Yes it is. And housing is like any other good, governed by supply and demand. But the reason demand out-strips supply is because we artificially constrain supply through regulation.
Also there are vastly cheaper ways to make decent housing in this country than how we do it now. And it isn't market forces that have produced the housing markets we have today. It is regulation. Simply put, we prohibit or restrict the construction of more cost-effective forms of housing in a vast number of ways. It isn't the markets doing that. It is government regulation. At the same time, we also subsidize and encourage through regulation the most wasteful and expensive forms of housing.
This isn't a liberal/conservative thing. A lot of liberal solutions to the housing problem of the sort that are popular out here in west coast cities are similarly misguided and counter-productive. One example is what they call inclusionary-zoning here in the Portland area. Essentially what inclusionary-zoning does is mandate that new construction of apartments contain a certain percentage of low-income housing. All this actually does is raise the cost of housing for everyone else while providing a tiny amount of highly-regulated below-market housing that does nothing to increase supply. Worse still are bureaucratic attempts to build public low income housing. Which always end up costing astronomical amounts per housing unit. It would be far more cost effective and efficient just to let the private sector build. What inclusionary zoning actually does is prevent many projects from being built in the first place, or built in ways that evade the restrictions by making them much smaller. Otherwise they just don't pencil out. And the net effect is to raise the cost of housing for everyone in the entire market.
There is a very weird dynamic in this country that I don't fully understand. It is especially present in liberal western cities. Here in the west coast, these sorts of small business people are treated as heroes who are adding to the community
But these kinds of small businessmen are treated as "evil" greedy developers
I don't get it.