Should it not be the other way around, turn housing into more of a commodity? We have no shortage of most commodities, for example foods, because typically the higher the demand for the commodities, the more is made. Those markets benefit from things like economy of scale. Housing seems to be the opposite right now, there's very high demand and yet development is not able to keep pace due to artificial restrictions like zoning and height limits.
Housing is limited by sustainability in ways most commodities are externalized.
Here are all the reasons you can't buy a commoditized "cheaply made" house in Nowhere Minnesota:
A. There is finite land in the world. Burying it in sprawl housing is an American tradition that has wrought disastrous environmental, health, time consuming, wasteful, and systemic consequences across the nation.
B. Housing does not exist in a vacuum, not in a way close to what true commodities - things you buy off a shelf for a purpose but otherwise are non-interactive - operate. Housing requires infrastructure in myriad forms from electrical to transit. These structural requirements are systematized and cannot be commoditized meaningfully and thus housing itself is limited by them.
C. Housing is limited by your means to sustain it. This means you need a job, and work is going in the opposite direction of commoditization because any repetitious work is being automated. The availability of meaningful employment is shrinking and thus the viable domains of legitimate housing likewise shrink, which is why the flood to California is a thing, why there is so much demand for density, and why a half century of gentrified urban planning has ruined the states housing market.
D. Housing is already commoditized. You can buy a manufactured house made at scale for an inflation adjusted cost half of what manually built houses were costing a century ago with more square footage, modern amenities, and the ability to have it installed on a lot over a weekend. If you price out the physical goods cost of manufacturing some of the highest density vertical condo buildings in the world the per-square footage of livable space costs are often below stick built houses. The limiting factor is land - so back to A through C, thats the limiter.
The construction of buildings should be done in a free market that invites competition of builders but with the regulation to recognize those purchasing said structures are rarely educated on quality or safe construction. The distribution of land needs to be radically rethought because the established paradigm of treating it like a segregated consumer good is bankrupting the working class as the aristocracy pours money into property as their Scrooge McDuck money pit of choice.
