I really dislike the use of the qualification &quot;luxury&quot; for land developers. People constantly complain about how ridiculously expensive the bare minimum housing is getting in high demand areas, but endlessly complain that &quot;new luxury apartments&quot; aren&#x27;t going to solve the problem.<p>I think that this is just a bias that is blinding people to the inherent contradiction. The reason that shithole apartments become so expensive is because there are people with the money to spend who &quot;need&quot; (i.e. work in the area) that apartment. It has nothing to do with construction or maintenance costs, just demand. Even the &quot;luxury&quot; apartments have inflated prices compared to their material values.  Which means that there is a lot of room to move up.<p>Basically what I&#x27;m saying is that people need to stop complaining about the &quot;type&quot; of housing. If someone builds 50,000 cubicle apartments or 50,000 luxury flats in a high demand area, your shithole apartment&#x27;s value&#x2F;rent is going to change the exact same amount.  Because there is plenty of room for the people generating the demand to &quot;afford&quot; better (in strict material&#x2F;construction terms). It shouldn&#x27;t matter to anyone who isn&#x27;t already in the mid-range of units to begin with (i.e. people complaining about the rent on their 400sqft hole in the wall). The real issue is that these places are &quot;only&quot; building 50k (or whatever the number) new units, when they actually need far more.<p>Maybe building cheaper (and therefore smaller) units could make allocating the area for this number of units more palatable, but that is still a secondary problem. This just runs into the issue that as much as people bitch about &quot;luxury&quot; condos, they want crappy high density ones nearby even less.