Elizabeth Warren wrote a book about this issue 2 decades ago: The Two Income Trap.
It used to be that you could afford a mortgage on 1 income. Now you can’t even afford it on 2. The explosion of 2 income households has made it much harder to compete in the bidding wars for housing.
At the same time, homeowners (NIMBYs) go to city hall and fight tooth and nail to protect their investments by blocking new housing development. It’s this horrible cycle of ladder pulling.