This is the other side of the problem. Much of the construction in the US is a net negative rather than a net positive. I found this recently when buying a house: the majority of houses in the town in question I looked at and said, "I would need to knock fifty thousand dollars off the land value to have this bulldozed before I could build something habitable." It's not financially viable because they are classified as being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, not negative tens of thousands of dollars.