California’s unprecedented housing crisis has ushered a new power player onto the scene with a supply-and-demand message so succinct it could fit on a T-shirt: Build more homes.

More than four in 10 California adults are seriously considering moving away from their part of the state because of the cost of housing, with the highest proportion in the coastal counties and the lowest in the state’s interior.

A backlash against high rents and home prices in Los Angeles has produced a movement that is so open to new development that many call themselves YIMBYs — as in “Yes in My Backyard.”

The residents, developers say, are NIMBYs — happy to see new shopping centers, apartment blocks and housing tracts, so long as they’re “not in my backyard.”

Now, there’s a new player in this well-worn battleground: YIMBYs.

Few public policy issues can match urban housing politics for its incendiary combination of passion and misconception. To wit: the confounding idea that relaxing regulations ...

California’s housing affordability troubles have contributed to the state’s poverty rate, which is the highest in the nation. It also has burdened millions with high rents and, according ...