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VerbalReading Comprehension

Free GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Question

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When a city adopts inclusionary zoning, it requires developers of new market-rate housing to set aside a fraction of units, often 10 to 20%, for households below a defined income threshold. Advocates credit such mandates with the below-market units they directly create, and on that measure the policy succeeds: in cities that adopt it, the count of newly built affordable units rises. Because the requirement attaches to construction that would have occurred anyway, supporters describe it as affordability secured at no cost to the public budget.

The economist Hargrove argues that this accounting flatters the policy by ignoring its effect on the total housing supply. A set-aside functions as a tax on each project, since the developer recovers the loss on below-market units by raising rents on the remainder or, where that is not possible, by building less or not at all. Comparing fourteen metropolitan areas, Hargrove found that the cities imposing the steepest set-asides issued markedly fewer building permits per capita over the following decade than otherwise similar cities without mandates. On this reading, the policy does not enlarge the stock of housing so much as redistribute access to it, transferring affordability to the households who win the unit lottery while leaving marginal renters, who never reach that lottery, facing tighter and costlier markets.

Hargrove is careful not to overstate the case. The permit gap he documents could reflect differences in land availability or local demand that his fourteen-city sample does not fully separate from the mandates themselves, and he concedes that modest set-asides in high-demand cities may suppress little construction. His claim is therefore the narrower one that inclusionary zoning should be judged by its effect on the whole market, not by the affordable units it visibly produces. Whether that effect is large enough to outweigh the policy's direct benefits, he leaves to the evidence each city can gather.

Which of the following best describes the organization of the passage?

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Answer & Explanation

Correct answer

C

The stem word "organization" signals a structure question, resolved by tracking each paragraph's function and matching it against the full sequence in each choice.

Paragraph 1 introduces inclusionary zoning ("When a city adopts inclusionary zoning, it requires developers...") and presents the favorable way its results are conventionally counted: advocates "credit such mandates with the below-market units they directly create," the unit count "rises," and supporters call it "affordability secured at no cost to the public budget."

Paragraph 2 opens with "The economist Hargrove argues that this accounting flatters the policy," then reinterprets those same results through a proposed mechanism (the set-aside "functions as a tax on each project") backed by supporting data (a fourteen-metropolitan-area comparison showing "markedly fewer building permits per capita"), concluding that the policy "redistribute[s] access" rather than enlarging supply.

Paragraph 3 opens with "Hargrove is careful not to overstate the case" and narrows that reinterpretation: it grants possible confounds, concedes that "modest set-asides in high-demand cities may suppress little construction," and reduces the claim to "the narrower one" before deferring the magnitude question to the evidence.

Choice (C) captures exactly this three-move arc: present the policy plus its favorable accounting, then a critic's reinterpretation via mechanism and data, then a narrowing of that reinterpretation. It is the credited answer.

(A) wrongly makes the author argue and reaffirm a thesis of the author's own; the passage never does either. (B) wrongly claims the critic's data is shown to rest on an error and that a defense of the policy is restated in stronger form; instead Hargrove himself concedes possible confounds, and the passage never defends the policy in its own voice. (D) wrongly ends in a delivered verdict, when the passage defers the magnitude question to the evidence each city can gather. (E) wrongly places the criticism in paragraph 1 and assigns the final qualification to the policy's defenders, when the criticism arrives in paragraph 2 and it is Hargrove, the critic himself, who qualifies his own study in paragraph 3.