Tuesday, January 27, 2026
For years, conversations about housing have circled the same drain. Prices are too high. Inventory is too low. Younger buyers feel locked out. Renters feel stuck. Policymakers promise relief, often through subsidies, credits, or new rules layered on top of old ones.
What’s changing, is that a growing number of influential voices are starting to say the part out loud that often gets skipped.
If there is a housing shortage, the primary cure is to build more housing.
That idea sits at the center of what’s increasingly being described as an abundance agenda and a key part of the over-arching discussion of affordability. It’s less a slogan than a reframing. Instead of asking how we redistribute a scarce resource, it asks why we’ve allowed scarcity to persist in the first place, and what stands in the way of producing more.
Housing is where this shift is becoming hardest to ignore.
For decades, we have made it extraordinarily difficult to build homes in many of the places people most want (and need) to live. Zoning rules that limit density. Lengthy approval processes that add years and cost to projects. Local opposition that treats change as a threat rather than an adjustment to reality. Layered together, these barriers, some intentional and some accidental, have constrained supply even as demand has steadily grown.
The result isn’t mysterious. When supply lags demand, prices rise. When prices rise, affordability falls. And when affordability falls, we reach for fixes that treat the symptom rather than the cause.
The abundance lens flips that logic. Instead of asking how to help people compete for too few homes, it asks how to make “too few homes” a less permanent condition.
What’s notable is who is beginning to adopt this framing. It’s not confined to developers or free-market purists. Economists, policy thinkers, urban planners, elected officials, and candidates for elected office across ideological lines are increasingly converging on the same conclusion. Without materially increasing housing production, nothing else scales.
That doesn’t mean ignoring legitimate concerns about infrastructure, environment, or community character. It does mean being honest about tradeoffs. A system designed to make building rare, slow, and expensive will reliably produce rare, slow, and expensive housing. No amount of downstream financial engineering can fully compensate for that.
And this conversation is no longer theoretical. The language of abundance is beginning to surface more regularly in policy discussions and in the early contours of thinking and speaking in advance of the 2026 and 2028 election cycles.
That matters. When policymakers and candidates start from the premise that housing scarcity is a choice rather than an inevitability, the range of possible solutions widens. Engagement with subject matter experts increases. Practical solutions begin to find their way into policy and eventually into markets.
For the real estate ecosystem, builders, lenders, title professionals, regulators, appraisers, this shift has practical implications. An abundance agenda isn’t just political. It’s structural. It raises questions about timelines, risk, compliance, local control, and how decisions that are made block by block…shape national affordability trends.
We’ll continue to pay attention to how these ideas evolve and where they begin to surface in concrete ways, both here and across our publications. As with many shifts that ultimately prove consequential, this one is happening gradually, and often outside the spotlight.
But if housing policy is beginning to realign with a basic reality, that homes are places people live, and that chronic scarcity has consequences, it’s a development worth watching closely.
Because when there aren’t enough homes, the most direct solution is also the simplest to say.
Build more housing.
Until Next Time,
Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC