If you believe housing is for people to live while doing the work they can get at the salaries those jobs are willing to pay them, then it is absurd not to consider income in housing affordability.
There is a minimum amount that it intrinsically costs to create housing, e.g. the cost of lumber, and in some places local wages are too low to afford that, and that sucks but the reason for it is low wages rather than housing scarcity. Then there are places where housing is unaffordable, not because wages are low, but because housing costs are artificially high, and that is a different problem with a different solution.
First, it costs way more than $200k/unit for new builds where I live (Seattle). Unless they go for scale, then maybe they are getting $200k with lots of profit and a $1k/month HOA. The biggest cost these days is simply labor. Construction workers aren't cheap.
Second, the housing is not at all equivalent in Asia. The standard 30 story overbuilt concrete apartment buildings, completely un-renovated (but at least you can get that done for cheap), but it keeps migrant workers employed (they overbuild on concrete for less technical builds, at the expense of increased building maintnence and/or reduced building lifetime). China and India just don't magic up these buildings, and often times it is used as a jobs program (or they would move on to more expensive but longer lasting builds, the fact that the buildings will be torn down in 20-30 years is seen as a feature and not a bug). But those cheap to build flats are still going for $1 million/each in cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen.
That's the point. If you restrict where they can be built, and how they can be built, they cost more to build. And then prices go up.
> The biggest cost these days is simply labor. Construction workers aren't cheap.
This is part of the regulatory cost. Rules that require labor-intensive construction methods (preferred by both labor and landlords because they both want new construction to be more expensive), and licensing requirements that statutorily take a long time or significant money to satisfy (e.g. multi-year apprenticeships, expensive licensing exam fees) rather than immediately licensing anyone who can pass the exam and not charging to take the test.
> China and India just don't magic up these buildings, and often times it is used as a jobs program
At which point it's a government subsidy, but that doesn't really get you out of anything at scale. Somewhere or another somebody is paying for the construction.
> But those cheap to build flats are still going for $1 million/each in cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen.
You can allow something to be built without allowing enough of something to be built.
You can also build enough of something and still have high prices because of some other constraints or regulations preventing the people paying the high prices from using some of the supply, so it goes to waste.
But these are not the reasons that a $1000/month flat in India is unaffordable to locals. The reason for that is that local wages are low.
My family bought an apartment couple of hrs from Delhi for about $100K which is huge amount for locals considering it is center/ hub of nothing. And as far as fit/finish goes one can easily spend another $50K on it to bring it barely to level of basic rental apartment in US.
