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This was a couple of years ago but I think the numbers are still the same: sending a shipping container from Hong Kong to Newark cost about $3000 while sending the same container in the opposite direction cost about $500. This is because we badly want the shit China makes while they don't want anything we make (the same situation that led Great Britain to force China to accept opium at gunpoint almost two hundred years ago). Sending a container to China is so cheap that for a stretch we were actually filling them with our garbage because it was less expensive to dispose of it there.
Anyone who think this represents economic weakness on China's part is batshit crazy.
This is because we badly want the shit China makes while they don’t want anything we make
That's not entirely true. China produces a lot of low-margin industrial goods that Americans then assemble into finished products. Americans produce an assortment of agricultural and mineral goods that are in high demand in China (oilseeds and grains, particularly soybeans, followed by mineral fuels and oil). We also produce a number of high-margin technology components (include aircraft and parts, electrical machinery and TV parts, and nuclear reactor parts and mechanical appliances) that are expensive but comparatively smaller by volume than the products China sends our way.
Think of it this way. If China sends us a pound of feathers and we send them a pound of iron, even if they're the same price one of them is going to fill up a shipping container a lot faster than the other. The end result is a net positive number of shipping containers coming into the US.
Anyone who think this represents economic weakness on China’s part is batshit crazy.
It's a generally symbiotic relationship and one that any neoliberal economist would laud. We've stratified our industrial economies such that we're highly specialized in respective fields. It isn't weakness on either side's part any more than the heart is stronger/weaker than the lungs because one beats faster than the other breaths.
Containers as cheap home starting points in US is also a function of this dynamic. No need to ship empty ones back to Asia.
The problem isn't the lack of ability to build new houses, it's the lack of land that's in a liveable area, zoned for new development and not already taken. The land doesn't exist.
Not entirely true, they love our soy beans and alfalfa.... But Chinese junk and cattle feed are both horrible for this world. In fact, you can pack a freighter full of alfalfa and hardly add to its weight.