Alex Armlovich, a senior housing policy analyst for Washington, D.C.–based think tank the Niskanen Center, recalls being an undergraduate student on break sitting on the couch at his parents’ house in Buffalo more than a decade ago, reading Ed Glaeser’s writings. Glaeser, a renowned urban economist, at the time was, and still is, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Armlovich started as an intern at the Manhattan Institute not too long after and eventually became a fellow himself.
It’s an interesting time to be in the world of housing, to say the least, but what one might see as a national housing crisis, Armlovich sees as a metropolitan crisis. To better understand this distinction, Fortune reached out to Armlovich. To put it simply, it’s always been possible to buy cheap land and find a home far away from friends, family, work, restaurants, hospitals, et cetera, in his view. But that’s sort of changing, and while it’ll likely always be true to some degree, some middle markets seem to be becoming less of a refuge from unaffordability in the era of remote and hybrid work.
