Jason Ward has reason to hope that America can pull itself out of a historic housing crisis. Yes, it needs to build millions more homes. Yes, home prices and rents have become unsustainable. But then again, he says, consider Austin, Texas. Like many American cities in recent years, Austin was fast becoming “an LA-type place to live, with prices just getting very out of hand,” said Ward, an economist at RAND. Then it passed a series of reforms to make it easier to build housing.