I'm sympathetic to all of these ideas, and I think we should really be talking more about housing on a national level, but there are a few main issues I see that all of the public funding proposals ignore:<p>a) Housing is, at the limit, a positional good.<p>b) Construction costs are crazy, e.g. <a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/04/26/construction-costs-killing-new-bay-area-housing.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/04/26/con...</a> and not just in the bay area, I spent a bunch of time looking this up with a focus on NYC and they were in the 400k+ price per unit range there.<p>c) Construction costs go up as density increases, particularly once you need to install an elevator.<p>d) NIMBYs/zoning/permitting costs.<p>As I see it, the insane costs associated with building new housing is why we're only getting "luxury" apartments - you just can't make any money because of the high costs.<p>So where does that leave us? IMO it means we need better transit, but at least for the NYC subway construction costs are insane, and we need a way to build things more cheaply.<p>I have my own pet idea in modular housing being promising for bringing down construction costs, but fundamentally it is an operational, not policy problem.<p>And I don't think anyone really has a solution for NIMBYism besides overriding them at a state level, which has not been very effective so far.