There's another way it wouldn't work: if the pent-up demand is so large that it would take an impractical number of units to make any dent in the non-luxury market price. It's possible that this is the case: I read about one economic study that claimed that in SF today it would take about 100,000 new units before prices started falling, which is a pretty impractical number. (Sorry, I don't have a citation at the moment but I can try to find it later.)