That's a cool site, I made a graph that I think illustrates my point more clearly:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6ZPIt's the change in population vs. the change in new housing with a separate line for each.
It's not super easy to understand because the population change is in thousands of people and housing is just in individual units, but I think it's clear from the graph (if I'm reading it correctly) that Houston is not building enough to meet demand. When you mouse over you can see the amount of new people and compare it to the amount of new housing. There's a lot more new people than new housing.
[Edit]: I found an even cooler dataset which I added to the above graph, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B72x - it doesn't go back as far, but it shows available housing inventory which is a more relevant metric (and it's going down). I tried adding median price too, but it made the graph hard to read.
Basically, in a city not meeting demand I'd expect to see the following:
- Prices increasing faster than inflation
- Population increasing faster than new housing
- Availability of housing going down (supply constraints which cause prices to go up)
How bad the situation is depends on the above variables, but generally if you don't build enough to meet demand things get worse. That is true in a worst-in-the-world way in the bay area, but also appears to be true most places due to bad incentives - people who already bought in benefit (or at least think they benefit) from restricting supply.