I think the problem is you are giving a money on the table explanation for the missing lower-income housing. If developers could make more profitable lower-income housing (and by lower I mean anything other than high-end) they would and a lack of such housing is probably caused by a lack of demand(not in the sense that poor people don't want housing but rather they can't raise the price sufficiently to make it profitable for a developer).
I would rather argue that government regulation is definitely the problem on multiple levels. For one you probably have to deal with state and federal regulations making it very difficult to get economies of scale. Does every state/city really need to define the bare-minimum requirements for a house differently? Is there really nothing they can agree on so we can have standardized housing rules? That alone should limit housing costs significantly but if you also limit the power of local government to restrict growth and force it to accommodate new citizens rather than try to block them would also be a very good way to reduce a lot of the costs of new housing. I wonder how much developer money is spent litigating in places like New York and San Francisco that should be seeing most of the growth in housing.
Notice that this is not a problem
In most of the US. Most housing in the US is still probably cheap it's just nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere. Housing is very expensive in a few critically important areas that have largely failed to accommodate the influx of immigrants.
I would rather argue that government regulation is definitely the problem on multiple levels. For one you probably have to deal with state and federal regulations making it very difficult to get economies of scale. Does every state/city really need to define the bare-minimum requirements for a house differently? Is there really nothing they can agree on so we can have standardized housing rules? That alone should limit housing costs significantly but if you also limit the power of local government to restrict growth and force it to accommodate new citizens rather than try to block them would also be a very good way to reduce a lot of the costs of new housing. I wonder how much developer money is spent litigating in places like New York and San Francisco that should be seeing most of the growth in housing.
Notice that this is not a problem In most of the US. Most housing in the US is still probably cheap it's just nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere. Housing is very expensive in a few critically important areas that have largely failed to accommodate the influx of immigrants.