Housing is still a very conservative industry, productivity is very low, because any transformative technology only works at scale, but the US is super big and even the population centers are low-density, in many jurisdictions, zoning basically mandated labor intensive low density housing for decades, etc.
Land is available. What's not is infrastructure, and economic surplus to maintain all the required new homes and infrastructure (roads, pipes, power grid, etc).
Housing suffers from the same curse as the transit infrastructure, or the nuclear industry, enormous economic and political inertia keeping/prefering the status quo, any new projects are small, low-efficiency, lack economies of scale, lack innovation (because copy-paste building just one more is the lowest risk thing).
Look at the recent California zoning remedy program, so few real estate developers are taking it, because it turns out that those small local markets are basically incompetitive cronyist distopias, and it makes no sense for them to get into a fight with the zoning/approval board.
Land is available. What's not is infrastructure, and economic surplus to maintain all the required new homes and infrastructure (roads, pipes, power grid, etc).
Housing suffers from the same curse as the transit infrastructure, or the nuclear industry, enormous economic and political inertia keeping/prefering the status quo, any new projects are small, low-efficiency, lack economies of scale, lack innovation (because copy-paste building just one more is the lowest risk thing).
Look at the recent California zoning remedy program, so few real estate developers are taking it, because it turns out that those small local markets are basically incompetitive cronyist distopias, and it makes no sense for them to get into a fight with the zoning/approval board.