The state builds them, shittons of them. See also: the City of Vienna and it's incredible housing situation.

I get incredibly annoyed when I read anglo hottakes on housing these days.

It's a solved problem in other parts of the world, but it doesn't fit the market ideology, so it gets ignored.

So, public housing is also a thing in the US. It has just never taken off at a large scale:

- The state does not own much land in US cities. So that means buying existing properties at great expense and demolishing/rebuilding at even greater expense.

- The "veto" ability for existing residents to oppose new projects in the US is incredibly strong. Even existing public housing residents will oppose new ones built near them.

- Construction costs are unnaturally high in the US for a variety of factors - municipal governments can't seem to get out of their own way when it comes to zoning requirements and etc.

For California, they ended up paying $1 million dollars per unit! Much more than they would have just buying existing properties for individuals.

I don't think it's a problem of "market ideology". I think it's easier to prescribe it as a general policy failure. Vienna has a set of favorable circumstances that are not easily duplicated to other urban areas, and places like China can just ignore legal rights of their citizens to build whatever they want.

good luck convincing property owners that city is going to build 5000 units every year in their neighborhoods. How does vienna defang homeowners from being toxic and selfish.

As far as I know, it just ignores them. They can complain all they want, the city is within its rights to build on land it owns.