I didn't ignore rent, rather I did not fall into the intellectually lazy trap of blaming whatever poor and exploited minority of the day for economic struggles.

I'll say it again - new housing isn't being built to keep up because domestic people, that means you and me, do not want it to be built. New housing is purposefully limited by local governments in order to preserve the value of existing housing.

In most cities it's illegal to build more than one unit on a lot. You also typically require a special approval process to build apartments. If you look at the states, HUGE cities will often approve only half a dozen or so new apartments a year. Duplexes, triplexes, dingbats, townhomes - these are straight up illegal in most of the country.

You can't have a city that gets ~100 new units a year and expect prices NOT to go up.

If you want an example of what to do right, look at Austin Texas. Austin built 100,000+ new units in the past couple years and average rent actually decreased ~10% between 2023 and 2024. Yes, you heard that correctly - decreased.

The reason why this works should be obvious, but Americans suffer such severe cognitive dissonance around housing they refuse to admit it. They'd rather blame random poor brown people. We require more housing, particularly dense affordable housing. And yes, that includes in your neighborhood. The sooner people admit this reality the sooner we can fix the housing crisis.