If you build a $5 million dollar house, and a multimillionaire buys it as their fourth house, this does not reduce housing costs for anyone.
If you build a thousand new apartments in Sri Lanka, this has no practical effect on the cost of housing in Colombia.
If a housing authority pays a contractor to build a dozen affordable, subsidized apartments, but the apartments are then discovered to be uninhabitable firetraps, the cost of housing can go up.
Authoritatively making sweeping generalizations not only ignores the edge cases, it often sets policy in ways that enable more of those edge cases.
> If you build a $5 million dollar house, and a multimillionaire buys it as their fourth house, this does not reduce housing costs for anyone.
That’s not necessarily true. If you build a $5m house where there was previously no house, and the multimillionaire buys it, then they’re not buying some other $4m house, and someone could buy that instead of something else, etc.
For this to work, you need a situation where building n houses does not create demand for approximately n houses.
If you build a thousand new apartments in Sri Lanka, this has no practical effect on the cost of housing in Colombia.
If a housing authority pays a contractor to build a dozen affordable, subsidized apartments, but the apartments are then discovered to be uninhabitable firetraps, the cost of housing can go up.
Authoritatively making sweeping generalizations not only ignores the edge cases, it often sets policy in ways that enable more of those edge cases.