The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the agency responsible, one would imagine, for housing and urban development. Over the past two decades, America has done far too little urban development—and far too little suburban and rural development as well. The ensuing housing shortage has led to rising rents, a surge in homelessness, a decline in people’s ability to move for a relationship or a job, and much general misery. Yet the response from the federal government has been to do pretty much nothing.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the federal government granted $87 billion to the CDC and other health agencies, and paid pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars to create a vaccine. When the property bubble burst, the Bush and Obama administrations earmarked as much as $100 billion to stem the foreclosure crisis (albeit with horrid results). During the financial crisis, Congress created a $700 billion backstop for failing banks. And to jolt the country out of the COVID recession, Washington disbursed nearly $2 trillion to households and businesses—including putting a temporary moratorium on evictions and providing $46 billion to cash-strapped renters.

What is happening with housing might not seem as dramatic. But that is only because the crisis has been brewing more slowly. Despite the unemployment rate sitting at record lows and household wealth sitting at record highs this year, an also-record number of Americans were experiencing homelessness: 653,104 in just one night this January. And by some measures housing is less affordable now than it has been in half a century. Shaun Donovan, who served as HUD secretary from 2009 to 2014, told me he had “never seen availability problems this bad … Housing has always been a top-three issue in New York and San Francisco. What is changing now is that it is a crisis in red parts of the country, rural parts of the country—in places where it’s never been an issue.”

Yet legislators have not passed a significant bill to get people off the streets and out of shelters. Joe Biden has not signed a law to increase the supply of rental apartments in high-cost regions or to protect families from predatory landlords. Congress has not made more families eligible for housing vouchers, or passed a statute protecting kids from the trauma of eviction, or set a goal for the production of new housing.

For its part, HUD says it is doing what it can. “Housing sets the foundation for everything else in a person’s life,” Marcia Fudge, the HUD secretary, told me in an email. “HUD is doing all in our power to invest in those who have often been left out and left behind.” But the department can only work with the authority and money Congress allots it. As housing costs have risen, as more people have been forced to crowd in with neighbors or camp in their minivans or skip going to the doctor to make rent, neither HUD nor its budget has expanded to meet Americans’ needs. Right now, it subsidizes housing costs for 2 million households, though more than 10 million families spend more than half of their income on shelter.

The country’s lack of a national housing policy is part of the reason we are in a housing crisis, and Washington needs to take a real role in ending it.

In the past few weeks, I asked a number of housing experts why Congress, HUD, and the administration weren’t doing more.

The problem is structural: Washington just isn’t set up to address the housing crisis. The federal government plays a large, but largely indirect, role in the housing market. It operates through incentives, credits, guarantees, and subsidies. Rather than building housing, it makes mortgages cheaper and covers part of market rents. Rather than setting up retirement communities, it provides tax breaks for developers. You could say the country’s real department of housing and urban development is the Treasury Department, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Senate committee responsible for housing is the Banking Committee.

“The biggest footprint is in mortgage markets,” Jenny Schuetz, a housing economist at the Brookings Institution, told me. The Federal Housing Finance Agency—which oversees Fannie and Freddie—“has more practical authority over housing markets than HUD does. And it’s this obscure agency that most people don’t even know exists.” But the Treasury Department, she added, “doesn’t view itself as a housing agency. I don’t think that many people are sitting inside Treasury actively working on housing-access issues.”

It wasn’t always that way. Indeed, Washington played an aggressive role in expanding the country’s housing stock from the 1930s to the 1970s. As part of the New Deal, the government financed the construction of homes for tens of thousands of families. HUD was founded during Lyndon Johnson’s administration and, as part of his Great Society, set out to build or rehabilitate millions of housing units.

But concentrated poverty and social unrest in public housing—and the anti-Black racism it triggered in voters and politicians—led Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, to put a moratorium on new government-financed projects. HUD would instead provide eligible applicants with vouchers to help pay for their housing. This would “in the long run be the most equitable, least expensive approach to achieving our goal of a decent home for all Americans,” he told Congress. A decade later, Ronald Reagan gutted the voucher program, slashing HUD’s budget by 60 percent.

As a result, today’s HUD is not much of a housing agency. And it is definitely not much of an urban-development agency. (“I used to joke that I’d like to put the UD back in HUD,” Donovan told me, pointing to the department’s limited community-development efforts.) It lives in the shadow of Reagan: small, narrowly focused, and somewhat disrespected. Its current secretary, Fudge, not only publicly lobbied for a different Cabinet gig after Joe Biden’s election but did so by arguing she did not want to end up at HUD. “It’s always ‘We want to put the Black person in Labor or HUD,’” she told Politico while seeking the USDA post that ended up going to Tom Vilsack. (“These out-of-date comments do not reflect the Secretary’s strong pride in the HUD workforce and the work that HUD has accomplished during her tenure,” a spokesperson responded.) Preceding her in the job was Ben Carson, who had no housing experience and repeatedly asked for his own budget to be decimated.

Nearly all of HUD’s budget goes to its voucher programs. And unlike SNAP benefits or Medicaid coverage, vouchers are not an entitlement; the majority of qualifying families do not get help. (Ninety-three million Americans are on Medicaid; 41 million use SNAP; just 5 million live in a household receiving a voucher.) Applicants languish on waiting lists for years, even decades. Many eligible people don’t bother signing up, and as many as one in three people offered a voucher does not end up using it. Take-up rates are low because the process is so arduous and because landlords discriminate (illegally, but commonly) against voucher recipients.

“Think of lining up families who qualify for food stamps and only one in four families gets to eat,” Matthew Desmond, a Princeton sociologist and the author of the book Evicted, told me. “That’s exactly how we treat housing policy today. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because, without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”

Something else is stopping Washington from addressing the housing crisis: the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. Land-use policy is not the purview of the federal government. It’s the purview of the states. Congress cannot rewrite Los Angeles’s building code. The White House can’t decide to upzone West Hartford, Connecticut. “I used to spend time with my counterparts in other countries and they’d say, Well, we just updated our national building code and national zoning code. We just wrote a national housing strategy,” Donovan told me. “I’d say, Wait, you have a national building code?”

As my colleague Jerusalem Demsas has written, we have delegated our housing policy not just to state and local governments but to every neighborhood’s homeowners association. Residents of a given place have ample opportunities—zoning-board meetings, candidate forums, historical architectural reviews, city-council open mics—to stop development. So they do. And thus mostly wealthy, mostly older people shape policy to their preferences: keeping new families out, maintaining single-family zoning, stopping development, and prioritizing the aesthetics of buyers over the needs of renters.

Local control is going to make it hard to get out of this crisis. “We’ve got 3,000 counties and 40,000 cities and towns,” Schuetz, of the Brookings Institution, told me. “There’s huge variation in not just their political motivations but in their capacity to carry policy out. And there’s no way to implement local reforms in a widespread way, at any kind of scale.”

But Washington can do something—much more than it is doing now. Expand the low-income housing tax credit. Direct even more money to states with high housing costs. Get rid of the law preventing the government from increasing the number of public-housing units. Fix up the units we already have. Make housing vouchers an entitlement, so that every poor family that needs help with rent gets it. Doing all of this would help not just help millions of poor Americans get and stay housed. It would also help boost the supply of affordable apartments and make HUD a strong advocate for all low-income renters. “Maybe I am getting out over my skis here, but I feel like if HUD were an agency funded at the level of need, an agency administering a universal benefit, it would be a different agency,” Desmond told me.

Then it could develop novel policies to address some of the big drivers of today’s housing shortage: building costs and land-use restrictions. The federal government cannot change land-use policies unilaterally. But that doesn’t mean that it is out of policy levers, housing experts told me. It just means that it needs to work somewhat indirectly: providing cash incentives to places that harmonize their building codes, green-lighting dense development near transit hubs, and allowing prefab homes, for instance. The Biden administration is starting to enact these kinds of policies, and pressing Congress to let it do more. In terms of building costs, the federal government can’t do much to lower the price of lumber. But it can allow more skilled immigration for construction workers and tax land to encourage development.

More modest, cheaper policies are at hand as well. For instance, HUD could start advising state and local governments on how to increase their housing supply. “There is a lot of experimentation going on at the local level,” Schuetz told me. “HUD could at the very least be monitoring this stuff, performing research, evaluating what works and what doesn’t.” It could help Tucson learn from Oakland, Iowa from Massachusetts. “This is squarely in HUD’s comfort zone,” Schuetz added, noting that no agency or political entity is doing this work at the moment.

Many of these policies cost money. But the federal government needs to spend more on housing, particularly on multifamily rental housing. The first thing politicians and civil servants in Washington need to do is simply see the housing crisis as the federal government’s responsibility. Universal homeownership was once the explicit goal of the U.S. government; affordable housing for everyone, everywhere, and the end of homelessness should be the policy priority now.

You would think, with prices as high as they are, that Americans would have tempered their enthusiasm for shopping of late; that they would have pulled back spending on luxury items; that they would have sought out budget and basic options, bought smaller packages, fewer things.

This is not what has happened. Consumer spending rose 0.2 percent, after accounting for higher prices, in October, the most recent month for which the government has data. Online shopping jumped 7.8 percent over the Thanksgiving long weekend, more than analysts had anticipated. The sales of new cars, dishwashers, cruise vacations, jewelry—all things people tend to give up when they are watching their budget—remain strong. Consultants keep anticipating a recession precipitated by the “death of the consumer.” Thus far, the consumer is staying alive.

People hate inflation, just not enough to spend less: This is one of the central tensions of today’s economy, in which things are going great yet everyone is miserable. And in some ways, Americans have nobody to blame but themselves.

Three years ago, the pandemic gnarled supply chains around the world, leading to shortages of many consumer goods. At the same time, the American government transferred roughly $1.8 trillion to households in the form of generous unemployment-insurance benefits, an amped-up child tax credit, stimulus checks, and delayed or forgiven student-loan payments. Less supply, more demand—it was a recipe for higher costs.

Costs really rose. A dozen eggs went for $1.33 the summer after the pandemic hit; the price topped out at $4.83 last winter. Gas prices nearly tripled. Used cars started trading for as much as or even more than new cars. The cost of leasing an apartment surged. The cost of buying a house went up even more.

[Rogé Karma: The 1970s economic theory that needs to die]

More recently, prices have been driven up, if more slowly, by the strong labor market. The unemployment rate is as low as it ever gets and has been for some time, with labor shortages in a number of sectors: air-traffic control, education, retail, trucking, police and public safety, nursing, plumbing, and electric. The tight labor market has forced employers to pay workers more, boosting wages, particularly at the lower end of the income spectrum. Real hourly earnings for workers in the tenth percentile of wage distribution went up more than 8 percent in the past three and a half years, the economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew found. And average wages have grown faster than average prices.

Sticker shock is real. And in surveys, people say that they are trading down because of cost pressures. But in fact they are spending more than they ever have, even after accounting for higher prices. They’re spending not just on the necessities, but on fun stuff—amusement parks, UberEats.

People just have a lot of money on hand. More broadly, they seem to be less likely to change their purchasing habits in response to price shifts—even when budgets are leaner. A raft of recent studies have found that American consumers have become less price-sensitive in recent decades. Households are using fewer coupons. People are spending less time mulling over what to buy when they’re shopping.

Why? Maybe because, although prices of many consumer goods are higher than they were a few years back, they’re still much, much more affordable than they were a few decades ago, thanks to globalized trade and manufacturing advances. (The price of a television has dropped more than 90 percent since the late 1990s.) Your grandparents might have gone to three different grocery stores to get the best deals. Would it really be worth it for you to do the same now? Maybe not. Especially not if you have a job. It used to be much more common for one partner in a marriage to make the money and the other to raise the kids and spend the cash. Today, working-age women are only a little less likely than men to be employed, giving them less time and energy to pinch pennies.

Another theory: Consumers might have become more brand-loyal, less willing to trade Coke for Squirt or Nike for Sketchers. Perhaps that is because companies have gotten better at tailoring products to people’s tastes. Perhaps it is just inertia: People get more stuck in their ways as they get older, as the average American has. You’ll pay more for Starbucks coffee because you always get Starbucks coffee.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Why Americans hate a good economy ]

It should be good news that Americans are better off than they were pre-pandemic. It should be good news that people can afford more, even if prices are high. But then why is everyone so mad about prices? Higher prices are just vexing, making people do mental math every time they shop. Economists point to other psychological factors too: People seem to think of their swelling bank accounts as a result of their own hard work, but consider cost increases someone else’s screw up. Nor do average consumers see inflation as something that might benefit them by, say, eating away at the value of their mortgage payments.

People want to blame Joe Biden for their bills. They want to accuse stores of gouging them (though the evidence for “greedflation” is scant). The strange truth is that most people really are in a more comfortable position, even if they’re not happy about it. It’s not like a weak economy, stagnant wages, crummy consumer spending, and cheaper stuff would be better, after all.