About
Housing is simple until you look closely.
The Setback started from a frustration with how the housing debate gets flattened. Build more housing, everyone says. True, and yet the reason it isn't happening is different in every city.
In Los Angeles, a project can wait the better part of a year for approval, and much of the city is zoned so only single-family homes are legal. That is a regulatory problem. In Detroit, there is no shortage of land or buildings, but investment does not flow to the places that need it, because the numbers do not work. That is a capital problem. In San Francisco, the land itself runs out. That is a structural problem. Same shortage, three different binding constraints.
This publication takes one city at a time and asks a single question: what is actually stopping supply here? Each report runs the same measurements, walks through the constraint that governs that market, and ends with a development model that puts the diagnosis in dollars.
Who writes it
Zachary Boukkouri is a freshman at Colby College, from Bethesda, Maryland.
He spent three years as a junior project manager at a family construction and development firm, where he filed the permits, tracked the budgets, and watched projects stall for reasons that had nothing to do with whether anyone wanted the housing built. That vantage point (closer to the job site than to the commentary) is what this publication tries to keep.
The Setback is where construction, policy, and finance meet. Housing is the rare problem that none of the three explains on its own.