How can community input be undemocratic? It all comes down to whose voice gets heard. Opportunities for in-person community input usually occur at odd hours, when working people and parents who need to care for small children are less likely to attend. The result, according to research by political scientists Katherine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer is that city council members and planning commissioners disproportionately hear from residents who are white, older than 50, and—by a stunning margin—homeowners. Homeowners, of course, have more incentive than renters to block more development, because housing scarcity boosts their property values.

And as if the overrepresentation of NIMBYs (short for “Not in My Backyard”) in the public comment process were not enough, new research from political scientist Alexander Sahn shows that comments in opposition to new development are two times more effective than comments supporting proposed projects. Remarkably, Sahn’s findings hold true even in San Francisco, which is home to a large number of well-funded community nonprofits with a mission to assist low-income people and support affordable housing.

Houston, Texas, has stood out in the United States for its dedicated commitment to implementing housing-first policies, earning positive national media coverage this year in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Smart Cities Dive, among others. Earlier this month, the housing advocacy group California YIMBY published a report heralding Houston’s housing-first experiment, arguing California has not been able to replicate it primarily because Houston has more abundant housing. The group praised Houston’s land use policies — including its lack of a traditional zoning code — for substantially increasing Houston’s housing supply and lowering its costs.

Leaders in Houston agree their housing supply has helped them over the last decade, but cautioned against seeing their city as some housing utopia. Much of the credit, they say, goes to the slow, dogged work of earning trust from private-sector landlords, having a strong mayor system that remained all-in on housing first, and strategically leveraging federal dollars, including from the seven federally declared disasters the city has had in the last seven years. Houston puts no local general operating funds into homelessness receives scant funds for it from its state legislature, and Texas has not expanded Medicaid.

“The theory that Houston’s success at reducing homelessness is because of its lack of zoning is a red herring,” Eichenbaum, the special assistant to Houston’s mayor for homeless initiatives, told me. “The reality is while we might not have the typical zoning that many cities have, we do zone through ordinance and the hardest piece is still siting a location. We still have to deal with NIMBYism.”

But liberalism is largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.

This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis. As the historian Jacob Anbinder has explained, in the ’70s and ’80s conservationists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups, and left-wing organizations formed a loose coalition in opposition to development. Throughout this period, Anbinder writes, “the implementation of height limits, density restrictions, design review boards, mandatory community input, and other veto points in the development process” made it much harder to build housing. This coalition—whose central purpose is opposition to neighborhood change and the protection of home values—now dominates politics in high-growth areas across the country, and has made it easy for even small groups of objectors to prevent housing from being built. The result? The U.S. is now millions of homes short of what its population needs.

I know that the “people refuse service” narrative is popular among average people. Housing First is not glamorous for our American sensibilities. It does not appeal to the American middle class ideals of having to “bootstrap” your way to success. It does not fit into our fictitious ethos that our outcomes in life are entirely of our own doing rather than early life advantages and systems that trotted completely predictable paths. For that reason, Shellenberger’s quick and easy narrative will always be a popular one.

But there’s simply one proven method to reducing homelessness in the United States and it’s housing. Give your relatives and co-workers the empirical book “Homelessness Is a Housing Problem” this holiday season.

Gerontocracy is a relative concept. At his death in 1984 Yuri Andropov was only 69, decades younger than Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein and the other ancients currently presiding over the US Senate. What mattered was not the absolute age of the Soviet leadership but their generational cohort. Soviet history can usefully be understood as the story of the youth, maturity, and senescence of a single age group: people who were children in 1917. In the 1920s they benefited from the massive expansion of Soviet educational institutions and career opportunities for workers. As terror spread in the 1930s, they stepped forward to fill gaps left by junior Old Bolsheviks or bourgeois specialists. The survivors of World War II emerged into careers in the upper ranks of the party-state apparatus, and when the Politburo began to prioritize “trust in cadres” in the 1960s they found themselves, now in late middle age, occupying secure positions of power. The 1970s became an era of mass consumption driven by fossil fuel revenues, some of which could be siphoned off to fund lavish lifestyles for party nabobs (though these were spartan in comparison to post-Soviet corruption). By the late Brezhnev era, a bribe of half a million rubles could allegedly buy you the post of oblast party secretary, analogous to a governorship, in some parts of the Soviet Union. But after peaking in 1980, oil prices began to rapidly decline; the opportunity provided by this windfall had not been used to address the structural problems of the Soviet economy. Yesterday’s children of the revolution found themselves entering a new era of crisis plagued by the mental and physical calamities of old age.

The world that GPT-3 portends, instead, is one where some bureaucratic functions have been replaced by A.I., but where the people who would normally do that work most likely still have to manage the bots. Writers like me will have a digital shadow that can do everything we do, which would be a bit unnerving, but wouldn’t exactly put me or my employer out on the street. Perhaps a truly unchained GPT-3 would provide more exciting iterations, but it might also just write racist tweets that turn off investors and potential buyers of whatever products OpenAI wants to sell.

I asked Recht, who has spent his entire career working in machine learning and computer science but who also plays in a band, whether he was interested in a world of GPT-3-generated art, literature, and music. “These systems are a reflection of a collective Internet,” he said. “People put their ass out there and this thing scours them in such a way that it returns the generic average. If I’m going to return the generic average of a murder mystery, it’s gonna be boring. How is it different than what people do already, where they do their analytics and produce some horrible Netflix series?” He continued, “The weird monoculture we’re in just loves to produce these, like, generic middlebrow things. I’m not sure if those things would be worse if GPT did it. I think it would be the same?”