🏙️ Higher love: The case for building up

America has rediscovered housing supply—but without height, its most productive cities will keep choking off growth

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in the USA and around the world:

The US housing debate has reached a sort of unsatisfying stasis. First, affordability is now a major political and policy issue. Good! Second, reasonable people now agree that more housing supply is both needed and prevented by bad rules and regulations.¹ Also good!

A victory in the competition of ideas? Well, more like a necessary battle won—but hardly a sufficient one. That’s because the conversation has seemingly settled on too modest a version of “more” supply: a few extra stories here, some missing-middle infill there, maybe an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard. It’s progress, definitely (perhaps the most identifiable bit of progress in the embryonic “abundance” movement). It’s also not nearly enough.

What’s missing is height. We’re talking about the kind of vast vertical ambition that built my hometown of Chicago after the Great Fire, that turned postwar Hong Kong from a colonial backwater into one of the densest and most productive economies on Earth. Cities have always grown along two axes—outward across land² and upward through the skyline. Today, we’ve rediscovered the first. Now it’s time to turn our eyes to the skies.