I'm having trouble reconciling this with the fact that in my corner of the world prices have been growing exponentially during the past decade despite the population remaining relatively stable and a record number of housing units being built.

The only thing that changed in this period was investment demand, which skyrocketed.

I have a building in my neighbourhood which consists solely of tiny studio apartments - the vast majority of which were already bought out back when the project was still a hole in the ground. Half of the lights are perpetually dark, because barely anyone lives there.

Or better yet: there's a hole in the ground in my neighbourhood that was still the previous building back when they started selling apartments - the company went bankrupt during the pandemic and construction was only started when another company stepped in and bought everything.

Bottom line is you can't fight exponential growth in demand with linear increase of supply.