The situation for non-housing assets is not quite as bad in the US.
There are entire towers that were never used as residences, but just used as investment vehicles based on faith rather than any sort of realized value.
This is really a story about the dangers of using housing stock as an investment vehicle.
North America has a related problem of financialization, but is complicated by rules constraining stock in the places where people would like to live.
I would argue that you need rules around financialization (punitive capital gains taxes on market based gains for non primary residence), as well as rules around allowing people to do reasonable things with their property (infill, single family zoning, etc) to increase the amount of allowable stock.
I don't think we've been to the same city, vacancy rate is around 7%.
China serves as this counter factual and it's facing an even larger housing crisis. Massive building of houses lead to many people buying up property for investment reasons and now there is a pretty clear oversupply while plenty of people still struggle to find housing.
I don't really understand why HN is obsessed with building unlimited housing as though this will fix the problem. For years people clamored that this was the solution to all of SFs problems, but as SF starts to shrink it already looks deserted, I can't image what happen if the HN fantasy of building unlimited massive apartment housing had materialized.