To him, the core of the story is home prices, and the desire of homeowners to keep those prices rising, and everything else was more or less a rationalization. “Economic advantage is a powerful private motivator, but it plays poorly in public discourse,” he writes. “It is considered gauche (I have tried it) to mention in a public meeting that a particular public policy will raise or lower home values, even though what is acceptable to mention—traffic, crime, walkable streets, local pollution—pretty clearly maps onto home values.
