As previously covered, housing markets have a core rule: lower available homes relative to demand → higher prices; any housing policy that ignores this arithmetic won’t dent the crisis.
Callout example: New York up ~6.4% YoY with inventory still ~46% below pre-pandemic levels; Chicago and Philadelphia sit nearby with tight stock and firm price growth.
Conversely, markets with high or rising inventory (right side) tend toward flat or falling prices - note several Sun Belt cities edging into negative territory.
Policy implication: permit more, build more, and speed conversions; subsidies without supply simply bid up prices.
Thomas Coleman & David A. Weisbach - “Taxes and Reported versus True Income” (University of Chicago Law School, 2025)
The approach used by Piketty et al. (2018a) and defended by Iselin & Reck (2025) assumes misreporting is proportional to income - an assumption that excludes heterogeneous evasion patterns.
If misreporting varies within income classes, evasion from the top may appear as data points lower down the reported distribution; correcting it could reduce , not raise, top income shares, since more people are higher earners in reality than reported.
Implication: inequality research needs humility - methodology, not morality, determines much of the apparent result.
