And it's wild to me how we can't seem to figure out how to bring the cost for this down. Building affordable houses should be our no. 1 priority.

If you build plenty of houses, they become affordable. The latest Affordable Housing is mostly gov-enabled scams, at least in San Diego. They are being made for greater costs than the luxury housing since the funding is guaranteed. Then the same developers are incentivized to keep all rates high by building less.

https://sdhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/107_Workshop_RAN...

Just tax corporate owned vacancy. In a slump there will be apartment buildings that are mostly empty because they refuse to lower the rent as lowering rent triggers property re-valuation.

Office buildings sit mostly empty for the same reason.

Tax the owners to punish the bad bets and eternal growth expectations of banks to force them to use the space to the benefit of the community or be forced to sell when they run out of money. Use zoning laws to prevent the destruction of units to avoid taxes.

repeated efforts to develop "dwelling units" on a large scale have collapsed in corruption. There are financial players who are very aware that there are vast amounts of monthly monies at play. This is not unique to the USA in fact it is a repeated theme in the capital economies.

The US Federal Housing and Urban Development Department was intimately involved in the Savings and Loan collapse of the late 1980s. It was punted around and repeated in the 1990s, but the stock market gains of the late 1990s diluted the news in public. That phase culminated with a dot-com bubble collapse and ultimately, the 2007 dollar credit crisis. Leveraged purchases of real estate were part of that financial soup. Many of the players from that time were "boomers" and their seniors, so living memory of those circumstances are now fading. There are many, many non-fiction books about these topics.