Market-rate, as a term, just means that it’s governed by supply and demand and not externally subsidized. The rest of the text describes how loosening zoning laws spurs housing construction which helps with affordability.

The idea is that, if enough housing gets built, the market rate lowers. For instance, my city Montreal has a lower market rate than, say, San Francisco or Vancouver. Why? Higher supply and lower demand.

Or an even better example: Tokyo. Most populous metro area in the world, but it’s also stupidly easy to build apartments and other dense housing by right. The result? The “market rate” for housing in Tokyo is remarkably affordable, even to a minimum wage earner:

Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area.

…

In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. Instead of allowing the people who live in a neighborhood to prevent others from living there, Japan has shifted decision-making to the representatives of the entire population, allowing a better balance between the interests of current residents and of everyone who might live in that place. Small apartment buildings can be built almost anywhere, and larger structures are allowed on a vast majority of urban land. Even in areas designated for offices, homes are permitted. After Tokyo’s office market crashed in the 1990s, developers started building apartments on land they had purchased for office buildings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html

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

Except that any housing, market-rate or not, does empirically help with affordability:

But what happens to rents after new homes are built? Studies show that adding new housing supply slows rent growth—both nearby and regionally—by reducing competition among tenants for each available home and thereby lowering displacement pressures. This finding from the four jurisdictions examined supports the argument that updating zoning to allow more housing can improve affordability.

In all four places studied, the vast majority of new housing has been market rate, meaning rents are based on factors such as demand and prevailing construction and operating costs. Most rental homes do not receive government subsidies, though when available, subsidies allow rents to be set lower for households that earn only a certain portion of the area median income.

Policymakers have debated whether allowing more market-rate—meaning unsubsidized—housing improves overall affordability in a market. The evidence indicates that adding more housing of any kind helps slow rent growth. And the Pew analysis of these four places is consistent with that finding. (See Table 1.)

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/04/17/more-flexible-zoning-helps-contain-rising-rents

We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease rents in nearby units by about 6% relative to units slightly farther away or near sites developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. We show that new buildings absorb many high-income households and increase the local housing stock substantially. If buildings improve nearby amenities, the effect is not large enough to increase rents. Amenity improvements could be limited because most buildings go into already-changing neighborhoods or buildings could create disamenities such as congestion.

https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/105/2/359/100977/Local-Effects-of-Large-New-Apartment-Buildings-in?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Plus, it’s just a weird argument to be making that we should be just forcefully shipping homeless people out to Bumretch, Kentucky to live in a dilapidated shed. No jobs, no opportunities.

The places where housing is needed are cities. The places with jobs and opportunities. And the cities that are most expensive are the ones with the absolute lowest vacancy rates.

Additionally, why would we actually want zero vacancies? Vacancies are good for the average person. Vacancies mean you can shop for a new home or apartment without finding someone to swap units with you. Vacancies mean your landlord has a credible threat of vacancy if they demand too much in rent. Vacancies give power to renters and buyers. Why would any left-leaning person willingly – much less gleefully – take bargaining power away from renters and give it to landlords on a silver platter?

At this point, I’m half-convinced this “vacancy truth” rhetoric the person you’re responding to is espousing is a psyop by landlords to protect their economic interests.

The thing is that red tape also applies to public housing, too. Those incentives are for municipalities to remove local land use policies such as SFH zoning, parking minimums (like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver all removed recently), policies which would apply to public housing projects, too. Removing these NIMBY land use policies is a necessary pre-condition for both public and private housing.

Depriving them of the chance to continue to vote for him would be undemocratic

Oh man, the irony. Do they not remember that China doesn’t even pretend to have national popular elections? The people can’t vote for Xi even if they actually wanted to!

I’m not even communist — rather a Georgist myself — but it’s so fun to portray THEM as the conservative reactionaries and paid shills. They literally don’t even know how to properly respond. The best part is everything I said is 100% true: tankies ARE in fact errand boys for the imperial elites. Or at the very least useful idiots.

This is the propaganda I can get behind.

And with trolleybuses powered on a renewable grid, it’s zero gallons!