You have a baseline of prosperity and life in your head.

The Heritage guys have a weird perspective where they idolize the early Federalist US and the Reagan Era. Prosperity for the common man wasn’t a highlight of either era, to put it mildly.

In 1790s New York, for example, “local control” meant that many of the people of upstate New York were a sort of serf-like tenant living on the estates of the great men, Dutch patroons who played ball with the colonial and State political infrastructure. They had the freedom to pay rent until their landlord was willing to let them go. That existed into the 1840s, when the country started getting woke.

So we can address housing issues with creative solutions. Why do poor people need their own apartments? Stuff them into a tenement. You can easily fit 15 people in a two bedroom apartment so they can build drones or whatever.