Additionally, the Vienna housing that this article touched on is a way deeper rabbit hole that is absolutely worth looking into. They have a completely different housing paradigm than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
In general, the Vienna model is very difficult to copy without being in extreme conditions: https://www.threads.com/@__smiz/post/Cxpz28CIkT6
The single lever he points out is itself a ton of local, regional, and federal regulations and laws that all need modernizing or abolishing, which is far from a simple, single lever at all.
But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist".
Nathan J. Robinson actually said the quiet part out loud a couple years ago, when he wrote in Current Affairs (a relatively high-profile American leftist periodical) a long defense of suburban NIMBYism.
"It's not the permits, it's the demand shock" (the last image in the blog post). The "demand shock", was the economy growing...quickly. And that statement is left hanging in the air like we're supposed to do something about it.
The economic growth is a good thing, we should have a housing system that reacts to it like surge pricing but instead we get a lot of hand-wringing then rezoning 5-10 years too late, so instead of temporary surge pricing, we get permanent ultra-heavy-high-surge pricing.
The housing claims in the book are basically unfalsifiable as written. It might be a straw man, but at least it’s a concrete result.
Worth adding that "public housing" isn't the only or even the most common form of subsidized housing. There's no Faircloth limit at all to public-private subsidized housing with AMI-calibrated eligibility and rent, and that's a much more common form of subsidized housing than a "housing project". But it can't get built in meaningful numbers either, because it's simply too expensive.