Comment by appreciatorBus

When housing is scarce, all housing, even 100 year old dumps, will sell or rent at luxury prices.

No one is building apartments made of solid gold or concrete mixed with diamonds. They are building thoroughly ordinary buildings of concrete, wood and drywall. They fetch "luxury" prices & rents because for each one that exists, there are 40 ppl trying to live where, so they raise the price or rent to capture the riches of the 40, despite there being nothing particularly special or expensive about the physical structure.

You can do this with non-profit/govt/social/public housing too - if there isn't enough of it, every unit will require a "luxury" of time to wait for it to become available, even if the nominal price or rent is affordable.