Studies show pretty conclusively at this point that increasingly housing supply, regardless of how it’s done, leads to decreased pressure on housing costs.

The city is welcome to build public housing if it wants, but until it gets around to that, the least it can do is not make it literally illegal for anyone else to build meaningfully dense housing.

Just to give an obvious example, it will obviously benefit the people who wind up living in the housing that is built. They’ll likely be relatively wealthy, but you can add some incentives and subsidies for some affordable units, and even despite that, a wealthy person moving into a new apartment means that person isn’t moving into some other unit, reducing demand on it and enabling lower prices across the market.