You are 100% spot on, I mentioned this in another comment I made and our housing crunch recently (past 8 years or so) is all due to human nature(and also a huge inflow of money). You can buy cheap houses in a majority of America but most people(on HN especially) want to live in superstar locations like SF bay area, coastal areas, mtn towns etc. Its a classic human nature problem and not a infrastructure problem. In addition you have trillions of dollars of money from venture and disrupted legacy industries(see tech giants bringing in hundreds of billions) flowing into these few places and people are surprised when an average house price in San Mateo county hits $1.8M!