[wind0w]

> the only thing that makes financial sense to build is luxury apartment

Exactly! That's the problem with housing as a market commodity -- developers will only build luxury housing or slums. A deregulated housing market looks like this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slum#/media/File:Mumbai_03-20...

Affordable housing requires public investment, public housing. There is no other solution.

[nikanj]

Sure. I mean, you can sell pretty much any kind of car, as long as it fulfills all the safety regulations. That's why the free market only builds Lamborghinis and utter rust buckets.

Trust me, if developers could freely serve every sector of the market there was demand, without being choked by zoning, land supply, etc, we would see the whole housing range from the Toyotas to the Testarossas.

[maxsilver]

Cars can be a psuedo-free market, because you can buy a car built in Detroit, but drive it in Boston, and everything is fine. You can buy a car from Tokyo, and drive that in Boston and everything is fine. You can also choose not to buy a car, but instead buy a motorcycle, and everything is (mostly) fine.

You can't do that with housing. No amount of new zoning or new construction can solve that problem, because the land in every city is already fully monopolized.

Housing will never ever be a "competitive" "free" market. It can't be, because buyers don't have meaningful agency in their choices (for all but a few exceptions, everyone basically has to live pretty near their work/school/family), and buyers can't opt-out of the housing market (there are no reasonable alternatives except things like homelessness, which aren't reasonable).

[rmrfrmrf]

Looking forward to purchasing real estate imported from Japan.

[dodobirdlord]

It seems like you're invested in missing the point, but will you accept the analogy of restaurants? A wide variety of restaurants exist in most cities across a wide spectrum of prices. It's not a given that some 5-star French restaurant is necessarily the most economical use of a storefront everywhere. It might make more sense to build a Buffalo Wild Wings. But if you can only build a limited amount of housing, much less than what is demanded, you'll only be selling to the highest bidder anyway, and since you know you can fill your whole building with your target customer type you might as well build exactly what they want because then you can charge a bit more for it.

[ch4s3]

Mumbai is extremely regulated, and much of the city has strict height limits. The slums there are mostly built illegally.