I mean.. houses are an item.... a better question would be, is there enough (desirable) land to build houses on, and will the government let you build there.

I live in a city where we have enough land, but the government wont let anyone build pretty much anywhere, and the housing prices are horrible.

This is actually a thing, though. Chinese interests own a huge amount of land in the US, for example, and they're buying more every year [0].

[0] https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/07/china-is-buying-bil...

That article says "As of the start of 2020, Chinese investors owned about 192,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land valued at about $1.9 billion". That's out of 900mil acres of farmland in the USA. So about 0.02% -- hardly a "huge amount".

True. For added perspective, the top 100 largest land owners possess about 40 million acres throughout the US [0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-largest-landowners-i...

Land and building permits are way harder to obtain than a truck driving license.