I’ve spent much of the past two weeks on the road (California, DC, New Hampshire) talking about housing issues. I put this slide together and used it many times in my talks. I admit that it lacks nuance—I’m sure there are multiple crossovers and people who can fit into multiple categories—but as a broad concept, I find it insightful. I can always tell when something really resonates because people in the audience get out their phones to take pictures of the slide. And there were lots of pictures of this one.

That’s because the fundamental insight behind it, I think, is important. Governments rely on continually rising housing prices, or else things can go really bad really quickly (see the financial crisis of 2008). Existing homeowners would much prefer to have their housing prices go up than have them stagnate or fall. People making loans on homes, building homes, developing property, or working within the real estate market have many of their mistakes forgiven by appreciating property values. Those who invest—including pension funds and other institutional money—benefit not only from the appreciation of real estate, but also from the overall wealth effect that rising home prices provide.

So a policy approach that lowers home prices is going to run into a lot of structural resistance. And that’s the core cognitive dissonance in our affordable housing conversation: we want housing to somehow become more affordable without prices actually going down. Stated another way, we want people to somehow be able to afford housing while housing itself remains largely unaffordable.

Only die-hard YIMBY movements have been really honest about this disconnect. That’s because the foundation of their thinking is a near-religious belief in the law of supply and demand—and forget the messiness of human irrationality. If supply and demand is your gospel, it makes sense to seek to lower prices by dramatically increasing supply, and that’s what market-focused urbanists do. That would do the trick, for sure, but whether it would actually be the kind of stable and prosperous world they envision is another question.

As with many housing issues, I don’t have a clear three-step plan to make everything work for everyone. Similar to the latest college admissions scandal, it seems that at least part of the conversation needs to acknowledge that even if we truly believe in some vision for an ideal society—whether that includes ample affordable housing or fair college admissions standards or something else entirely—when it comes down to it, our vision for our personal happiness is often at odds with our theoretical utopia. Put another way, individually, we have a vested interest in one approach (rising prices and growth), but collectively, we express an interest in the opposite (broader affordability and housing stability).

If we first make that acknowledgement, we can start to discuss a transition between a housing market dominated by our current distorted craziness and one that is more responsive to human needs.