Is social housing really a good focus in extremely valuable real estate areas? Many places in the world are too expensive for most people to live in. Places like Vancouver and Toronto though, have a skyline of cranes building high rises to meet the demand. Social housing in high prices areas is manipulation that doesn't help many people. Letting the demand be met on the high end and shooting for social housing in more reasonable areas makes much more sense. I'm not convinced that market distortion in pricey areas helps anyone when people who are in danger of not having basic needs met need something accessible, not a multi-year process to win a cheaper place in a hot area.
Vienna is consistently ranked among the best cities in the world and has a high degree of social housing. And the same is true for places like Singapore and cities across the more social democratic parts of Europe.
If anything, the availability of social housing puts a downward pressure on prices and makes sure that people who perform many of the vital functions of running cities (healthcare workers, teachers, infrastructure maintenance workers) can afford to live there. Leaving something as necessary to survival as housing open to a highly financialized, global capital markets has proven time and time again to be a rolling disaster of homelessness and unaffordability.
What Singapore does is not at all the same as what is talked about here. Singapore isn't building housing in the hottest areas and selling it for cheaper than a market rate, they are building their own housing and selling it at market rates to Singaporean citizens with restrictions.
San Francisco forces developers to have certain amounts of units that get rented out for half the normal price as a stipulation for building. This is directly counter to market prices in desirable areas.
