My city, like many in the US, is facing rising rents and a shortage of low income, or even just affordable housing. The city has been preempted by the state from passing any sort rent control, public housing options or really any thing other than what the developers want to build.
In the face of a drought of affordable housing developers have offered the city the exact opposite of what we need, more luxury housing. They claiming that the increased supply will cause wealthier renters to move into the new housing, which will open up space in market rate housing for middle income renters to move in which should open up space in low income housing for the poor to move in. The housing will trickle down.
The developers will first claim that this trickle down housing policy will lower rents, until anyone interrogates it. Under scrutiny, they eventually concede that it only slows down the rate of increasing rent. Not a solution. Barely a stop gap. But any alternative has been foreclosed upon. So in our thirst for affordable housing developers offer to piss in our mouths. And the YIMBYs fucking beg for more. Piss in our mouths, we are thirsty.
Building new luxury housing doesn’t help rent rates for the working class because luxury housing and regular housing are two different markets. It might make older luxury housing more affordable for those at the lower ends of that market but it’s not going to turn a decade old luxury development into affordable housing. Also, a lot of luxury housing exists as co-ops/condos and thus are bought up by speculators looking for a store of wealth and thus do nothing to reduce rents. And this doesn’t even address the problem that landlords have incentive to make their buildings look as valuable as possible to other landlords they could sell the building to, and that means minimizing lower income tenants. That’s why a lot of buildings in NYC that got subsidies in exchange for settling aside portions of the building as affordable housing make the affordable housing tenants go through a different entrance. They don’t want the building to look like it has the “rabble” living in it.
fwiw the "luxury housing" in my city is most often private luxury dormitories which solely exist to scam the richest university students. Rich kids have their parents pay full downtown-1-bedroom prices for only a bed in some 2-4 bedroom apt. Almost certainly unlawful, but hey "it's legal in California so why not here?" That said, those students are probably the only demographic that will actually fill apartments at that price range.