Felix Salmon
Writes on finance and markets, now as a senior writer at Bloomberg, after years as chief financial correspondent at Axios, and is the author of The Phoenix Econ...
“If there were price-insensitive home developers in the same way that there are price-insensitive data center developers, we would have homes everywhere.”
Slate Money · October 2026
Emily Peck had just pointed out that data center construction is up sharply even though people protest the projects and try to pass laws against them, because so much money is chasing AI. Salmon turns that into a point about housing: what holds building back is the incentive to build, more than the rules.
Transcript
abundance. What you're saying. Okay.
But like, you look at the chart we just had reporting on like government data on data center construction. It's up like 60% year over year. Why? Because there's a big incentive for people to build data centers. There's like a metric fuckton of money being spent on AI expansion and on data centers, as we've talked about on Slate Money. So guess what? People are building data centers. It's like problem solved. Doesn't matter what the regulations are. In fact, people hate these things. They are protesting them. They're trying to pass laws to stop it and they can't do it. The only difference. If
there were price-insensitive home developers in the same way that there are price-insensitive data center developers, we would have homes everywhere.
So many homes. That's it. That's all you need. You don't need to like tinker at the margins. That's my hot take. I don't know. Well, people who want affordable housing don't have the giant lobby that real estate developers do. There's nobody on the side of people who need affordable housing really fighting for it except for policymakers. Or any kind of
housing. No, the real estate developers have a decent amount of clout.
Well, what I'm talking about, I'm talking about affordable housing, though, specifically. Yeah,
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