The article says that a unit of housing is $600K, but you have to click through to see that that is for an example 100-unit building. This is somewhat relevant,

The article says that a unit of housing is $600K, but you have to click through to see that that is for an example 100-unit building. This is somewhat relevant, since construction costs for residential buildings scales nonlinearly with size. And that does seem pretty high. Here in the Boston area, I think it would be less, though perhaps not a lot. THe new Millenium Tower downtown cost something like $600 million, or roughly $500 per sq. ft. But that's a super-lux tower on one of the most valuable plots in the city. Around where I live, I see a lot of semi-prefab buildings going up--smaller buildings where the units are trucked in on flatbeds and stacked up like Legos. This is presumably much faster and cheaper. But these sorts of costs mean that developers are only going to build when they can get premium prices for sale.