It's very curious that we are so focused on housing because it's a problem in relatively few areas driven by demand surging because of increased job centralization. It isn't surprising and it's hard to fix because it's complicated to incentivise lower density cities.

But what about food and clothes? What about books? For all our wealth, everything in the US is dozens of times more expensive than in some poorer countries. Can we develop a society that produces these products at a similarly low cost while sustaining our lower classes in other industries (since the ultimate floor for costs of goods in the US is the cost of paying laborers 'living' wages)?