UCLA Housing Voice Ep 119: Responding to Supply Skepticism with Vicki Been
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Jul 8, 2026 
Vicki Been, law professor and former NYC Deputy Mayor for Housing, brings deep expertise in housing policy. She discusses research testing whether market-rate building helps affordability. Short takes cover rezonings and neighborhood amenities, vacancy-chain evidence, natural experiments, induced demand, and what causal studies still need to settle.
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Paper Framed Skepticism To Spur Causal Research
- The 2019 Supply Skepticism paper aimed to translate common public worries into research questions and spur causal, on-the-ground studies.
- Vicki and coauthors framed skeptical claims precisely so researchers could design tests addressing endogeneity and perceptions.
Core Skepticism Claims Laid Out Precisely
- Common skeptical claims: new market-rate housing is 'luxury' and won't help locals, may induce richer in-migration, and uses scarce land that should be affordable.
- The paper urged separating induced demand, filtering, and land-scarcity arguments for targeted empirical tests.
Endogeneity Requires Natural Experiments
- Early literature lacked causal studies because developers self-select where and when to build, creating endogeneity problems.
- Kate Pennington's fire-rebuild natural experiment in San Francisco illustrated how random shocks can identify causal effects of new housing.