Shortage in the absence of price controls generally means that something is inhibiting supply from increasing as demand does, causing increased demand to have the primary result of increasing prices rather than increasing production.

Sometimes this is expected or unavoidable, e.g. if you have a sudden increase in the demand for electricity then the price will increase temporarily until new power generation or transmission capacity can be brought online, and in the meantime you have a shortage.

The problem comes when the shortage is a result of artificial scarcity as it is with housing/zoning, because then it's not temporary, it persists until the cause of the artificial scarcity is defeated.

Let's be honest, it's not even that.

It's more like "relative to historic trends, many people want houses [in desirable areas] who can't afford the current prices."

Building tons of new houses outside of the hot areas that all these people want to live would still elicit cries of a shortage and an affordability crisis. Because there are currently affordable places outside of hot areas, but not very many takers.

It's a really tough nut to crack. Because how do you reorient the demand to those areas that have the supply? It's not easy. We can't seem to do it currently, and there's no real plan to do it if even if we could somehow build even more housing. We'd have to build lots of housing only in hot areas. Which sounds easy enough until you realize the economics don't make sense and even on the off chance that you could, it would only generate more demand.

First order of business however should be to find a clever way to stop abuses like the ones outlined in the article. The housing that would free up in the hot areas would not be near enough to meet the demand, but if we stop that nonsense at least we're not "digging the hole deeper" so to speak.