It depends where you are, in the UK we have american HOA level regulations on house building, your permission can be denied because of the shade of your roof tiles or because the sheds are using the wrong shape of corrugated roofing sheets. Of course the problem is more that these things are very ill defined and the local planning office gets incredibly petty with the power they’re given.

So you’ll be interested in California’s solution. If the project contains enough low income housing and the city won’t approve it the developer can just build it anyways. All the safety standards are still required, they just can’t be stopped from building it. And if they build it within a certain distance of a light rail stop they don’t have to include parking.

At first, yes, but eventually prices come down when there’s a glut of supply

I’ve never met a person actually making that argument, though. I’m certainly not advocating removing building safety codes, only the NIMBY bullshit like exclusionary zoning that was literally designed to keep people of color far away from white people. Even the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia page for the YIMBY movement say it’s primarily in favor of removing things like exclusionary zoning and parking minimums:

The YIMBY movement (short for “yes in my back yard”) is a pro-housing movement[1] that focuses on encouraging new housing, opposing density limits (such as single-family zoning), and supporting public transportation. It stands in opposition to NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) tendencies, which generally oppose most forms of urban development in order to maintain the status quo.[2][3][4]

As a popular organized movement in the United States, the YIMBY movement began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s amid a housing affordability crisis and has subsequently become a potent political force in local, state, and national[5][6] politics in the United States.[7][8]

The YIMBY position supports increasing the supply of housing within cities where housing costs have escalated to unaffordable levels.[9] They have also supported infrastructure development projects like improving housing development[10] (especially for affordable housing[11] or trailer parks[12]), high-speed rail lines,[13][4] homeless shelters,[14] day cares,[15] schools, universities and colleges,[16][17] bike lanes, and pedestrian safety infrastructure.[3] YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing.[18][19][20] Cities that have adopted YIMBY policies have seen substantial increase in housing supply and reductions in rent.[21]

The YIMBY movement has supporters across the political spectrum, including left-leaning adherents who believe housing production is a social justice issue, free-market libertarian proponents who think the supply of housing should not be regulated by the government, and environmentalists who believe land use reform will slow down exurban development into natural areas.[22] Some YIMBYs also support efforts to shape growth in the public interest such as transit-oriented development,[23][24] green construction,[25] or expanding the role of public housing. YIMBYs argue cities can be made increasingly affordable and accessible by building more infill housing,[26][27][28]: 1  and that greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by denser cities.[29]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY

When you say “doing the former” what specifically do mean?

Empirically, building more housing does lower the cost of rent. See Austin for an example. But yeah there is more that could be done for sure.

I need you to learn about the California city of Berkeley, where it is illegal to build more housing because it might cast too much shade and disrupt your neighbor’s hobbyist tomato garden.

You probably read that and thought I was exaggerating for effect. I am not.

…keep building legal and easy housing. Megacorps and oligarchs get crushed when the bubble pops underneath them.

EVERY BUILDING project in my city is upscale rich housing.

This is myopic thinking. We all live in one big housing market. If you don’t have enough houses built, it doesn’t provide housing for the working class. You just end up with multi-millionaires living in tiny homes.

When you restrict the ability of builders to build new homes, they focus on maximizing the profit of the few homes they can make. We had cheap housing in the US in eras where we made it possible for builders to build vast numbers of housing on a colossal scale. That way you can really harness economies of scale and drive down the price tremendously.

There are two ways to make money by making something. You can either make high-margin luxury goods, or you can make vast numbers of low-margin affordable goods. Our current restrictions on home buildings encourage developer to take the former path, when we want to encourage them to take the latter.

True as it may be that there are more vacant homes than there are homeless people in America, the expression misses the forest for the trees. In many cases, those homes are vacant for a reason – they may be located in places like dying rural villages, or declining Rust Belt manufacturing towns where the local economy is severely depressed and there’s no work to be had for residents. They may also be severely dilapidated and unsafe to live in. Solving the housing crisis isn’t as simple as just assigning existing vacant homes to people who don’t have them – housing needs to be in the right place, and of decent quality, too, or else it’s not doing any good.