NPR.

This is the indicator from planet money.

I'm Darym Woods.

And I'm Adrian Ma.

People are facing pretty steep housing costs in big American cities like New York.

You pay, you're paying $2 million to get a little bandbox.

How do people even do it?

It shouldn't be that expensive.

The median age of a first-time home buyer 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. And 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. Today on the show,

how to build housing affordably. We visit a San Francisco apartment complex that manage to overcome

those rules that are driving up house prices.

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