If you want more "affordable housing" build more housing in general:
> Now, if you cornered Gopal and Clark — or the “small group of academics” they cite — you could probably get them to admit that if we built 10 market-rate (“luxury”) apartments for every resident of Austin, most of them wouldn’t get filled, and landlords would be forced to slash prices, and regular folks would have cheap apartments to live in. An apartment’s price is not built into its walls and floors; “luxury” is just a marketing buzzword, and most of the apartments that are affordable today went for market rate when they were built.
More housing in general is generally good:
> What you should notice here is that Gopal and Clark only briefly mention the “growing body of research” that supports the filtering effect, choosing only to specifically name the 2019 paper by Asquith et al. They do not mention Li (2019), who finds that “for every 10% increase in the housing stock, rents decrease 1% and sales prices also decrease within 500 feet.”
Want rents to decrease? Have vacancy rate of 10%. Renters can jump ship at any point and have an option available, which will incentivize landlords to not be assholes.
If vacancy rates are ~0%, then landlords can do whatever they want, and renters have to to take it.
Comparables and greedy corporations inflate the inventory of expensive housing while affordable housing shrinks to nothing.