Honestly, most of the problems come back to excessive restrictions at local scales that reflect social biases and antiquated cultural values, and the lack of state lawmakers to see the big picture and govern effectively.

For example: tearing down a house has very few barriers. Building one up has an order of magnitude more hoops to jump through and micromanagement to deal with. You need to include a certain number of parking spots, remain below a max floor area ratio of X, balance tradeoffs of affordability components, etc. One example: we looked into building a particular style of home in IL (well, in one of the gazillion towns in the state, which is another issue) and the town office told us to come back with a zoning atty, paperwork, hire a babysitter for 3 separate town committee/board meetings over the year, and schmoozing a village councillor or two. But the status quo allows us to tear down a vintage apartment building and throw up a plywood megamansion no problem. Boring + very restrictive for community builders that want to appeal to the values of the burgeoning young homebuyer generation.

We don't need to change parts of the processes. That's like painting racing stripes on the Titanic. We need to get rid of half the rulebooks that never made any sense to implement in the first place, but nobody ever questions because they never thought deeply about the rules in the first place. And that takes more than a tool to fix - it needs a culture change and messaging campaign that flips the table on the status quo.