"Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices." True if it's the government building the houses, otherwise you hit a point where construction margins tank well before market saturation is reached. In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).

That may be true in a very local area, but if you build something really nice in an area that wasn't very nice, the units that used to be mid are now near the bottom and have to lower their prices.

> In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).

This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up.

Social housing builders are good for many reasons, 1) they provide competition to the public market, and when efficient don't need to return profit to shareholders so provide a very good competitor in places like Finland and Singapore, 2) social housing builders smooth out the business cycle, because new housing is needed just as much when at the downturn of the business cycle as at the top, so it greatly helps provide stable employment and a stable workforce for housing construction, greatly improving housing.

But the idea that new idea drives up housing prices in any way is, at best, a fiction. It's mostly a lie from landlords and homeowners to try to justify their continued extraction of profits from their idleness.

You’re saying that prices are bounded by construction costs.

Sure, as with every other good.

But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.