Comment by bluGill
Renters, make sure you vote. NIMBY really hurts you when the house owners who vote make it impossible for you to get affordable rent. Rental properties get higher property taxes: rent goes up, or the quality of the house goes down. When cheap apartments cannot legally be built: there are no cheap apartments.
Some of the YIMBY stuff is coming in the form of stricter environment regulations and even union labor rules and high minimum wage. Looking at you, NYC, where building 99 unit buildings and no more is the norm because otherwise the wage becomes $40/hr. It's called 485-x.
There's no escape in the US from the problem. It's either California with weird complicated property tax laws that make no one sell, Texas with unlimited and disgusting urban sprawl, Florida with shoddy construction, or NYC with big headaches tied to strict building incentives for tax breaks.
The answer could be ugly - less regulation, but now you're going red and not blue, which is very much the opposite attitude that many pro urbanization folks tend to be.
I'm not sure, other than I think the issue is that it's not Not Enough Building. It's that we allow investors to buy everything up. In NYC this year, 40 percent of condo transactions were without financing contingency. Explain that one.