I wonder if two things are massive factors in this:
a) The US is already prosperous. When you have much too lose, your mental trade-offs between gaining something and losing what you have become different.
b) US politics has been dominated by the massive post-war generation. It seems like we drastically stopped building when the boomers had bought their first homes.
Both of these also work for other Western countries that also stopped building.
I think a major cause is how dependent the United States is on the courts to decide the law. China is a technocracy with strong central state control so they can sidestep that; Japan, on the other hand, has a strong bureaucracy that given a set of rules and processes, can execute them efficiently. On the other hand anything you do in the USA starts off in a gray zone and really is decided once you’ve gone to court, limiting risk taking to only those who are well capitalized and have a lot of time to burn.
This is definitely true. I'd also add community input to that.
However, while these are all issues, I think the root cause is a deeper cultural issue. I don't think Western, European countries have the same legal issues but they too stopped building.
a) The US is already prosperous. When you have much too lose, your mental trade-offs between gaining something and losing what you have become different.
b) US politics has been dominated by the massive post-war generation. It seems like we drastically stopped building when the boomers had bought their first homes.
Both of these also work for other Western countries that also stopped building.