You've probably heard the explanations. Greedy developers. Restrictive zoning. Foreign investors. Each contains a grain of truth, but they miss the bigger picture.

The housing crisis isn't primarily a construction problem or a regulation problem. It's a population distribution problem. Millions of people are trying to squeeze into the same handful of places, and no amount of building can keep pace with that kind of concentrated demand. Understanding this demographic reality changes how we think about solutions.

Modern economies have a peculiar feature: they reward concentration. The best jobs, the most interesting people, the richest cultural offerings—they cluster together in a small number of metropolitan areas. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Talented people move where opportunities exist, which attracts more employers, which draws more talent.

The numbers are striking. In most developed countries, the majority of population growth concentrates in just a handful of metro areas. In the United States, roughly half of all job growth since 2010 occurred in just 20 cities. Similar patterns appear in the UK, Australia, Canada, and across Europe. Meanwhile, smaller cities and rural areas often see stagnation or decline.

This isn't random preference or cultural snobbery. It's economics. Knowledge workers benefit from being near other knowledge workers. Companies locate where talent pools exist. The result is demographic concentration that would have seemed bizarre to previous generations. Your grandparents could build a middle-class life in almost any decent-sized town. Your children may face a choice between a handful of expensive metros or limited opportunity elsewhere.

Takeaway

Housing demand isn't distributed evenly across a country—it piles up in specific places where economic opportunity concentrates, creating intense pressure in some areas while others empty out.

Here's the arithmetic that breaks housing markets. San Francisco added about 100,000 jobs between 2010 and 2019. It built roughly 30,000 new housing units. That gap—70,000 more jobs than homes—gets filled by longer commutes, more roommates, and higher prices. Every year the deficit compounds.

Building faster sounds obvious, but it runs into real limits. Construction requires land, and desirable cities are often geographically constrained—coastlines, mountains, existing development. It requires labor, and skilled tradespeople aren't easily multiplied. It requires time, and a condo tower takes years from planning to occupancy. Even cities that genuinely want more housing struggle to match the pace of inbound migration.

Zoning reform helps at the margins. Cutting permitting timelines helps. But when a metro area attracts 50,000 new residents annually while its practical building capacity might be 20,000 units, the math doesn't work. The demand side of the equation—where people choose to live—matters as much as the supply side.

Takeaway

Construction can never build fast enough to satisfy unlimited demand in limited geography—at some point, where people live has to become part of the solution.

If concentration causes the problem, distribution offers a partial solution. Some countries are experimenting with policies designed to spread population and economic activity more evenly. Japan has invested heavily in regional cities. South Korea offers incentives for companies to relocate outside Seoul. The UK's "leveling up" agenda attempts something similar.

Remote work—accelerated by the pandemic—represents perhaps the most powerful distribution mechanism yet. When workers can do their jobs anywhere, the economic logic of clustering weakens. Early data suggests this is already reshaping migration patterns, with smaller cities and suburbs gaining population from major metros. Technology may be doing what policy struggled to achieve.

None of this eliminates the need for more housing in growing areas. But it reframes the problem. Rather than asking only "how do we build more in expensive cities," we can also ask "how do we make more places economically viable?" Spreading opportunity geographically doesn't just ease housing pressure—it creates more resilient communities and reduces the winner-take-all dynamics that concentrate both wealth and housing costs in a few favored locations.

Takeaway

The housing crisis has two levers: building more homes where people want to live, and creating more places where people would actually want to live.

Housing affordability isn't just about zoning codes or construction costs. It's about where opportunity lives—and right now, opportunity crowds into too few places.

The path forward requires both approaches: build more in high-demand areas and spread economic vitality more widely. Demographics created this problem. Thoughtful attention to population distribution can help solve it.