Housing as an investment creates all kinds of terribly misaligned political incentives for local democracies. A land value tax would've helped by shifting people's nest egg from the value of their homes to their accumulated savings from income.

As it is, NIMBYism is likely the biggest driver of rising costs of living, rising homelessness, rising municipal debt, and generational class divides.

I wonder what you'd think about this video from Gary's Economics about the housing crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTlUyS-T-_4

It feels to me like a good faith counterargument to the YIMBY build more housing line of thought, so might be an interesting perspective

Devil's advocate, I don't think we should keep building more housing insofar as it encourages population growth (which it does). Like highways, there will always be barely enough, no matter how many lanes/houses we build.

But population growth is the overwhelming factor in all of our sustainability issues.

So in response to the rapidly rising prices, we should not build any housing because it doesn't matter? Surely there is still a positive benefit since there must be less than one person wanting to move in per new unit otherwise they would have already moved in?

The reason there will never be enough lanes is not population growth. It's that we generally don't provide people with alternatives to driving, and adding more lanes just makes even more people have to drive, since things get even farther apart.