There’s no clean way to explain a housing crisis in an hour. That was clear listening to a recent episode of Connections with Evan Dawson focused on a proposed housing project on Rochester’s east side. The conversation was thoughtful, the guests were engaged, and the questions were fair. But housing is one of those issues where the real tension doesn’t come from disagreement over the goal — it comes from how quickly the consensus unravels once specifics enter the frame.
I say that as someone who works in this space every day. I’m not in a newsroom anymore, so I don’t see the Facebook comment sections the way I used to. But I do work with communities and people across the Finger Lakes trying to move housing projects forward, and I write about these issues regularly here on Substack.
What I heard in that conversation wasn’t unique to Rochester. It was the same set of arguments that show up everywhere — in cities, suburbs, and small towns.
Start with one of the most common refrains: This isn’t NIMBY, because more people benefit from keeping a parcel as green space than the roughly 20 people who might own homes there.
It sounds reasonable, but misses the point entirely.
Housing policy right now is about tradeoffs. There’s no version of this where every outcome is maximized. When supply is constrained, every decision to not build is a decision to keep that constraint in place. Framing the benefit as “only 20 homeowners” ignores what homeownership actually does. It’s one of the last reliable pathways to building generational wealth. That impact doesn’t stop with the buyer. It spreads — across families, across time, across communities.
Then there’s affordability — or more accurately, the way we talk about it.
“It’s not affordable” has become a catch-all critique, but it rarely comes with a realistic benchmark. State-backed affordable housing projects are routinely exceeding $500,000 per unit. Look at any announcement from Governor Kathy Hochul’s office on housing in the last several years. If that’s the baseline, then almost every project, subsidized or not, is going to fail the definition of “affordable.” And if that becomes the standard for opposition, the outcome is predictable: Nothing gets built, and affordability gets worse.
The “will of the people” argument is another one that deserves a closer look.
Public meetings are important. Input matters. But volume and representation are not the same thing. Even if you assume a large group opposed a project — say 1,000 people — that’s still less than 0.5% of the population. Loud doesn’t equal majority. And policymaking can’t hinge on who shows up the most consistently or forcefully.
There’s also a tendency to frame these decisions as choosing between two bad options — housing or green space, development or preservation.
That framing creates a false sense of neutrality. Not choosing is still a choice. In a housing-constrained market, inaction is a decision to preserve scarcity. It may feel less disruptive in the short term, but the long-term consequences are real (we’re living them now). Higher costs, fewer options, and more pressure pushed elsewhere.
And then there’s the language that always seems to find its way into these conversations: “The character of the neighborhood.”
At this point, we should be honest about what that phrase has meant historically, and how it functions today. It has been used for decades to oppose housing of all kinds. What’s striking now is that it’s effectively weaponized, on a selective basis, by groups that would otherwise rebuke it if posed in less progressive communities.
None of this is unique to Rochester. That’s the real takeaway.
Communities across the Finger Lakes — and across the country — broadly agree that there isn’t enough housing. They say it at public meetings. They say it in planning documents. They say it in conversations like the one on Connections. But when it comes time to approve specific projects, the same arguments surface, over and over again, and the result is the same: Delay, reduction, or outright rejection.
There isn’t an easy way out of that cycle. But there is a straightforward one.
If we’re serious about addressing the housing shortage, we have to start treating tradeoffs as unavoidable, not disqualifying. We have to stop applying standards to new housing that nothing else in the market is expected to meet. And we have to be honest about which arguments are about outcomes and which are about discomfort with change.
Everyone agrees we need more housing. The question is whether we’re willing to accept what it takes to get there.
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