Tim Redmond on the 48 Hills news site recently reported on conference at UCLA’s Lufkin Center that brought together academics and policymakers on both sides of California’s housing debate. The results were eye-opening.
There are groups that profess the theory that the key to solving the shortage in housing affordability is to simply increase supply by reducing regulations and other local controls, such as zoning and development standards.
A debate on this supply-side housing policy, including the transit-oriented development bill SB79, was held at UCLA on 4/15/2026.
A group of experts challenged the following set of unsupported underlying assumptions of the policy:
- The nation has a housing shortage that is causing prices to rise.
- The shortage is due to a long-term failure to build enough housing.
- The failure is due to regulations and NIMBY neighbors.
- Eliminating local zoning rules and related obstacles will solve the problem and bring prices down.
- The group provided data indicating:
Developers have no incentive to flood the market with new housing, which would prevent them from maximizing profit, so the new housing will actually further drive prices higher.
There is not a housing shortage (housing construction as actually outpaced growth based on household size); rather, there is an affordable housing shortage.
Massive influxes of wealth and private capital investments into housing has had a far larger impact on affordability than the over-simplistic supply-and-demand argument.
Read Tim Redmond’s full account of the conference at 48 Hills here:
https://48hills.org/2026/04/the-best-and-worst-of-ca-housing-policy-on-display-at-ucla-conference/