Unlimited Housing Would Literally Be Hell

According to C.S. Lewis

Nov 12, 2025

Regular readers: My apologies for fewer posts recently. I have been working on two other pieces–one that I submitted for The Boyd Institute’s essay contest [edit: see here], and one for Plough Magazine (PloughStack), which hopefully will be published soon [edit: it was published here!]. Stay tuned for those pieces and more!

aerial photo of city — Photo by Michael Tuszynski on Unsplash

The Great Divorce (1946) is my favorite C.S. Lewis novel. Short, fast-paced, and timeless, the book is not about marriage or divorce, but instead about the division between heaven and hell. The book’s central conceit imagines that the residents of hell –portrayed as a gloomy, dreary city, rather than a pit filled with fire– are permitted to take a bus ride to heaven. But once there, hell’s residents don’t like it! They’d rather go back to their grim abodes than have to adjust to the wonders of paradise. I could go on and on about how great this book is, but it’s better just to read it yourself.

As I was reading it, however, I realized that The Great Divorce has something to offer the ongoing conversation around housing scarcity, NIMBYism, YIMBYism, and of course YIMSR (Yes In My Spare Room). Early in the book, the protagonist (who is new to hell) asks another man on the bus about this strange locale:

“It seems the deuce of a town,” I volunteered, “and that’s what I can’t understand. The parts of it that I saw were so empty. Was there once a much larger population?”

“Not at all,” said my neighbour . “The trouble is that they’re so quarrelsome. As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbour. Before the week is over he’s quarrelled so badly that he decides to move. Very like he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarrelled with their neighbours -and moved. So he settles in. If by any chance the street is full, he goes further. But even if he stays, it makes no odds. He’s sure to have another quarrel pretty soon and then he’ll move on again. Finally he’ll move right out to the edge of the town and build a new house. You see, it’s easy here. You’ve only got to think a house and there it is. That’s how the town keeps on growing.” “Leaving more and more empty streets?” “That’s right. And time’s sort of odd here. That place where we caught the bus is thousands of miles from the Civic Centre where all the newcomers arrive from earth. All the people you’ve met were living near the bus stop: but they’d taken centuries-of our time-to get there, by gradual removals.”

“And what about the earlier arrivals? I mean -there must be people who came from earth to your town even longer ago.”

“That’s right. There are. They’ve been moving on and on. Getting further apart. They’re so far off by now that they could never think of coming to the bus stop at all. Astronomical distances. There’s a bit of rising ground near where I live and a chap has a telescope. You can see the lights of the inhabited houses, where those old ones live, millions of miles away. Millions of miles from us and from one another. Every now and then they move further still. That’s one of the disappointments. I thought you’d meet interesting historical characters. But you don’t: they’re too far away.”

Here’s the irony: The ability to simply “think” of a house to build it, with no zoning restrictions at all, sounds like an Abundance dream! But as Lewis’ allegory hints at, this desire for unlimited space and privacy does not lead to flourishing. It leads to hell.

Lewis’ insights are a bit unexpected. After all, many Americans imagine that they would love to live all alone, far from civilization. There’s a reason memes like this exist:

The truth is, that humans are meant to live in community with one another. As God proclaims in Genesis: “It is not good for man to be alone.” Given our fallenness and self-centeredness, however, many humans struggle with finding harmony together. When given the option, particularly in more individualistic cultures, we try to avoid other people.

For a long time, humans stuck together out of necessity. But in American society post-WWII, many people experienced material abundance at a level never seen before in human history. Levels of co-living dropped rapidly, from 9% of the population to 1% of the population, within a couple decades (source). Suburbs exploded, and everyone who could afford it wanted to buy a McMansion in a suburban gated community. Everyone tried to live separate from each other.

But I believe the past 70 years of American history have been an unwitting example of the concept of Chesterton’s Fence, which cautions against casually eliminating long-standing practices and traditions that may serve purposes you may not realize. Americans thought we all wanted to live alone in large, empty houses with white picket fences. It’s clear now that something has been lost, and moreover, the impact on housing prices and the overall housing stock has been significant.

Nowadays, we are seeing an epidemic of loneliness among Americans, who feel more and more isolated in their homes and communities. Meanwhile, there is a housing shortage in many regions, driven in part by a desire to have our homes all to ourselves.

But here’s what I want to highlight: Housing abundance alone will not solve our problems. Left to our own devices, Americans will devour more and more housing stock, without ever having enough. Even with an infinite amount of housing, we will just end up in Lewis’ vision of hell: big empty streets, plenty of houses, but no one wanting to hang around each other. And to be honest, that already describes certain parts of America.

So if not infinite housing, then what’s the solution? I believe we have to learn how to live near one another again. That’s the central premise behind Yes In My Spare Room: there exists plenty of housing, but it’s not spread to those who need it. Co-living has to be part of the conversation for addressing our housing shortage.

As a side benefit, if more Americans can learn how to live near each other like they used to (as hard as it can be sometimes), it will go a long way to solving a lot of our other problems: political polarization, isolation, and loneliness, to name a few.

If we can do that, we’d be able to escape Lewis’ vision of hell, and maybe get a little bit closer to the kingdom of heaven.