[xyzelement]

// If only politicians had an iota of strategy

Strategy requires a goal. Naively your goal might be to house more people.

NYC tried that with lots of projects built in the mid 20th century. True it provided apartments for a number of people during that time. However the projects were a terrible dangerous place to grown-up and many who grew up in them weren't able to enter mainstream society (and thus then subsequent generation requires even more such housing)

Meanwhile the areas near these projects are also dangerous and blighted - doing that at scale would condemn the entire downtown and send the city into a tax death spiral.