this shortage is entirely caused by cities preventing construction of everything but single family homes So I work in a field closely related to this, and the issue is less cities and more banks. The regulations in my city are basically: “if it’s housing, no regulations”. No minimum parking, no maximum density, no height limit, etc etc. But the banks? Won’t finance over ~22 stories. Or over ~200 units. Or parked less than 2:1. So we end up with only these short towers that are 50% parking podiums, where units are expensive AF because they have to pay for $100,000+ of parking per unit, not to mention the astronomical land prices being less diluted.

The only solution is for the city itself to start financing construction (and realistically doing the development themselves too), but that’s never going to happen.