It has everything to do with restrictive zoning and building codes. NYC is a prime example, there are tons of empty commercial office buildings. But they will never house people because building codes require every room to have natural light. Rules also restrict share and boarding houses which used to provide affordable housing to many people.
No one said affordable housing needed to have windows in every room or home very room to have a bathroom. They're affordable for a reason and this is the norm in every other part of the world.
It's time to start thinking like every other country and culture.
What do you say about the reasons those regulations exist? It didn’t start that way; they were added after years and events.
Also, NYC has a lot of new residential buildings going up. I see them all over. But every time I look up what’s it’s for, it’s for the ultra-wealthy - $10s of millions per (huge) condo.
There is a lot of pent up demand. In a society where housing is provided by the market, those who can pay get served first. Stifling more construction doesn’t really lower prices; look at the Lower East Side and Soho where people pay out the nose to live in literal tenements.
It is hard to overstate how much housing would need to be built. To get housing affordable, Sweden committed to building 1M units over a decade in the 70s when the population of the country was 7M. In the 2010s, NYC had a population over 8M and built about 200k units.
