That's fair, and I don't generally mind colloquial terms either. 

I just wanted to know how I'm supposed to interpret the statement. Seems like it boils down to "3.7 million fewer homes than some bureaucrat thinks there should be."

I'm fine with the colloquial term... I don't know what $$Q_D > Q_S$$ looks like in real life, or how we'd even know, because $$Q_D$$ would be unobserved in that instance.

I guess we can detect it with the presence of non-price based allocation mechanisms, like lotteries, lines, etc.  But with a market as heterogeneous as housing, I'm not sure how easy that is to observe.