Passage:
In urban economics, some analysts argue that rising housing prices are best addressed by expanding supply through relaxed zoning and faster permitting. If more units can be built, the argument goes, competition among landlords will moderate rents, and scarcity will ease. This supply-focused approach often treats demand as a given and emphasizes the physics of limited land.
Tenant advocates respond that supply expansion can be too slow to help current residents and may even accelerate displacement if new construction targets luxury buyers. They also argue that housing markets are not perfectly competitive: landlords can exert pricing power, and speculative investment can disconnect prices from local incomes.
Several policy researchers propose combining supply reforms with protections that operate on shorter time horizons. Targeted rent stabilization, legal aid for tenants, and subsidies for low-income households are presented as ways to reduce harm while new units come online. The passage’s broader point is that treating supply as the only lever misreads a political and temporal problem as a purely technical one.
Question: The author includes the tenant advocates’ response primarily to…
- provide the final conclusion that tenant protections should replace all new construction
- introduce complications and counterpoints to the supply-focused approach, setting up a combined policy alternative (correct answer)
- offer statistical evidence that zoning reform has never increased housing supply
- explain how permitting offices function on a day-to-day basis
- shift the discussion from housing to transportation infrastructure
Explanation: This question tests the reader's understanding of passage structure and organization in GRE Verbal Reasoning. Structure concerns how ideas are arranged to support the author’s purpose, such as introducing responses to set up combinations. The tenant advocates' response introduces complications like slowness and displacement to the supply approach. This prepares for the combined policy in the third paragraph. Choice B accurately captures this setup function. In contrast, choice A fails by suggesting replacement of construction, misrepresenting the integrative role. Similarly, choice C confuses with offering statistical evidence against zoning, focusing on content rather than organizational complication.