This is the lie told everywhere that the only real solution to affordable housing is gov spending billions on a small set of tenement buildings, that take a decade to build, and are 3x over budget. Instead of reforming municipal policies to reduce rampant NIMBYist roadblocks, rethinking zoning from the ground up, streamlining regulations to make it easier to follow and enforce the rules safely, etc etc.

None of those things require billions of dollars to be committed. Just heart, communication skills, and charisma. There's a mountain of capital and regular people ready to build new housing, lack of capital, or will, or lack of demand to build has never been the problem. To discover the root problem requires asking why it's so rare/expensive despite that reality and why it's so harder today than it was 100yrs ago.