No one should be permitted to revel in the schadenfreude about millennial living arrangements without confronting what’s behind them: the sky-high cost of renting in U.S. cities. A growing number of frustrated young people lay the problem at the feet of the anti-development baby boomer, thwarting efforts to expand the housing stock and driving up his own home value in the process.

In practice, that means pushing planners to reject high-cost projects (“gentrification!”) and low-cost projects (“crime rates!”) and everything in between (“neighborhood character!”).