I know exactly how we can solve all of our rent-control and slow construction problems:
Arenak.
It’s a transparent substance that appears in E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark series of novels. It’s made of dirt-cheap ingredients, can be molded into place like clay and then hardened by application of a tiny bit of salt water, and when hardened is 500 times stronger than the strongest steel. You could build an earthquake-proof skyscraper out of a tiny amount of arenak over the course of a few days – and since it’s transparent, you wouldn’t even have to decide ahead of time where to put the windows! (Said windows now being unbreakable, of course.) With 20-story buildings being cheaper than most 2-story buildings now, rent will be so cheap that rent control will no longer be necessary. And with such short construction times, building new power plants will be a snap.
I say it’s high time our materials engineers got to work on making arenak a reality!