[lossolo]

Housing costs mostly boil down to this stack:

price of land + price of materials + cost of labor + margin + other (marketing, admin, fees, financing, etc.)

When you try to boost the number of homes, you also boost demand for construction labor, materials, and buildable land. Those inputs tend to rise or at least not fall much, so there isn’t a big, easy savings there. That leaves soft "other" costs or developer margin. Other is a relatively small slice, and typical margins aren’t huge push them too low and projects stop penciling, so fewer homes get built.

Even if margins were squeezed, the price drop would usually be too small to bridge the affordability gap for most households.

The bigger issue is that household incomes haven’t kept pace with housing prices over the last few decades.