> we could do a lot to reconfigure the existing supply to make it fit the people better?

The problem is that housing and infrastructure is, you know, actual giant physical objects. It takes a year of planning and millions of dollars to move a road. You can't tear down a block of single family homes and put a denser apartment building in there until everyone living in them sells. You need to run sewer, power, and roads to make a new neighborhood, and even then you will still have to deal with the impact to nearby schools, traffic, hospitals, etc.

Making places for people to live is, like, many orders of magnitude more effortful than anything we do in the software world.

> It kinda feels like the affordable housing issue is just a red herring for the larger wealth inequality issue.

Yes, this is certainly another piece of the puzzle. For every 100 people who can't afford a thing, there's still 1 rich person who can, and increasingly, rich people are the primary source of profit for businesses. So businesses target them more and more and we end up in today's world where it seems like "no one can afford what's being sold".

It's because unless you're one of the wealthy minority, you're simply not a market participant at all.

Related: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-econ...