What I believe you're referring to is NIMBYism. The belief seems to be that we can build our way out of this problem, often called YIMBYism. I believe YIMBYism is generally well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed.

YIMBYism is often used an excuse for rampant deregulation. I believe that private developers won't ever build our way out of this problem because that hurts profit. It takes the government as a major player to solve this problem. People will point to examples like Austin having declining rents as a direct result of supply but that doesn't really invalidate my criticism.

UK supermarkets used to engage in a practice called land banking [1]. Basically they would buy up land and do nothing with it. They were buying it to prevent competition. And if land kept going up in value there was no cost in doing it. Ultimately Aldi and Lidl came along and ate their lunch by building in less desirable but cheaper areas. But another consequence was that it restricted the supply of housing.

What YIMBY policy would prevent land banking (hoarding)? You need something and it's not even more deregulation. The cost of just holding land needs to be higher. You need some form of land value tax [2].

More than a decade ago, I remember hearing about "investors" buying up all the trailer parks and jacking up the rents (eg [3]). This is entirely parasitic behavior. Any form of ground rent on permanent structures like this should be somewhere between illegal and uneconomical. The land of the trailer parks should be co-owned by the residents, period.

This has a huge negative social cost too. Trailer parks are often the housing of last resort for many. Make it unaffordable and people end up living in cars and them ultimately the streets. So what have we achieved here other than padding the profit margins of investors? We've shifted that cost onto the government, which is just another wealth transfer from tax coffers to the wealthy.

Ten years ago, Xi Jinping quietly popped China's real estate bubble, which has been in decline ever since. He famous said [4] "Houses are for living, not for speculation". It's funny reading Western reporting on this because China's real estate recession is viewed as a negative when it's just a correction from intentional state policy.

That required government intervention in the housing market. This would never have happened with any set of incentives of private developers.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jun/26/tesco-hoard...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

[3]: https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/w...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...