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By Albert Sawano
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America has reached a point where having a roof over your head can feel like an economic privilege, and that should alarm us far more than it does.
The housing crisis is usually presented as a humanitarian emergency, and it is one. People are being priced out of communities, pushed into overcrowded housing and, in the worst cases, onto the streets.
The latest national homelessness assessment from the nonprofit National Alliance to End Homelessness found that 745,652 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2025. That was down from the record 771,480 counted in 2024, but homelessness remained near historic highs.
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But there is another critical argument here that goes unseen: unaffordable housing is an economic liability.
It drains household purchasing power, distorts labor markets, stretches commutes, and forces governments to spend enormous sums managing consequences that could have been addressed much earlier.
America is also building too little. Freddie Mac estimates the country is short 3.7 million homes. The latest construction figures make the situation more troubling.
Total U.S. housing starts fell 12.4 percent in July, while single-family starts dropped to their lowest level in three and a half years. We have a supply problem, a cost problem, and a financing problem all operating simultaneously.
Still, the conversation keeps returning to the same accusation: greedy developers.
Trapped in a Perfect Economic Storm
I understand why the blame game exists. A family sees a home selling for an extraordinary price and naturally asks who is making money from it.
But blaming developers for the entire crisis misunderstands how a building gets from an empty parcel of land to someone’s front door.
Developers and buyers alike are trapped in a perfect economic storm, squeezed by high land costs and expensive energy, burdened by rising property taxes, and halted by a severe shortage of skilled labor, all while facing a punishingly expensive financing market. Materials cost money, and every delay carries a financial consequence.
A developer trying to build multifamily housing is caught between these costs and the rent the market can realistically support. The margin is often far narrower than people assume.
This creates a perverse incentive. When the economics of building ordinary housing become harder to justify, developers can have greater incentives to pursue higher-priced projects. The industry adapts the only way the math allows.
We have constructed an economic environment in which building an affordable home can be harder to justify than building an expensive one. The cycle feeds itself, and pretending greed sits at the center of it lets the actual mechanism keep running unexamined.
Housing is Critical Infrastructure
The consequences reach much further than real estate. Housing costs often push people farther away from employment.
In Southern California, someone may find cheaper rent miles from where they work, only to surrender hours of their life to commuting. That person is paying twice, once for housing and again for the transportation required to reach opportunity.
In essence, housing is the bedrock of employment, health, and community stability. When a family cannot plant deep enough roots to build a future, it becomes everyone’s problem, and a mandate to demand better.
Imagine a city where nurses live near their hospitals, teachers afford the communities they serve, and young families spend disposable income at local businesses rather than bleeding every spare dollar into rent.
Housing is critical economic infrastructure. Secure it, and household spending surges, employers gain a stable workforce, and entire cities become more productive. That is the version of America I want to build.
The alternative is bleak. We can continue producing housing that becomes more expensive, accept poorly constructed buildings as the cheapest option available, push workers farther from jobs, and spend billions addressing homelessness after people have already fallen through the system.
There is a better choice, and it requires us to rethink construction itself.
Is The Answer Modular and Factory-built Housing?
Modular and factory-built housing should be taken seriously as part of that answer. McKinsey has estimated that scaled modular construction can deliver construction-cost savings of more than 20 percent under the right conditions.
A new federal housing law enacted this year is also attempting to make factory-built homes cheaper and easier to deliver, including removing a permanent steel-frame requirement that the Niskanen Center estimates can add roughly $5,000 to $10,000 to the cost of a manufactured home.
The government has a role here, too. Policy can make land available, support innovative construction, and create financing structures that recognize the useful life of a well-built building.
We should also revisit models that allowed public entities to assemble and redevelop blighted land, because public policy has the power to change the economics of what private capital can build.
Ultimately, a functioning economy needs people who can afford to participate in it.
I do not believe we should accept a country where shelter is available primarily to those who got into the market early or earn enough to absorb its escalating costs.
We should demand an industry and a policy framework capable of producing housing that is financially viable for its builders and affordable for the people who keep our communities running.
Stop treating housing affordability as somebody else’s social problem. It is an economic problem. It is a workforce problem. It is a productivity problem. And eventually, it becomes everyone’s problem.
We should start building like we understand that.
Albert Sawano, AIA, LEED AP, is Founder and Principal Architect at Synchronis. The views expressed are his own.
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