That doesn't really make sense. The population in most of the west is vaguely around replacement. A given individual can only make use of so much housing at once. Sure if you're rolling in cash throw in a vacation home or two. There's a pretty quick falloff in terms of utility, status, desire, any metric that's coming to mind as I type this.

It seems to me that at least in the US the issue is location. There's cheap stock in places without jobs and ridiculously expensive stock where the good jobs are located. It doesn't have to be this way.

It's not capitalism that requires infinite growth, it's our current monetary system.

New money is created by lending it into existence, with interest.

That last bit is key. In order to pay off the interest, you need money, which was also loaned into existence with interest.

The only way to maintain this is through constant economic growth. Without it there's a deflationary collapse.

Millennia before Adam Smith was born, pretty much every human societies which built "houses" (be they crude tents, igloos, lean-tos, thatched huts, or whatever) made a point of building enough of those to house all their members.

Capitalism has financialized housing, and that seems to be a major cause of the "can't actually build housing" problem.

In general, in pre-industrial societies families built their own houses rather than "society" building them for them. Of course this was because 1) many tribal societies had no concept of land ownership so you could just build wherever someone else wasn't using, and often these were temporary for a season or two anyway 2) later feudal societies where there was land ownership had land mostly owned by a nobleman who allowed his serfs to build their cottages on his land.

Maybe true "In general"? But a very good fit for my poorly-chosen set of examples. Vs. -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longhouse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabono

(And quite a few others.)

> made a point of building enough of those to house all their members.

But populations were relatively stable until capitalism drove us towards the growth mindset.