>so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem
Civilizations, human settlements, people's homes and communities aren't fungible commodity widgets solvable and movable through copy-paste solutions like technical challenges, no matter how much HN insists every world challenge from housing to world peace, is as easily solvable as those at their tech jobs.
Just because you can 1:1 reverse engineer a bomb design and have it work the same, doesn't mean you can just take a housing policy that worked in the demographic, geographical, historical and cultural context of one country and just drop it in another country with a completely different context and background, and expect it to just work the same.
This is the tech equivalent of: "well, it was working on my machine".
“Building enough housing” is actually a concept that we can apply everywhere in the world. My city has a million fewer people than it did 50 years ago and inflation adjusted rents are an order of magnitude higher. It’s not because the ability to build enough housing was lost to the sands of time.
Sure. In some company cultures, the developer throws the code over the wall and it's up to the operations team to make it work, so "well, it was working on my machine" is basically saying "go fuck yourself". There are other ways to work though, and so an alternate culture is for SREs to be engaged from the start of the project, so the developer doesn't just throw the code over the wall, and "well, it was working on my machine" is followed by a pairing session with the SWE to figure out the differences between the two as to why it's not working. Of course, modern tools aka Docker make that less of a problem these days, but as with all things, half the side of tech is culture and not the technology itself.
Back to the point though, I didn't claim it's at all easy to solve the housing crisis everywhere in the world, but that there are cities without a housing crisis. However they solved it won't be directly applicable to cities on a different continent in a difference country with a totally different culture, zoning laws, building codes, and entrenched interests.
But it proves it's possible. "All" that has to happen is the right person with sufficient political capital to get it to happen. Such a leader or team doesn't exist in most places, unfortunately, but, again, the point is if there was such an individual, they're not trying to do the impossible, since it's been proven it's possible.
Civilizations, human settlements, people's homes and communities aren't fungible commodity widgets solvable and movable through copy-paste solutions like technical challenges, no matter how much HN insists every world challenge from housing to world peace, is as easily solvable as those at their tech jobs.
Just because you can 1:1 reverse engineer a bomb design and have it work the same, doesn't mean you can just take a housing policy that worked in the demographic, geographical, historical and cultural context of one country and just drop it in another country with a completely different context and background, and expect it to just work the same.
This is the tech equivalent of: "well, it was working on my machine".