# Land, development, democracy

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com) · 2024-09-10

book, democratic-processes, development, economics, housing, housing-crisis, jerusalem-demsas, local-democracy, the-atlantic, urbanism

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Traffic congestion and a lack of affordable housing are two clearly defined problems facing most, if not all, major cities. We know they exist. We call them crises. And yet, we can't seem to implement effective solutions, even though we know what they are. Why is that? In her new book, [_On The Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy_](https://bookshop.org/p/books/on-the-housing-crisis-land-development-democracy-jersualem-demsas/21434648?ean=9781638931966), Jerusalem Demsas makes the argument that it is a failure of local democracy. There is a disconnect between what we _say_ we want to happen and what we are _actually_ doing. This resonates with me. In my mind, it's looking upstream at what is bottlenecking us from making the decisions that will produce better outcomes for our cities. So after reading [this conversation with her](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-08/an-american-affordable-housing-crisis-built-by-local-democracy) about the new book, I decided to buy a copy.

As always, I'll let you know what I think.

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/land,-development,-democracy)*