Health I can understand cause it takes a long time to produce a Doc, and there is a high demand and low supply dynamic.
But we can easily build housing cheap. Even if the real estate/investment lobby is busy buying up all the "prime" land, its not like the US is a small country to work around them somewhere.
On top of all the above, you have teh general populace, of which a significant portion own housing they want to see go up so you won't ever get to the point where everyone sees the light and overwhelmingly supports you like uber got to, there will always be significant push back from the populace who want to abuse supply constraint to increase their personal benefit at the severe cost to all of us.
Even the US being a big country doesn't help much. The value of land for the purpose of living on it is largely defined by the infrastructure around a particular piece of land: are there schools, shops, doctors, ... nearby, or do you have to drive through an empty desert for hours to reach them? And unless faster forms of individual travel are invented, this will limit the amount of "usable" land even in an imaginary country with unlimited boundaries.
I'm not going to build a doctors office, or a train, or a corner store next to 10 people. I'm gonna build it next to 100,000 people. And now here we are, where we have space but not really because most of the space is worthless.
Very, very few. Rural areas are disproportionately impoverished. It's just statistical, not personal, and it makes complete sense once you consider what an economy is.
> But I'd never live in a major metro area, that's nuts
Those major metro areas make up the vast majority of the US' economic prowess. You don't have to live in them of course, but you should be aware that the American suburbs and rural areas are essentially on the welfare of more economically successful areas.
40% of the US population lives in a coastal county:
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
Two-thirds of the US population lives with-in one hundred miles (160km) of the border:
* https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
The US population is fairly concentrated, and it seems that many people like living next to other people (for personal and/or economic reasons).
Lowering costs to build should, in theory, increase supply.
High demand should, in theory, increase supply.
But other things influence the balance, regulations, interest rates, etc, that are either keeping supply low or demand high, inflating prices.