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https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population The massive growth of the global population is hard for people to grasp, but is a big part of the cost of housing. Even if we've built billions of new homes in the last century that isn't enough to compensate the bigger still population increase.

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The limiting factor in population is the ability to construct housing?

Growth in the developed countries with housing shortages keeps getting revised down.

Since 1968, 77 million housing units have been completed in the US. At 2.5 people per household, that's enough for 190 million people. The US population has increased 133 million over that time. We have plenty of housing.

Just looking at new housing units is only half of the story. I can't and won't speculate on how many homes were torn down during the time it took to build 77 million housing units, but it had to be a significant number.

If two single-family houses were torn down to make room for one new-build, single-family house, then it is a loss of housing. Not to mention natural disasters, condemned housing, rural housing being torn down for farmland, urban housing being torn down for new highways. I do wonder how many houses were destroyed in that same timeframe.

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