| there is no housing or land shortage - simply desirable houses in desirable locations are expensive. Check out this website: https://www.cheapoldhouses.com/ there are many houses on there for not much money but they are obviously not in desirable locations. Some need some repairs but that is just time & materials not buying expensive land. So there is lots of cheap land and cheap houses. Increasing density by tearing down some single family homes and replacing with townhomes is probably a workable compromise - now there are three dwellings where before there was 1, and everybody still gets a garage and a yard, but each of those townhomes will still be priced up to what the market will bear because there will not be an infinite supply of them. In my town of 20,000 about 1000 dwellings are coming online significantly increasing the supply - potentially increasing the populatiog by 2000-4000 people, (up to 20%!) but they were all snapped up for $800-900k and now there is only one available for $1.2M. People want to live in desirable places, and will pay more to do so. Nice places are always going to be expensive. If you don't have a house you can hack the system by moving to a place with cheap dwellings and making it desirable, which is a normal pattern: Artists and musicians move to cheap neighborhood, it becomes cool & desirable |