I've seen articles that argue this, but I think the bigger issue is that Millenials can't, because it's too expensive: http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0... and municipalities simply won't let anyone build housing that millenials can't afford.
Except... for exurbs, which don't have existing veto players. Consider: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/hou... :
Unlike most other big cities in America, Houston has no zoning code, so it is quick to respond to demand for housing and office space. Last year authorities in the Houston metropolitan area, with a population of 6.2m, issued permits to build 64,000 homes. The entire state of California, with a population of 39m, issued just 83,000.
People move to Houston and exurbs because they can. They don't move to say New York and San Francisco and Seattle because those cities are so expensive, regardless of other preferences.
Another recent-ish factor is that Texas law and judges' insane attachment to property rights, to the extent of including various intangible property rights, has a perhaps counterintuitively anti-development impact. Neighbors can take new developments to court on the theory that the new development has damaged some of their own property's value, e.g. by producing increased traffic or blocking views (some of this originally came out of a very broad interpretation of "regulatory takings", but has extended to private litigation). For example, last year, a group of homeowners won $1.2 million from the developer of a new condo tower: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/article...
It is, however, relatively easy to build new single-family homes in the exurbs ~20-30 miles from the city, which is what the vast majority of those 64,000 new-home permits are for. These technically count as "Houston", because Texas law is very annexation-friendly, so Houston has annexed most of its suburbs and exurbs out to a radius of ~30 miles. But that's sort-of like counting a new subdivision being built in Walnut Creek as an example of development progress in San Francisco.
