In “Why Housing is So Expensive” I write:

There are two big reasons why housing is so expensive. The first is the obstacles put in the way of building new housing in many of the most desirable cities to live in. …

… [second] there has been no real improvement in productivity in construction in the last 50 years.

The book Building an Affordable House, by Fernando Pages Ruiz, and its review by Brian Potter in his blog Construction Physics, gives a sense of what the possibility frontier is for low construction and how far typical construction is from that possibility frontier.