>In economics, a commodity is an economic good or service that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.[1] Most commodities are raw materials, basic resources, agricultural, or mining products, such as iron ore, sugar, or grains like rice and wheat. Commodities can also be mass-produced unspecialized products such as chemicals and computer memory.
>The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole: well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. [0]
If anything, housing is not enough of a commodity. Each site effectively has a bespoke regulatory framework that has to be discovered as expensively as possible, through a series of planning meetings. Each project requires an extremely high-touch political consensus process. Each building is expected to be unique-but-not-too-unique for its context, of-the-present-moment without altering historical character. As a practical matter, it's really expensive and take a long time and many iterations to arrive at a design that everyone agrees meets those criteria. Watch an SF Planning meeting video sometime. Most of the multifamily projects discussed on any given day are continuations. The curation process yields a great-looking museum, but we pay for the delay and uncertainty it creates in the price of admission.
Houses should be less like houses and more like soybeans: cheap, abundant, with many highly competitive producers and a price that floats just barely above the cost of production. Producers should be responding quickly and effectively to changes in demand, just as in the commodities markets. Commodities are the things we're most likely to have enough of for everyone!
Housing has effectively one producer, the San Francisco planning commission, and if it doesn't feel like meeting demand this year, everyone else has to just live with that. (There is no reason to think it would feel like meeting demand for social housing. Shadows, traffic impacts, neighborhood character changes, etc. are the same either way). Commodification would be an incredible improvement!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity