Part of the complication is the dynamic nature. Truly affordable housing is older housing, but older housing never comes available if it is never built in the first place.

Not really, the median house price for the US is quite cheap. Perhaps the other solution is get jobs to the places that have cheap housing. Remote work helps.

Outside of California, it is obvious. Inside of California, they have Stockholm syndrome from over 50 years of trying heavy handed approaches that do not work.

If you were to put a 'food czar' in control of feeding everyone, it would never occur to said czar to just let businsess willy nilly put restaurants wherever they thought they could make a buck. It couldn't be that simple.

Build more what? Where? How?

I used to work in a 5-storey office building in Sunnyvale, CA (special permission required to build it). I could look out the window and see 10 miles in every direction. It was a vast sea of aging 60s bungalows. Also the most expensive place to live in the US. All my coworkers commuted for hours every day from the distant suburbs.

You ask what we should be building, and where? How about replacing old single-family homes in the Bay Area or Los Angeles with high-rises, or at least mid-rises...or at the very least town houses or something!

Housing. On land. With our hands. Unfortunately, the single greatest hurdle is bureacracy which requires layers upon layers of paperwork to build a single thing. On top of that, the taxes don’t help pricing the asset either. Nor do the additional 1000s of pages of regulations that prevent laypeople from making money on that housing.

It's now required nearly every electrical breaker be AFCI @$50/ea instead of $5/ea. Extra $900 right there. Multiply that by all the other bullshit...

The only free land is far away. This is a huge problem in itself.

Housing. On SFBA real estate. By drastically increasing the number of permits issued.

Houses, apartment buildings, government housing. Everywhere that has high housing demand with square footage prices far exceeding the national average. Reduce the governmental burdens to building new housing such as easing impact studies, reducing the influence of local zoning boards, and cutting unnecessary red tape (I don’t mean go to 0 government rules but we have a severely onerous amount now especially in the most popular places).

Houses. Everywhere. Using labor.

High-rise apartments, ideally.

Exactly!

Exactly, just look at NYC and see how cheap apartments get once you build more.

Wait.