Increasing housing supply means decreasing homeowner capital and harming the major investment vehicle of a generation. That's politically untenable. Sadly, the pain will be felt by us and our children until we are able to exercise political power, which will require harming our parents retirements. Maybe the answer is renters unions, how many people can the police evict at once?
Young people don't understand their rent is high because they don't vote or exercise political power.
Go to any country in the world with an upper-middle class neighbourhood and ask them if it's alright to plop an extra condo or apartment building in the middle.
The only way you'll smoothly get permission is by providing huge, costly, benefits to the local households.
Otherwise it would involve a long drawn-out court battle, or a corruption scheme with the local political potentates, pretty much everywhere where there are such neighbourhoods.
If supply goes up, existing homeowner value goes down, the amount landlords can ask goes down. I don't see any reason it is more complicated than that, the entrenched interest is obvious.
Doubling the housing in a neighborhood could halve peoples entire net worth.
So even if the average home prices slightly increased it would still be the same dynamic.
When people have more money to spend because they’re not paying half their take home pay or rent or a mortgage, they’re generally more amenable to paying for things.
The other half of the solution, is that most tech companies have got to stop trying to become ridiculous never ending growth machines like Facebook, and just become boring utility companies. No one needs Facebook to do all the shit it does - it just needs to be a digital yellow pages. No one needs reddit to be flashy - it just needs to function as a forum. Keep the price low (e.g an hour of minimum wage in whatever country you’re accessing from for a month for a no ad version) and you will get people signing up.