Robert Showah’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post announcing the impending demise of YIMBYism due to a supposedly “self-curing” American housing shortage reads less like analysis and more like a Victorian doctor declaring the patient healed with just some fresh air while the fever still rages. His argument leans on a simplistic narrative that demographic shifts, the death of baby boomers, and more construction in outlying areas will solve everything. In doing so, he badly misdiagnoses the real ailment: regulations stifling the kind of development many Americans want to see, which has the potential to make a dent in the current housing crisis.

First, the claim that declining marriage rates reduce demand is textbook backwards. As average household sizes shrink, the same population requires more homes, not fewer. One married couple in a three-bedroom house becomes two single adults in two one-bedrooms, or two studios. Fewer marriages mean more households, and more households mean more demand for precisely the smaller, nimbler homes that exclusionary zoning often forbids.

More on this demographic misread: Mr. Showah notes that declining birth rates may eventually lead to lower housing demand, but when, and where? Pinning demand-side hopes on there being fewer babies far down the road does nothing for a family facing pricing pressure today or even in the next twenty years. Further, dismissing seniors as inconveniently propping up demand today, only to release housing upon their death, fully minimizes the fact that seniors today want and benefit from walkable settings and smaller units as they downsize, according to AARP. Lastly, he assumes younger heirs will want to live in, or buy, the homes that boomers release in auto-oriented suburbs, but their demand for walkability is palpable.

Mr. Showah appears to sneer at walkable urbanism as though it were some boutique preference and not, in fact, popular. Our Foot Traffic Ahead report, which I co-authored with Christopher Leinberger, finds that Americans pay hefty premiums to live in walkable places: around 37 percent for a rental apartment. And yes, that includes places that he believes might be too hot for anyone to walk, like Los Angeles and Atlanta. The National Association of Realtors now shows that a majority of Gen Z and Millennial adults entering and in their prime homebuying years prefer walkable, connected homes to larger, car-dependent homes. This marks a turning point.

These facts are not ideology; they are basic urban economics and market demand. To suggest otherwise is like insisting that nobody wants to see Taylor Swift live, while stadiums sell out in minutes, because more people have listened to her on streaming. He mistakes numbers for preference.

Third, Mr. Showah gets his bugaboo of regulation exactly backwards. There is no nefarious urbanism agency requiring you to develop your home into a duplex by fiat. Smart growth priorities simply want to make certain housing choices legal for the market to provide; auto-centric priorities, like Mr. Showah’s, seek to personally enlist the state’s police powers to protect his aesthetic and low-density preferences from a free market that might do otherwise in some locations. The true regulatory stranglehold he should concern himself with is in the byzantine zoning codes that restrict options, stymie developers, and impose upon everyone the sprawling, auto-oriented suburbs he romanticizes. Decades of exclusionary zoning, minimum lot sizes, and parking mandates were designed to wall out working-class families and people of color, as Richard Rothstein so eloquently showed in The Color of Law. That legacy isn’t YIMBYism but the “onerous regulation” that keeps housing scarce where people most want to live.

And let’s talk costs. Cars are not cheap luxuries; they are forced necessities in places where transit, biking, and walking are artificially suppressed. The Center for Neighborhood Technology’s H+T Index shows how the combined burden of housing and transportation makes supposedly “affordable” metros like Houston more expensive for modest-income families than parts of New York or D.C. A $2,000 mortgage loses its luster when you’re spending another $2,000 a month to keep two cars running. The system in auto-oriented areas requires a person to finance and upkeep a five-figure machine as the entry price for participating in society. We would prefer that households have other transportation options to meet their daily economic and social needs.

To be sure, zoning reform alone will not solve the housing crisis. Funding for affordable housing, strong tenant protections, infrastructure investment, and smarter transportation planning all matter. Construction labor shortages, material costs, and federal financing rules also play real roles. But zoning is the keystone: without legal permission to build the types of homes and neighborhoods people increasingly want, the rest of those efforts can only go so far.

In short, the problem is not that YIMBY or smart growth reformers are asking for too much, and the solution isn’t to just wait it out for miraculous self-healing. The problem is that for too long, America has built too little of what people demonstrably want: housing in connected, inclusive, walkable communities. Writing off that demand as a passing fad dismisses the 21st century in favor of the mid-20th and often for bad rather than good. The housing crisis will not “disappear on its own.” It will be solved by undoing the very policies that Mr. Showah wants to preserve—the ones that prevent our neighborhoods from evolving, our communities from welcoming, and our markets from responding to reality.

YIMBY isn’t dying. It’s just getting started.

Dr. Michael Rodriguez is research director at Smart Growth America.