To be clear, none of this is intended to equate the challenges faced by new residents (many of whom contribute to gentrification, if unwittingly and unwillingly) to those of poor immigrants or families at risk of displacement in coastal U.S. cities. The issue is that we're pitting new residents against old ones when 90% of the problem could be resolved by simply building enough new housing to accommodate all comers.

We've allowed mostly wealthy, mostly white homeowners to dictate our future and leave us fighting over the scraps of the housing market, even as their homes each increase in value by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. We debate how to raise a few billion dollars for affordable housing on the backs of new residents—enough to build a couple thousand low income homes, maybe—while the value of single-family homes in Los Angeles County alone have increased by $500 billion over the past 25 years.

We've been convinced that the built environment—not the people who inhabit it—is what makes a community; that neighborhood integrity is about the character of buildings, not that of our neighbors. This is not a liberal ideal. Rather than turn these people away, we need to recognize that new residents are just people like us, looking for a better life and new opportunities. Adding enough new homes so that they can find somewhere to live is a very small ask. We have to stop acting as though the subjective value of "neighborhood character" (which has always been and will always be a moving target) is of equal importance to the hard economic realities of unaffordable housing, inequity of opportunity, and homelessness. The latter issues are clearly of greater importance, and if you're willing to sacrifice them at the altar of "neighborhood character" then you need to take a moment and seriously question your commitment to progressive, inclusive values.

Pro-Equity, Anti-Housing

Some of you may remember the hub-bub in 2014 over Thomas Piketty's book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," which examined wealth inequality in Europe and the U.S. over the past few centuries. It was an absolute blockbuster (for an economics book), showing that the share of income coming from returns on capital was increasing over time, which was bad news for those of us who don't earn most of our money on stocks, property, or other capital investments (i.e., most of us). It was a rallying cry for liberals around the developed world.

What you may not have heard about was the critique of Piketty's work by a 26-year-old MIT graduate student named Matthew Rognlie, who basically said that the issue isn't so much capital in a general sense, but housing in particular. In other words, the growing value of housing relative to other assets (as well as labor income) is responsible for almost 100 percent of increasing wealth inequality in the Western world. The below chart shows the share of income from capital, with and without housing included.