By Christopher Russell (Strategic Communications, Yimby LA)
On a comfortably warm June evening in Beverly Hills, the personal finance author behind I Will Teach You to Be Rich and Netflix's How to Get Rich, Ramit Sethi, arrives with his wife Cassandra at the offices of a real estate investment firm, passes the step-and-repeat, and enters to a mixed crowd of real estate agents, brokers, mortgage lenders, housing advocates, and Ramit fans ready to get their books signed. While better-than-usual hors d'oeuvres circulate through the crowd, the cross-section of locals who shape the housing market, by financing, selling, insuring, and titling homes, mingles with the renters and homeowners who live in them. We had all come to hear the case for building more housing from the guy best known for helping you live a rich life.
The Line Item That Decides Everything
His talk kept returning to a key idea: Housing is the line item that decides whether the rest of your personal finance playbook works at all. You can automate your savings, negotiate your salary, and invest early, and all of it compounds slowly enough to be swamped by rent. When the largest expense in your life is structurally out of reach, no amount of discipline closes the gap. Ramit has spent two decades telling people to spend extravagantly on what they love and cut mercilessly on what they don't. Housing in Los Angeles offers no such choice.
In the first quarter of 2026, median rent in Los Angeles was $2,520, down 3.7 percent from the year before. That decline arrived in the same stretch when nearly 4,000 new units broke ground across the city. Rents came down because homes went up. As Zachary Pitts, LA Director of YIMBY Action, the local chapter of the pro-housing "yes in my backyard" movement, put it at the event: "California, especially in Los Angeles…[is] not building enough housing. We have so much more demand than the supply, and we're trying to unlock that."
Millions of people trust Ramit Sethi on money. On this night he channeled that trust toward housing, and toward the people in Los Angeles already doing the work.
Why the Target Moves
Anyone in that room could describe the shape of opposition to new housing. The objections sound reasonable one at a time: traffic, school crowding, neighborhood character. Answer them earnestly, one by one, and the target moves. We have been making this point at YIMBY LA for years, usually to rooms far smaller than this one, so there was some satisfaction in hearing Ramit land it from the speaker's couch.
There is research on why the target moves. Dan Kahan, a Yale professor of law and psychology, calls it identity-protective cognition: people reject conclusions when accepting them would cost something real, like standing, identity, or belonging. In Kahan's studies, the most statistically literate people were the best at reasoning around a threatening conclusion, putting their skill to work protecting their belief rather than testing it. For a neighbor sizing up a proposed building taller than their own, agreement might cost a view, the easy parking, or the story they tell about their street. Map what agreement would cost the person before you argue the facts, because the cost is usually the real obstacle.
Ramit went further, into persuasion itself. How to talk with your neighbors, how to meet them on the problem they actually feel, and how housing policy and, yes, local politics shape what they can afford and what gets built around them. He spoke to the wider menu of housing types a city could allow beyond single-family homes, like duplexes, courtyard buildings, and apartments over shops. He went further still into the design of the process itself, where public comment periods scheduled for the middle of a workday select for the people with the most time and the deepest stake in preventing change.
“Ramit has a remarkable ability to explain in clear and accessible terms how our housing shortage drives up costs, and why both policy reform and grassroots activism are essential to solving it. Trusted voices like his are critical to helping more people understand the housing crisis and building a broad YIMBY movement.” –Zachary Pitts, LA Director, YIMBY Action
The Numbers Waiting Outside
Identity-protective cognition notwithstanding, the numbers help paint a clearer picture of the housing moment we’re in. Los Angeles permitted 8,714 homes in all of 2025, about 16 percent of the pace the state says the city needs. That pace reflects growth that arrives whether or not anyone plans for it. Los Angeles County adds more than 22,000 people a year through births alone, and the city registers three to four thousand new businesses every month. A region makes room for the people it creates, engenders an unaffordable housing market and its attendant pain points (our current condition), or watches them leave. Closing that gap takes more than an evening of discussion, but what these evenings can do is move the argument, putting it in front of people who have never heard housing described as the reason a good budget stops working.
Back in the Room
Back in the room, the evening is doing what evenings like this do. Ramit's galvanizing delivery gives way to a post-talk swarm where some attendees work up the courage to say hi. Better-than-expected desserts are passed around while housing nerds discuss their reactions to the June primary results. In a crowd this friendly to building, it is easy to feel like the argument has already won and LA is on its way to its rich life.
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The “LA Says Yes" forum was co-hosted by Gatsby Investments, YIMBY Action, and YIMBY Los Angeles. Special thanks to our event partners: Conventus, WFG National Title Insurance, and Andy Zuloaga at Farmers Insurance.