Voters love this solution to the affordability crisis. They’re wrong.

Voters want stuff to be cheaper.

To most economists, the best way to make things more affordable is to make them more plentiful: When the supply of a good rises, its price tends to fall. Thus, to push down the costs of expensive commodities, the government should make them easier to produce.

For example, zoning restrictions make it illegal to build apartment towers in many urban centers. This reduces the supply of housing, which leads to higher rents. Therefore, economists argue that the government should make housing more affordable by legalizing the construction of multifamily buildings.

But voters don’t love this answer. After all, it asks them to accept some immediate costs (construction noise, for example) for hypothetical future benefits. More critically, supply-side reforms do little to address their affordability concerns today. When a city council votes to upzone a neighborhood, a dozen condo towers don’t promptly sprout up through the concrete.

So, some politicians have recently gravitated towards a simpler solution to high prices: Make prices above a certain threshold illegal.

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