Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview with the conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. In that interview, he was asked to explain to a hypothetical democratic socialist where they were going wrong. In response, he argued, “With housing, the problem is mostly the government,” and cited the Cambridge City Council as an example of a body that was supposedly addressing the housing crisis by getting rid of regulations.

I’m both a Cambridge city councilor and a democratic socialist. I’ve fought for social housing and stronger tenant protections, and I voted for the Multifamily Housing Zoning Ordinance that Auchincloss mischaracterizes. So I can confidently say that he and other corporate Democrats, unfortunately, misunderstand both the cause of the housing crisis faced by cities like Cambridge and communities around the country and what our city council has done to tackle it.

The housing problems in Cambridge are case studies in the worst excesses of capitalism. Walking around Cambridge before the city council passed the Multifamily Housing Zoning Ordinance last year, it was not uncommon to see private luxury developers tearing down older, more affordable triple-deckers and replacing them with more profitable $4 million McMansions. If that doesn’t sound like a socialist economy that needed to be liberated from centralized government development, it’s because it definitely wasn’t. The Multifamily Housing Zoning Ordinance was an effort to better regulate the housing market to produce more affordable housing, including hundreds more deed-restricted affordable homes that would be managed by the city under our inclusionary zoning requirements.