Feature
Economists and policy analysts broadly agree that more housing needs to be built in order to reduce costs in America’s most expensive cities. Using a novel survey of mayors of mid-sized and large cities to explore mayors’ views on the roots of America’s housing crisis and what solutions they believe will most effectively address their constituents’ housing challenges, the authors summarize mayors’ attitudes and perceptions on key issues related to expanding the housing supply, reporting how well these views correlate with mayors’ assessments of their own cities’ supply needs.
By:
Dana Guterman
Across the United States, housing affordability has reached crisis levels. In many cities, home prices and rents have far outpaced wages, while housing supply has failed to keep up with demand. In the Greater Boston area alone, 36 municipalities now have a median home price above $1 million. Yet other cities offer a counterpoint: Minneapolis and Austin, for example, have permitted substantially more housing construction in recent years, and rents have fallen relative to inflation. But if building more housing stabilizes prices, why don’t more cities do it?
That question took center stage at a recent presentation in the American Politics Speaker Series, hosted jointly by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Center for American Political Studies. On November 21, 2025, Katherine Levine Einstein, associate professor of political science at Boston University, presented research examining mayors’ views on the roots of America’s housing crisis, and what solutions they believe will be most effective.
Dana Guterman is a copy editor and writer with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the positions of the Ash Center or its affiliates.
Commentary
Allen Lab Fellow Hillary Lehr convened a Voter Experience Summit at Harvard’s Ash Center in March, bringing together 25 cross-sector experts to rigorously map the voter journey. This essay explores how that collaborative process could lay the groundwork for new interventions to understand and improve the experience of voting for all.
Additional Resource
After Neoliberalism: From Left to Right brought together hundreds of leading economists, political scientists, journalists, writers and thinkers from across the political spectrum to explore and debate emerging visions for the future of the political economy.
Panel videos below.
Commentary
Allen Lab Affiliate Benjamin A. Barsky examines alternative emergency response programs — arguing for a democratic model of public safety governance in which responses to nonviolent incidents are shared across government and civil society rather than dominated by police.