In the desirable places, every terrible house is used and potentially worth millions. Due to NIMBYism, there are restrictions on development.
In contrast, other less-desirable places have made it very easy to build houses (and often even provided tax incentives), leading to over-building. But without corresponding jobs, those houses lie vacant.
You can simultaneously have housing shortages and housing excesses.
> The macro economic issues (massive capital accumulation by the 1%, stagnant wages for the majority of workers, etc) are more in play than NIMBYism and zoning.
To take an example relevent to HN, do you really think the reason that even well-paid developers can't buy houses in the Bay area is "stagnant wages?" Wages have increased massively over the past 5 years, but NIMBYism prevents the addition of new houses to meet the demand.
The problem is more the 5-10% of older people who got lucky with real estate than a conspiracy by the 1%.
> I'd be interested whether or not you're active in zoning issues in your community or how it is that you came to the conclusion that zoning boards everywhere are responsible for unfordable housing.
My mother is on the selectboard of a small Vermont town and she sees this all the time. There's a decent amount of demand for new affordable housing, but the existing power base of voters overwhelmingly demands that there be hard limits on how much new construction there is every year. They're particularly opposed to apartments. The end result is that housing is rather expensive despite there being an abundance of available land and the young families who would like to move to the area are priced out.