This is conflating what I said - and like I said, capitalism does not consider shortages in terms of human need, but in terms of the wants of wealth. We have a shortage of housing because the poor are too poor to afford it, and thus they do not create demand to be met.

Essential to that is how you phrased it - non-luxury. The market for the (relative) rich to buy houses is so large there are over a million of unoccupied homes[1] just to sate the potential choices of the ownership class that can afford them. There is an immense glut of building supply, rather than a shortage of it, just it is all directed to where the money is.

[1]: http://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-homel...

China is a great extrapolated example of this with their ghost cities[2]. The economic machine of China, using the same capitalistic peak employment model of expectation, has a tremendous civil engineers corps that needs to do something. But China takes some of the worst of capitalism and mixes it with the worst of Marxism and a large dose of totalitarianism, so rather than provide modern living to hundreds of millions there are dozens of cities built without anybody living in them, because nobody can afford to buy housing within them. But the CCP kept building them to keep the workers "busy" and keep the supply chain flowing, because they kept anticipating - in the same way many deceived Americans are - that the prosperity for the masses is coming eventually.

[2]: http://priceonomics.com/surveying-the-ghost-cities-of-china/

This just reflects on my central point - capitalist economic systems do not distribute labor or create supply based on human needs, but human wants. Those without who need have nothing to give capitalism to get their needs back, but those who have to give will have all their wants provided for and more. Not to say capitalism is not the best economic organizational system we have, it just does not align with most peoples common ethics.