> Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money.

Building codes that keep buildings safe and lovable are almost never the type of regulation that's a problem here. You'll virtually never find the dispute to be centered around a developer that wants to make a new building that's just kinda shitty and/or unsafe.

Rather, the problems tend to be:

* Livability concerns from neighbors around parking, views, shadows, traffic, "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors).

* Environmental reviews, and especially people from the above group using fake environmental concerns to shut down or stall projects that they have a livability problem with.

* Overall process just taking a really long time. San Francisco, for example, has basically been chided by the state government repeatedly for taking too long to process new building permits.

There's an implicit strawman in your argument, because almost nobody is arguing against basic building codes around safety, or saying we should get rid of zoning that keeps factories or away from schools or whatever. The problem is that initially well intentioned regulations went overboard and have strangled development that we actually want.

Imagine if farmers had to attend neighborhood meetings from "concerned individuals" and alleviate their concerns (with attendant delays) every time they planted new crops. That's kind of the situation housing development is in.

> How is this obvious?

It's obvious at both a macro and micro level.

At a macro level, you can just looking at housing prices nationwide, or look at how in a given metro area with a booming economy, housing stock only crawls upwards, despite obvious demand.

At a micro level, if you zoom in on an area, you'll quickly discover the issues I've talked about. Zoning makes much potential housing illegal or more expensive to build, and the processes make it much more difficult and more expensive and time consuming.

California has a legislative analyst office that's produced various reports about this IIRC, because coastal California has had such an awful housing crisis for so long: https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/housing

> A lack of home building, particularly in coastal urban areas, is the fundamental cause of California’s housing crisis. Many factors contribute to this lack of building, chief among them local community resistance to new housing. The high cost and limited availability of housing in California forces many households to make serious tradeoffs in order to live here.

> ...

> Housing element law requires cities and counties to develop a plan that demonstrates how their planning and zoning rules will accommodate future home building. Our review of available evidence suggests that housing elements fall well short of their goal. Communities’ zoning rules often are out of sync with the types of projects developers desire to build and households desire to live in. There are no easy solutions to this problem. Any major changes in how communities plan for housing will require their active participation and a shift in how local residents view new housing.

They've done some great work here, and statewide there's been some progress on the state forcing local governments to stop being such enormous shitheads, standing in the way of new housing. But it's an uphill battle, because of all the cultural momentum against serious new development.

> Unable... or unwilling?

Unable. Obviously not 100% unable, there's some new housing each year, it's just not enough.

And the fact that even local government themselves are uninterested in even trying themselves kind of gives it away. Even the people setting the rules don't want to play the game, they know exactly how painful they've made it.

I'm a bay area native so this topic is near and dear to my heart. Bay Area is basically NIMBY central for the whole country, but you can find similar issues almost everywhere, albeit not quite as extreme.