For context this is a Question I answered on Quora
Be a boomer homeowner that shows up to city council to kill anything denser than single family house cul-de-sac subdivisions, anything smaller than a 1200 square foot single family house, and when multi-family housing meets the minimum lot size requirement and gets a pass because its not in your back yard impose absurd off street parking space requirements so fewer lower income people can be housed there. The problem isn’t that boomers won’t sell their 2500 sqft homes that most millennials and zoomers can’t afford anyway, and which they’ll just end up selling to private equity, but they won’t allow housing to be built that their children, who earn 20% less than they did at the same age, can afford to own or rent without multiple roommates in many cases. Boomers aren’t the first generation to push suburban sprawl as the default housing model, that would be the greatest generation post WWII, or real estate speculation as the default development model, but they are the first to insist that anything deviating from that new norm be blocked and are therefore the first generation to create a housing shortage without a major world war involving the allocation of a country’s entire output away from consumer markets. Suburban sprawl has not only exhausted buildable land where actual job opportunities and amenities are sufficient for newer generations to start families (i.e. places that aren’t in bumfuck nowhere) but boomer homeowners through zoning boards and city councils have made it illegal to find affordable work arounds by making it illegal to live in RVs or tiny houses on trailers, making it illegal for multiple non-familial roommates to rent a single family house and engaging in so called urban renewal that destroys existing affordable housing stock. Unfortunately, NIMBY homeowners have a contingent of useful idiots on the left who block housing development not because they’re worried about their property values but because they are economically illiterate morons protesting “gentrification” that rally to block any new development that isn’t 100% low income housing instead of demanding land value capture (e.g. separating location value and structure value via land trusts, housing co-ops, and high capital gains tax on incremental site value) with new development. The net result of both anti-growth agendas is a 7 million unit affordable housing shortage that worsens every year.