You're right. One would imagine a site called City-Lab would put some effort into answering the question they open. But the most we get is "Perhaps the central problem of housing affordability is one of scale"

If this is what we get as an answer to such an important question, I can't really trust them to really be forthright when it comes to understanding the issues of cities. When people complain about the media, this is the kind of sloppy thing people complaint about.