I feel like this is what you'd expect to happen though right? Just from a base intuition on major societal shifts, you'd expect housing prices and availability to outstrip the local ability to afford them. You'd then expect mounting pressure to see more housing built to reduce the rate of price increase and raise the amount of supply. You'd then expect to see developers start making plans and getting the necessary approvals and permits. Finally after all of that happens you'd expect to see stuff start going up. And you'd expect this whole process to probably take something close to a decade to play out wouldn't you? My company just built a brand new HQ, in the middle of a big field. It was a 3+ year process from the moment it was announced, and I have to figure it was another year before that in the planning. I wouldn't really expect that building huge tracts of housing, whether in the middle of downtown, or out in the suburbs would be a much shorter timeline. You have all the permitting and planning to go through, land acquisition, infrastructure improvements / agreements to improve as part of the construction depending on your local setup, public hearings if any zoning changes are required, and then the inevitable delays that come with massive projects like that. And you'd expect all of this to happen in a slow ramp, starting with one project by one developer and expanding as demand continues to climb.
Yep! None of what I said was meant as a disagreement with any of this :)
I mean, I might wish that going from "wait a minute, nobody can afford to live here because lots of people have moved here and we haven't been building any housing" to seeing the first improvements in affordability would require less than like 20 years, but in reality, yeah, things take time.