A Boring Dystopia

In cities, a lot of the new rental construction is "luxury" because it's both the most profitable multi-unit housing project, and because it recovers its investment outlay decades earlier than a rental complex that intends to charge near or moderately above the average rent prices. There's no market incentive for anyone to build affordable housing, unless the government subsidizes it, which is unsustainable and defeats the purpose of affordable housing in the first place.

They don't have to worry about occupancy as long as there's a housing shortage, so you're stuck between living in decades old apartments that have questionable utilities and maintenance, or paying 2-5 times as much to live in an equivalently sized new apartment. One of the cities I lived in was entirely split between old converted buildings (that kept raising their rent) and brand new luxury apartments that would bleed you dry.

Smaller houses would help, but even Tiny Homes are fucking expensive now, with them creeping up to a couple hundred thousand for less than 800 sq ft. Basically, builders wanna build expensive houses for a larger profit margin, corporate owners want prices to rise and strategically buy and sell, and private owners want it to be an investment. With the housing market cooling, and builders slowing new construction to wait it out until demand pushes prices back where they want, we're basically stuck in a self-regulating purgatory, where housing becoming affordable is something that all the market pressures are pushing against.