[deadmik3]

isn't the point of things like rent control and affordable housing to specifically prevent people from paying more and pricing out people who want to live there?

[vorpalhex]

It comes down to this issue of whether or not more housing is available. In New York, there's effectively a finite cap on housing, so you can't just say "well buy somewhere else". Pricing caps and assistance programs make sense there, but those also come with less ability to control your neighborhood.

When there's tons of cheap housing available, then having small areas with expensive pricing isn't per se a problem (but could be an issue in context, say a small midwestern town excluding black people from buying houses by over-inflating prices.)

[x220]

>you can't just say "well buy somewhere else"

You can, for the most part, if you don't make it harder than it needs to be to build apartment complexes.

[vorpalhex]

You can't put 256GB of ram in your desktop and expect it to run faster.

You can't replace one house with 16 apartments and expect it to work as well.

Parking, noise, litter, etc. It's not fair for a developer to push their direct costs onto the neighborhood instead of eating it themselves.