Brendan Whitsitt: Is the Housing Crisis Our Fault?
On the persistence of incorrect and outdated ideas
Hanging on for dear life. Urban Progress, March 2025.
An essay in a new online publication, Urban Progress. Brendan Whitsitt describes how in 1846, a young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis at Vienna General Hospital observed that maternal death rates were considerably higher for deliveries by doctors and medical students, as opposed to midwives. He brought in a policy of handwashing, which reduced the mortality rate by about 90%.
There was tremendous resistance:
Despite clear evidence that handwashing saved lives, Semmelweis faced significant professional backlash. Many of his colleagues were skeptical of his observations. Some were outraged by the suggestion that they might be culpable in the deaths of their patients.
Semmelweis was dismissed from the hospital. He was only vindicated after his death, 20 years later.
The type of resistance Semmelweis encountered is not confined to medicine. Semmelweis’s story is a parable for practitioners in any profession — including those that create our cities: urban planners, architects, and engineers, both within the civil service and in private practice. Let’s call this group of professionals “city-builders.”
Like any other group of experts with established conventions and prevailing norms and beliefs, we city-builders often make the very same types of intellectual errors that Semmelweis’s peers made in the 19th century.
Despite the accumulated evidence, a great many planning professionals, architects, academics, civil servants, and politicians will ridicule the suggestion that we need to substantially increase supply and speed the pace of construction. Some can be openly hostile to those who suggest it, even within their own disciplines.
Many professionals have a deeply ingrained belief that only non-market regulatory measures, such as rent control and inclusionary zoning, or demand-side measures, like immigration controls, monetary policy, and prohibitions on short-term rentals, can address housing affordability. Many are skeptical that scarcity might be a contributing factor, much less a root cause, of our affordability challenges.
Like the medical professionals who hesitated to acknowledge culpability for not washing their hands, many city-building professionals are slow to recognize their own role in preventing access to a most basic human need — shelter.
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“The DCCs will not change housing prices. And I know that may be controversial for some, but I will say that unequivocally to you all now. The DCCs will not change housing prices.” Metro Vancouver DCC increases.
“Average wages and home prices are now separating everywhere in most of the developed world. And it does not seem to matter how rapidly new supply is added. Prices keep rising. So this problem can’t be caused by imbalances in ‘supply and demand’ for housing; something else is going on.”
Nassim Taleb said it well: “If something doesn’t make sense to you but it works, then it’s vastly better than something that makes sense to you but doesn’t work. People get it in the real world and academics don’t get it. If it works in theory but doesn’t work in practice it doesn’t count."