NPR. This is The Indicator from Planet Money.
I'm Darian Woods.
And I'm Adrian Ma.
People are facing pretty steep housing costs in big American cities like New York.
You're paying $2 million to get a little band box.
How do people even do it?
It shouldn't be that expensive.
The median age of a first-time homebuyer is now 38 years old.
That's up from around age 30 in the 1980s.
And you'll hear a range of explanations for why housing is so expensive.
Everyone wanting to move into the city.
We're seeing all these high-rises get built without really accounting for where lower middle-income housing is going to go.
You're going to do it, and if you're going to pay for it,
we're going to keep charging you that much.
Derek Thompson's a journalist and co-author of a new book called Abundance.
He and his co-author Ezra Klein are self-described progressives,
and they think their fellow progressives share a lot of the blame.
We have rules that constrain supply.
And as your listeners know, in any market where there's rising demand and supply is constrained,
prices have only one direction to go, and that is up.