This question was made for me. It's not the market; obviously there's demand for higher density housing, and were it allowed, people would make more of it. It'

This question was made for me. It's not the market; obviously there's demand for higher density housing, and were it allowed, people would make more of it. It's almost always local regulations that make producing such housing difficult, or more commonly, flat out impossible. Most American residential land is zoned for exclusively large single family homes in big lots. This is true even in most major metro areas. You can read a little bit about this here in this article that compared American zoning with Japanese zoning: https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning-more-liberal-than-us-zoning/ https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning... The gist of how it got this way is: racism and classism. The racism used to be more relevant, these days the classism is. You see, if you require that to live in a neighborhood, you must be able to own or rent a property with a minimum amount of land, it's easy to keep out people of lesser economic resources. A poorer family that might be willing to live an apartment in a nicer area will find that no such housing exists there, and being unable to afford a full house, they are excluded, hence the term 'exclusionary zoning'. This also has the effect of keeping those poor kids out of local schools. So yeah, it's economic segregation that America pretends doesn't count as segregation somehow, even though the effects are plain as day.