“You don’t build in that city/county.”
There’s an entire ecology to being a builder. You have a lot of people you work with and can call. If you suddenly went somewhere else, none of that applies and a number of what I’ll call soft factors will combine to make building extremely difficult or impossible. Also, the way funding is linked it may not be possible to even get approval for a large project. Also, large projects are intimately connected with local politics. You simply can’t go where you want and build what you want without getting in bed with the local politicians. As a reporter I attended large builder events and present were politicians of every stripe. I could tell from conversations I overheard it was very much a I’ll-scratch-your-back-you’ll-scratch-mine type of thing. The simple solutions I’ve seen proposed on FR simply don’t exist in the real world.
Politicians back “affordable” housing because it gets them elected by people who have no idea what “affordable” actually means to them. Not backing “affordable” means not getting elected.
I am very familiar with the housing industry.
As you say many developers are tied at the hip with local politicians.
In such a situation they have no right to complain about whatever crazy policies are in place.
But—there are always alternatives.
I know many developers who have chosen new areas because of local rules they did not like.
Usually they got local partners in the new area to get the introduction to the local pols.