I mean, there are specific regulations we can point to that are making houses and housing more expensive, I don't see how "allowing people to build more houses" could destabilizing living?
Oh come on. Obviously people aren't clamoring for bringing back asbestos or dumping sewage into the street.
Regulations are written for a wide range of reasons- legitimate safety issues, quality of life concerns, propping up values, funneling money to groups favored by the politicians or bureaucrats crafting the rules, political grandstanding against imaginary problems, particular rules favored by coordinated special interest groups, etc.
I once lived in an area where several suburbs all met, you could drive a few blocks and cross imaginary lines separating different legal cities. They had different regulations for minimum lot size, how close structures could be to the property lines, how trees on the property needed to be handled, whether you could put two separate structures on one property, etc. Obviously none of these things impacted safety, but did impact density, home prices, etc.
Less safe does not mean unsafe. Marginal gains in safety after a certain threshold may not be worth it. People wear helmets on bicycles, but no one wears a helmet just walking around.
Several years ago I read a German interview with a construction engineer who complained about the industrial lobby that pushes more and more regulations that, incidentally (/sarc), increase a (forced) demand for their products.
He gave several examples, of which I remember one. It is now law in Germany that new homes with French windows must have extra strong glass in them. The reason? What if a toddler on a tricycle ran into the glass and suffered serious injuries or death?
Now, said the engineer, there are no cases in Germany of this actually ever happening, or at least we do not have any records of them. But this what-if theoretical scenario increases construction costs of new German homes by a thousand euro or so. (And increases a basically guaranteed demand for products of a few certified safety glass vendors A LOT!) Take forty or fifty such extra requirements together and their cumulative effect on price of the finished home starts being significant.
But no one wants to be known as a potential child killer, so it is not worth opposing such measures.
The level of safety gained by such measures is nevertheless dubious. People didn't die in homes built to the less stringent standards of 1990 like flies.
Yeah, just to be clear, I was specifically talking about land-use regulations. I don't know anything about how stringent material requirements are for building houses, but i'd wager we have some dumb ones on the books in the US.
Regulations are written in blood.