This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Housing shortages color all aspects of American life, my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote over the weekend, including bagels, music, and education. The solution seems simple: Build more homes. But that’s much easier said than done, especially when Americans disagree about the basic facts of the crisis.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The triumph of LaGuardia, America’s worst airport The forgotten Ron DeSantis book The death of the sex scene

“Nowhere Is Immune”

“In my mind, bagel shops open at 6 a.m.,” my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote over the weekend. “That’s how it works. You should be able to feel caffeinated and carb-loaded at 6:03 a.m. every day of the year, including Christmas.” But in San Francisco, where Annie lives, it’s tough to find a bagel place that opens before 8:30 a.m. She blames the housing shortage.

Annie’s theory might sound a little far-fetched, but she goes on to explain the evidence to back it up: San Francisco is not building nearly enough homes to keep up with the jobs it has added in the past decade, and rents are higher in the city than pretty much anywhere else in the United States. This means that many families navigating child-care costs can’t afford to live in San Francisco; the city has the smallest share of children of any major American city. That’s all to say: San Francisco is not full of people “who might be up at 5:51 a.m. on a Sunday morning, ready to hit the bagel store.”

And this kind of cause-and-effect goes far beyond bagel stores, and far beyond San Francisco, Annie writes:

Housing costs are perverting just about every facet of American life, everywhere. What we eat, when we eat it, what music we listen to, what sports we play, how many friends we have, how often we see our extended families, where we go on vacation, how many children we bear, what kind of companies we found: All of it has gotten warped by the high cost of housing. Nowhere is immune, because big cities export their housing shortages to small cities, suburbs, and rural areas too.

A trio of analysts recently coined a term for this: a “housing theory of everything.” “You now hear it everywhere, at least if you’re the kind of person who goes to a lot of public-policy conferences or hangs out on econ Twitter,” Annie writes. The theory has caught on, she argues, because it’s true: “Housing costs really do affect everything.”

She explains:

[Housing costs are] shaping art by preventing young painters, musicians, and poets from congregating in cities … They’re shaping higher education, turning elite urban colleges into real-estate conglomerates and barring low-income students from attending. They are preventing new businesses from getting off the ground and are killing mom-and-pops. They’re making people lonely and reactionary and sick and angry.

So what do we do? The solution is simple on its face: “Build more homes in our most desirable places—granting more money, opportunity, entrepreneurial spark, health, togetherness, and tasty breakfast options to all of us,” as Annie puts it. But this fix isn’t easy to achieve, in part because many people struggle to even recognize that a housing shortage exists—even when the evidence is right in front of them.

My colleague Jerusalem Demsas reported on this problem a few months ago: “Before I get to the veritable library of studies, our personal experiences compel us to recognize that housing scarcity is all around us,” she wrote, in an essay aptly titled “Housing Breaks People’s Brains.”

Even the rich are struggling to find homes, a sign of how wide-ranging the shortage is. As Jerusalem noted, video clips have gone viral showing “hundreds of yuppies lining up to tour a single Manhattan apartment.” But many people don’t necessarily connect these real-estate woes with the reality of housing scarcity.

People also doubt the effects of building more housing: A study published last year noted that 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe that if a lot of new housing were built, rents and home prices would rise, when in actuality, the evidence—and economic theory—suggests that prices would fall.

In her article, Jerusalem offers a few theories for what’s behind these forms of denialism, but the consequences are clear: These types of thinking “push against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes,” she wrote. “After all, if there is no shortage or if building new homes doesn’t reduce rents, then no one has to tackle NIMBYism, no one has to work to bring down housing-construction costs, and no one needs to build millions of new homes in America’s cities and suburbs. In fact, this magical thinking goes, we can fix our housing crisis without changing much of anything at all.”

The first step toward solving the housing crisis might be aligning Americans around a shared reality—and as we’ve seen time and again, that’s not easy to do.

Related:

The U.S. needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine. Meet the latest housing-crisis scapegoat.

Today’s News

Newly released documents show that former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich put out a report that withheld details of his office’s investigation of Maricopa County voting in the 2020 election; the county is Arizona’s largest voting jurisdiction. A strong winter-storm system hit much of the continental U.S., leaving at least 75 million Americans under winter-weather warnings or advisories. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency threatened the Norfolk Southern Corporation with a legally binding $70,000 fine for each day the transport company fails to clean up the toxic waste from its train derailment in Ohio earlier this month.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Emma Marris asks: Are we trying to save animals in the wrong places? Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf probes the decline of organized religion in modern life.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty; The Atlantic

The Cure for Hiccups Exists

By Uri Bram

Hiccups are a weirdly distressing physical experience. In their normal version, they are benign and, given enough time and patience on the part of the sufferer, end by themselves. Yet there is something oddly unbearable about that brief eternity when you’ve just hiccuped and are waiting, powerlessly, for the next one to strike.

The search for a cure has, naturally enough in the age of the internet, resulted in a multitude of Reddit threads. Many claim a 100 percent, never-fails guarantee: putting a cold knife on the back of your tongue, saying pineapple, closing your eyes and gently pressing on your eyeballs, drinking water while holding down an ear. Specifically, your left ear.

Spoiler: None of these is a 100 percent, never-fails, guaranteed cure. As common and discomforting as experiencing hiccups is, remarkably little medical research has been done into the phenomenon—and even less into how to end a bout.

Read the full article.

More from The Atlantic

Biden’s hope vs. Putin’s lies The 2024 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet The children of the Nazis’ genetic project

Culture Break

Bleecker Street

Read. “There You Are,” a poem by Victoria Adukwei Bulley.

There you are

this cold day

boiling the water on the stove,

pouring the herbs into the pot,

hawthorn, rose;

Watch. Emily, a new film about the “most vexing” of the literary Brontë sisters.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

In a recently published article adapted from his new book, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, Jake Bittle writes about how climate change is affecting housing dynamics: Rising sea levels are turning coastal homes across the U.S. into sticks of dynamite, passed on to less and less wealthy owners with each sale—and at some point, they’re going to explode. Bittle’s work is another reminder that housing is inextricable from every other issue that touches American life, and life on our planet.

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken will join The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Thursday, February 23—one year after Russia invaded Ukraine—to discuss the war’s latest developments and implications for U.S. foreign policy. Register for the virtual event here.

I have a gripe about San Francisco: The bagel stores open too late.

My neighborhood, Bernal Heights, has a number of excellent purveyors. The tasty BagelMacher opens at 8:30 a.m. on the weekends, at which point my sons have been up shrieking and destroying things for three hours. Chicken Dog, which sells the best salt bagel I have had in California, opens at the downright brunch-ish hour of 9 a.m. I come from the Bagel Belt, to co-opt a term. In my mind, bagel shops open at 6 a.m. That’s standard. That’s how it works. You should be able to feel caffeinated and carb-loaded at 6:03 a.m. every day of the year, including Christmas. But not here in the Bay Area. And the housing shortage is to blame.

That’s my pet theory, at least. San Francisco has built just one home for every eight jobs it has added for the past decade-plus, and rents are higher here than they are pretty much anywhere else in the United States. The city could stand to increase its housing stock fivefold, according to one analysis. What does that have to do with bagels? Few people can afford to live here—and especially few families who have to bear child-care costs along with shelter costs. Thus, San Francisco has the smallest share of kids of any major American city. Meaning a modest share of parents. Meaning not a lot of people who might be up at 5:51 a.m. on a Sunday morning, ready to hit the bagel store.

The late opening hours of San Francisco’s bagel joints are not the only things you can reasonably tie back to its housing crisis. The declining share of gay residents in its historic Castro neighborhood. The blanding of the city’s bohemian culture. Even the graying of its famous brightly painted Victorians. (Apparently, the people who can actually afford to buy homes in the city prefer understated colors.)

[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]

The crisis is not just happening in San Francisco. Housing costs are perverting just about every facet of American life, everywhere. What we eat, when we eat it, what music we listen to, what sports we play, how many friends we have, how often we see our extended families, where we go on vacation, how many children we bear, what kind of companies we found: All of it has gotten warped by the high cost of housing. Nowhere is immune, because big cities export their housing shortages to small cities, suburbs, and rural areas too.

Recently, a trio of analysts coined an apt term for this phenomenon: the housing theory of everything. You now hear it everywhere, at least if you’re the kind of person who goes to a lot of public-policy conferences or hangs out on econ Twitter. Writing in the journal Works in Progress, John Myers, Ben Southwood, and Sam Bowman took stock of many of the most pressing problems in the Western world, among them declining fertility, endemic chronic illness, brutal inequality, the climate catastrophe, sluggish productivity, and slow growth. They tied each of them back to the cost to rent an apartment.

High real-estate prices eat up young families’ budgets, prompting parents to have fewer kids than they would like. Building restrictions beget sprawl, spurring people to walk less and drive more, damaging their arteries and the planet’s climate. The inability of inventors to move to cities bursting with know-how and capital quashes a country’s long-term growth prospects; the inability of workers to move to cities with high wages dents its GDP. And driving up housing prices by restricting construction acts as a wealth transfer from renters to landowners. Indeed, housing prices might be the single biggest generator of financial disparities in many Western countries.

In a roundabout way, the French socialist economist Thomas Piketty inspired the term housing theory of everything. In 2013, the publication of Piketty’s opus, Capital in the 20th Century, sparked a broad debate about the causes and effects of economic inequality. “The book was a huge deal, and there was that Bloomberg Businessweek cover where Piketty was this heartthrob and everyone was obsessed with it,” Southwood, a British policy analyst and journalist, told me. When reading some work extending Piketty’s thesis, he told me, “I was thinking, Well, wait a second, land and housing really is an important part of this.”

Myers (a former hedge-fund portfolio manager and the co-founder of a U.K. YIMBY group) and Bowman (a think tanker) shared his housing obsession. Southwood and Bowman helped found Works in Progress, now supported by the fintech giant Stripe. And the three published their manifesto on the housing theory of everything a year and a half ago.

[M. Nolan Gray: How California exported its worst problem to Texas]

Post-publication, the idea took off online and in policy circles. Although Bowman, Myers, and Southwood focused on the most vital, sweeping effects of housing shortages and high housing costs, their theory has taken on a somewhat distinct meaning among its internet devotees. As a meme or a catchphrase, it applies to many of the crisis’s more obscure symptoms: riots in Liverpool, Canadian visa trends, the bribery of public officials, New Jersey moms’ desire for luxury bathtubs, and, in my case at least, bagel stores’ opening hours.  

The theory is catchy because housing costs really do affect everything. They’re shaping art by preventing young painters, musicians, and poets from congregating in cities. How many styles akin to the Memphis blues and Seattle grunge are we missing out on? Would the Harlem Renaissance or the Belle Epoque happen today? They’re shaping higher education, turning elite urban colleges into real-estate conglomerates and barring low-income students from attending. They are preventing new businesses from getting off the ground and are killing mom-and-pops. They’re making people lonely and reactionary and sick and angry.

The answer is to build more homes in our most desirable places—granting more money, opportunity, entrepreneurial spark, health, togetherness, and tasty breakfast options to all of us.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The left has long believed that Democratic states are the future, whereas Republican states are the past. But migration data show that red and blue might be starting to switch places.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

DEI is an ideological test. The death of the smart shopper The catch-24 of replacing Joe Biden

State of Disunion

“Democratic-leaning states represent the future and Republican ones the last gasps of a dying empire.” That’s been the theory long espoused by many on the left, my colleague Jerusalem Demsas wrote this week. But geographic trends suggest a possible reversal of this state of the union: Florida and Texas were last year’s top states for inbound domestic migration, with New York and California in the rear. And some red states may be better hubs for employment right now too: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggest that there are now more nonfarming jobs in Florida than in New York.

Jerusalem took a close look at Florida and New York, which together are a paradigm of a broader national trend of migration from blue states to red states. She found that the cost of housing is likely the single greatest factor behind the shift. “The top 10 metro areas for unaffordability are a sort of who’s who of Democratic cities: Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim tops the list, with New York–Newark–Jersey City rolling into the sixth spot as the first non-California metro,” she writes. The rise of remote work in the pandemic has also meant that one of New York’s main superpowers—“its gravitational pull on workers,” as Jerusalem puts it—has been weakened.

So what does this mean for blue states and their superstar cities? They’re far from dying, of course: “New York City isn’t some dystopian wasteland where no one can see their future,” Jerusalem reminds us. But evidence of a growing exodus does mean cities that have long been sitting comfortably need to put in some work to retain their residents—by, for example, improving basic amenities such as public transit.

And there are some selling points that more affordable red states might never be able to offer. “A healthy city attracts wealthy, middle-, and working-class people; it pulls newcomers into its orbit while leaving room for natives,” Jerusalem writes. “I don’t have a lot of faith that the Republican regimes now attracting Americans will be invested in this type of inclusive growth.” As Jerusalem notes, “We’ve seen these states become hostile to LGBTQ rights, educational freedom, voting rights, racial equality, and more.” This is true in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation is forcing professors to change how they teach.

In short, the lack of affordable housing in blue-state cities means that some Americans have to “choose between liberal values and financial security,” Jerusalem argues. And that choice is made more stark by the fact that red and blue America can feel, to some, like two entirely different countries.

My colleague Ronald Brownstein has written about what he calls “the great divergence” between red and blue states. This widening divide is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America, he argues, with the GOP in particular hoping to impose its politics on the entire country. He wrote last year:

What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support.

These new migration trends won’t do much to end the ongoing duel between red and blue America. “Although some predict that liberals moving to red states could moderate our nation’s politics, that seems unlikely given states’ tendency to preempt local policy,” Jerusalem told me. And that happens in both red states (on issues such as gun laws) and blue states (where state governments may hold localities accountable for housing failures), she explained.

For now, it looks like the divide between red and blue states will persist. But as long as cheaper housing and good jobs coexist in red states, blue-staters will keep on coming.

Related:

“Most important, we must not upset DeSantis.” America is growing apart, possibly for good.

Today’s News

The Pentagon downed an unidentified high-flying aircraft over Alaska at the order of President Joe Biden, a White House spokesperson confirmed. Russia launched multiple drones and several dozen cruise missiles in a “massive attack” across Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian air force. The FBI reportedly found a classified document at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence, according to a Pence adviser; a Justice Department official confirmed that a search took place.

Dispatches

Books Briefing: What (and whether) our world leaders read provides crucial insight into their minds and priorities, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

More From The Atlantic

Red Zeppelin Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes had to disprove a misconception. What’s the smallest amount of therapy that’s still effective?

Culture Break

Tom Coughlin hugs Osi Umenyiora after the Giants' victory in Super Bowl XLII in 2008.

Read. “The Third Law of Magic,” a new short story by Ben Okri.

Or A Giant Win, a football memoir that offers a human counterbalance to the heroics and chest-thumping of the Super Bowl.

Listen. This Is Why, the new album from the band Paramore.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Jerusalem does great work dispelling the many housing and homelessness myths that persist among Americans. To dive deeper, start with her piece on why housing breaks people’s brains. “Anyone who’s been in a dumb recurring fight knows that the entire problem could be cleared up if everyone could just agree on exactly what was said or done,” she writes. “But you can’t, so you end up stuck in a cycle of relitigation. Housing-policy discussions are like that.”

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.