Sure you can. It requires a responsible government to align incentives. There is no axiomatic problem for building enough housing. The problem is the housing-as-investment paradigm, which only works if there is a perpetual housing shortage to drive prices well above values. Housing-as-investment creates a vicious cycle of shortage and incentivized harms to society in the interest of driving prices of housing up via a lack of desirable options.

To have a decent society for our children in a growing country, housing cannot be an investment. The value of a house must generally track downward with the depreciation of its structure. You need to separate the cost of housing from the cost of land, and in cities at least, tax land in accordance with its utility, encouraging vertical development in high population density areas.

The key to this working efficiently is responsible planning and zoning. Single family dwellings / 1-2 story housing is not likely to be viable adjacent to growing urban areas. Zoning should reflect this. This disincentives building single family homes in these areas, since taxation will be based on the fact that the lot could house a.32 unit condo, minimum lot sizes also reflect that planning, so property taxes would become quickly onerous for a single family home. If you want to live in a city, you should be amenable to living in a higher population density dwelling. I would imagine that for people that like their location, development deals that include a ground floor or penthouse apartment in exchange for part of the land value to a developer would become part of the norm. That way you can step out of the way, live somewhere else for 6 months and come home to your new flat. OTOH if you are just rich and stubborn, you can just pay the taxes.. but that will curtail the value of the home to a reasonable level. The current system rewards instead of penalizes homeowners for standing in the way of progress. At least tax revenues can be useful to the community.

Yeah dude you completely missed what I said I guess - I said you can’t build with wreckless abandon which means with “responsible government” as you put it

Oh, well, it’s not the first time I have demonstrated my capacity for stupidity. Maybe I read a different comment and answered yours, or maybe II didn’t really read it completely before I decided what it said. Either way, my apologies.

There are solutions, I think, to most of our issues… but the bias to avoid losing more than we are willing to invest to gain hobbles us.