Last February, urban geographer Tom Slater took to Twitter to indict the conventional wisdom on the high cost of housing: “Here is one of the most damaging myths of our age: the housing crisis can be explained by an imbalance between supply and demand.”

Testifying before the New York City Council and the Department of City Planning last winter, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s officials took turns insisting on that same conventional wisdom.

Carl Weisbrod, director of the city planning department, stated that “because our population continues to grow and exert upward pressure on rents citywide [70 percent of the city’s households live in rentals], we need to sustain higher levels of overall housing production to support housing affordability.”