Multiple factors contribute. Paul Baran, inventor of packet-switched networks, added a footnote to a 1968 monograph noting that his parents' inner-city Philadelphia fire insurance had just been cancelled.
The unavailability, or high cost, of insurance may prove fatal to both homeownership and businesses.
Note too that Marginal Revolution, based at George Mason University, pushes an explicitly libertarian, market. fundamentalist, ideology. Cowan and Taborrok occasionally break type, but the exceptions prove the rule.
I'd need to review the article in depth, but an immediate observation is that in a media-saturated, advertising-filled world, demand is anything but exogenous.
