It's not that we can't build more housing, it's that all the economic output has become concentrated in a few very small areas. This means that if you want a high-paying job you have to live within those very small areas or find a niche in a rural area that pays well. The middle between those two extremes has been pretty well erased in our economy.

You can no longer live in Podunk Michigan and go down the street and get a good paying job pushing a broom at the local factory. That work is done by a contractor who pockets the wage and gives a quarter of it to their employees. Or the factory closed because it was cheaper to build and ship widgets from somewhere else. So everyone has to either suffer the economic depression, drive for an hour or two to go to work, or move. This housing crisis is the end result of our economic policies of the last 40 or 50 years and the hollowing out of middle America and the consolidation of a lot of industries into two or three huge competitors slugging it out.

If we can fix that system and give people outside of major metros a shot at making a decent living again then the housing crisis would disappear. There are plenty of cities across the entire US that are tearing down houses because nobody wants to live in them and otherwise they become animal nests. Meanwhile there's a housing crisis on the coasts.

One thing I'd like to see is a federal payroll tax credit for remote workers. That would do a lot to reverse the "return to office" mandates of the last couple of years. If you disperse a bunch of bright and talented people into the middle of the country, at least some of them will find ventures locally that bloom into something big.

We can build housing very well. It’s a matter of cost. Labor is not cheap. Have you tried to price out construction recently? You don’t need to take it from a random comment on HN. Price the market and see what it tells you. If you happen upon a magical reserve of cheap labor though, please share with the group, as we’d love nothing more than to pitch in and make our housing problems melt away for everyone.

if you're saying labor is expensive and that building a house is too costly then we're not very good at building housing. if it takes 2000 days of your labor (exchanged for $ then purchase a house of course) but it only took 1000 days a century ago, that means we're getting worse at building housing, not better.