Energy is a large portion of the cost of aluminum ingots or tanker cars full of ammonia. It is not a large portion of the cost of constructing new housing. I wouldn't start with energy prices if I were trying to figure out how to make housing affordable. I'd try to contrast e.g. Tokyo, where housing is reasonably affordable, against the city of New York, where it is much less affordable. Japan doesn't have cheaper energy than the US.
The problem with this idea is that it was cheap energy that gave rise to the middle class during the industrial revolution. Energy acts as a force multiplier on human labor. Without it, you need many more humans to accomplish tasks like farming and construction. And many things just become physically insurmountable. We just wouldn’t have professions like software engineering or even yoga teachers (the way they exist today) without cheap abundant energy.
Remember that it was cheap energy that allowed people to migrate and settle in the city of their choice and thus free themselves from the landowning class.
With housing costs the way they are in certain cities, this is still relevant today.
The solution isn’t to make energy more expensive, but to make things more efficient, and to change where we get our energy from.
Oh, yeah, I doubt it's a fundamental issue, but given the apparent cheapness of most American construction, I can't imagine the energy efficiency is great.
If energy was more expensive, people would care and take this into account when making choices.
Eg in Germany people routinely check out how good the insulation on eg the windows is when they choose a place to buy or rent. That's because energy is expensive in Germany, and it gets cold enough in winter that you need to heat.
If energy is cheap enough, people can be rationally (!) ignorant about these issues.
Seriously cutting one's energy footprint is not free, it comes with serious cost increases elsewhere. The average American can't afford to live in NYC without curtailing much of what constitutes average living conditions.
If energy was predictably more expensive, that would be one way to sort it out. You wouldn't buy a house or an apartment without analyzing living costs. Contractors would suddenly get very interested in building more energy efficient housing.
I've also heard that in Russia, pensioners get a free amount of energy per month. That leads to a lot of wastage. For example if the pensions could be in cash, then the person would be motivated to save energy.
You do need cultural change too though. One way is to just demand visibility, not make any demands on actions. We have a published "energy class" for apartments and houses here. Our current apartment is class F or so - so we know our living cost is more sensitive to district heat prices than a class B apartment would be (those are newer and have in general higher purchase price).
Energy costs in the US are differently distributed, more into the future perhaps, more incidentally on the community perhaps, but the market means that the costs are the same (give or take 10% for transport)
Part of the cost of most things you buy goes towards the energy costs invested in making that thing. Lower energy costs would lower the prices of most things you buy.
Pretty sure that the cost of energy underpins almost everything we do or produce. I can't think of a single example that doesn't have a large energy component.
For example, health insurance is made up of the cost of paying people and creating medicines - and ultimately, it comes back to food, extracting raw materials and paying down debt, all of which are affected by the price of energy.
So dropping energy costs will eventually make most stuff cheaper (or make more money for rich people :( )
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