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.
I can't tell you how many times articles quote the some local professor to say "the highest demand in our city is for luxury housing". When you look into the methodology, the difference between our top income tenants vs top rental units is slightly higher than the difference between bottom income tenants and bottom rental units. And of course the demand of a rich person to live in a nicer apartment is one-to-one with the demand of a poor person to not be homeless. A better metric would multiply the differences by the vacancy rates of the units in those brackets.