The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business.
In housing, for example, Ezra Klein and I write that a key bottleneck to homebuilding in the last few decades has been legal barriers to construction, including zoning laws and minimum lot sizes. This is a mainstream view supported by economists and scholars who have studied the issue for decades. The antitrust left, however, claims that the more significant factor is that big homebuilders abuse their power by holding back construction to juice their profits. “Big homebuilders withhold housing supply,” the antitrust advocate Matt Stoller has claimed. In their paper “Post-Neoliberal Housing Policy,” the law professors Christopher Serkin and Ganesh Sitaraman criticize market concentration in homebuilding and call for “tools from anti-monopoly policy.”
At a high level, I have never found these arguments persuasive. One hallmark of a monopolistic market is rising profits. But researchers have found that developer profits have remained steady. According to the National Association of Home Builders, profit margins as a share of overall home-sale prices actually declined slightly between 2002 and 2024.
Still, I wanted to spend more time engaging with the arguments of the antitrust housing folks. One of the most detailed articles in this space is an analysis of the Dallas, Texas, housing market by the lawyer and writer Basel Musharbash. In “Messing With Texas: How Big Homebuilders and Private Equity Made American Cities Unaffordable,” Musharbash writes that housing in the Dallas metro, like many other cities, has become much more expensive in the last few years. He also points out that homebuilders in Dallas, as in many other cities, have gotten bigger in the last few years. Musharbash claims that these things are connected: Large builders are crushing competition and restricting supply to sell houses at monopoly margins. To restore affordability, he says, policymakers should “dislodge the powerful corporations” that build America’s homes.
I’m not an economist or a lawyer. I’m just a journalist. To the extent that I’m good at anything, it’s calling people on the phone and writing down what they say. So I reached out to the primary sources that Musharbash quotes throughout the piece.
What I found was astonishing. The economist Musharbash cites told me that his theories had been misapplied. The housing analysts quoted in the piece told me Musharbash distorted their points and reached dubious, or even flatly wrong, conclusions. The leading monopoly researcher I spoke to, whose work has been celebrated by the antitrust left, told me that the entire thrust of the article—and, by extension, much of the antitrust-housing philosophy—defied sophisticated antitrust analysis.
The essay you’re reading is very long. But I can sum it up in one sentence: The Musharbash essay on Dallas—like too much of the antitrust left’s work on housing—is filled with out-of-context quotes, overconfident assertions lacking evidence, and generally misguided claims. Now let’s go through them one by one.
Claim #1: Dallas is a “homebuilder oligopoly.”
Reality: I called the key oligopoly researcher cited in the Musharbash essay. He disagreed with the use of his work and told me that any city with Dallas’s construction record was “100 percent” not an oligopoly.
It is a fact that home prices across the country have increased in the last decade. It is also a fact that homebuilders have gotten bigger in the last few years. The question at stake here is: Is the second fact causing the first fact?
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