See San Francisco. Also generally anywhere else where prices are rising and developers can’t develop and yet there are a lot of affordable housing policies. CA as a whole has mismanaged this so badly they have a net migration outflow.

Also removing other housing restrictions that ostensibly were put in there by constituents is a valid reason for constituents to oppose AH. They get called NIMBYs for this but if the local populace wanted more high density development then the density limits wouldnt be there to be excepted by AH

Affordable housing in a vacuum disincentivizes development and results in worse affordability.

Affordable housing used as an incentive or way to overcome other barriers to housing (density limits, height limits, zoning etc) that makes the market more “free” net is will produce more development.

You don’t need it for development but it can be used effectively depending on other policies. As with all things it depends on what policy makers are optimizing for. These are all tradeoffs. But affordable by itself all else equal limits developer upside and incentives less development meaning less supply and higher prices.

In this case affordable housing nets out as a way to overcome policy barriers to market rate housing. So it actually makes the market freer.

Many other implementations of affordable housing further raise the barrier and thus even if any is built it doesn’t help widespread housing affordability issues.

Rent control is just another flavor of housing affordability policy that often (always?) backfires.

Crime, social peace, and economic opportunity are very linked. A lot of house prices in urban areas are wildly distributed and often the increase cost is to buy distance and safety (often just a couple blocks) from high crime areas.

Its wild how the solution to housing costs is really just:

Build more housing. Keep law and order.

No it doesn’t need to be “affordable”. Yes rent control is a terrible idea.

Just build more housing.

Note: that the US already has plenty of housing and housing costs basically go up in areas of low crime relative to economic opportunity. If you build housing, but allow crime to rise, you have wasted everybody’s time.