reason to get up in the morning beyond the already consuming and beautiful work of being a mother.

That is what I want Nitty Gritty City to be: a place to think seriously and hopefully about how cities work, and how our collective choices can make them better.

I’ll write here about housing, work, transportation, care, climate, schools, and the everyday policies that shape urban life. My goal is to look closely at the evidence, take tradeoffs seriously, and stay committed to the possibility that we can build places where more people will flourish.