Much as I (a relatively young person) am in favor of more housing, isn't it also true that a surge in homebuilding would eviscerate the wealth of a lot of older Americans who are on the verge or in the midst of retirement? I feel dread whenever I look at the retirement savings numbers. So many elderly who'll have to live on a knife's edge financially.
Using rising home values as a retirement account is essentially just a pyramid scheme.
Like, just think about how this has to work. It only functions if home values drastically increase between purchase and retirement, right? Let's say they have to double, for it to be significant for retirement savings: that means that each generation, houses are getting twice as expensive for the next set of buyers. Literally exponential growth in housing prices.
This can only happen a few times in a market before only people with a lot of wealth already -- intergenerational or otherwise -- can still afford the homes; just look at the bay area for an example. I grew up in the south bay, and hardly anyone from my childhood still lives there: they can't really afford it. To buy a house there, you usually need two people in tech with high salaries (and even then it can be stretching things a bit). Is that what you want?
The current situation in places that have had incredible growth in property prices is that people are funding their retirements, not from saving during their work years, but off the backs of their kids and grandkids, because they got lucky in where they chose to settle down. It's unearned wealth, plain and simple.
The ideal price of housing is zero*.
* okay yes obviously there's caveats there, but the fact that unlike other consumer goods where inflation is obviously held to be bad, people treat increasingly unaffordable housing as a good thing is insane.