Do I get to demand affordable housing overlooking Central Park in NYC? Beachside in Malibu?
If you want large incentive for development at scale you need to allow developers to make fat margins or else you wont get too many of them. Yes you can use affordable housing to do that. Eg: in the article they got higher density and exceptions (aka “fat stacks”) for building affordable housing units.
This is all policy tradeoffs at the end of the day. Eg: a tent is not “housing”, why? Because of reasonable policy. Same thing with housing codes etc. All directionally wise/good. But at the same time you can have bad affordable housing policy.
I do think housing is elastic and a cities policies around that elasticity determines if they will thrive or stagnate.