There's no way airports use enough land to be able to 'solve the housing crisis' by using it for housing. The housing crisis is an entirely self-created proble

There's no way airports use enough land to be able to 'solve the housing crisis' by using it for housing. The housing crisis is an entirely self-created problem by the societies it exists in, and it has little to do with amount of land. For example, Japan and South Korea have relative little land -- and in the case of Japan, very little non-mountainous land -- relative to their population, and yet rent prices there are quite affordable, even in the megacities of Tokyo and Seoul. Western cities tend to have some combination of greater restrictions on density/housing forms, and harder/more ambiguous red tape to develop new buildings. Relaxing these regulations would at least alleviate, it not outright solve the crisis, but people just don't wanna do that. It's not a technical issue, it's just that the political will isn't there. As an example of ambiguous red tape, take the ubiquitous "community meetings" that are common in US cities any time there's a major new development. It's common for neighbors to raise random objections that may or may not relate to any building codes or zoning regulations, and then a planning board to force the developer to adapt to those objections, or just block the project outright. What this means, is that there's really two sets of laws: one on the books, that was developed through normal democratic processes like city council members voting on them, or local initiatives passing, and then the second set is whatever the local residents feel like accepting in their heads. We would never accept this for other laws, the idea of, "well sure you didn't break any laws on paper, but local residents don't like what you did and a few raised a stink about it at a community meeting, so you're going to jail anyway." But that's how building permitting actually works. You can't just follow actual laws, you have to make the subset of people who show up to community meetings all happy.