Why shouldn't housing, like any other goods, be as cheap as possible for as high quality as possible?

Of course, many.

To be sure, are you asking if society does better when its people are homed vs. homeless? Because that seems like a question with an obviously-yes answer.

> The moment the government has ever step into controlling production of food, we’ve only seen subpar performance and starving people as a consequence.

You might be surprised to hear how heavily government directed and subsidized food production is in the USA.

This is nonsense. Agricultural subsidies are the largest item in the EU budget. Nobody is starving in Europe

I'm under the impression that more supply=lower rents, even if execution is not perfect, but I'm not an economist.

Not really? "The projects" are a consequence of a very specific approach to government housing construction.

There's an alternative approach which mirrors the public healthcare concept of "public option". Instead of restricting government housing to means tested individuals or specific low income populations, you develop a public competitor to drive prices down and to eat costs in regions where housing is needed but the economics just don't make sense yet.

i.e. the US Postal Service model. It works extraordinarily well as long as you don't repeatedly capture and handicap the org/agency (like has been done to the USPS). And even with the USPS despite being severely handicapped it still provides immense value by driving prices down while maintaining the essential service of last mile delivery.

A similar approach could be envisioned for a public construction agency.

There are multiple city and state housing facilities in my area that are perfectly fine. They are not huge or luxurious but they're safe, clean, and well maintained.

When the options ar homelessness or subsidized housing, subsidized housing is absolutely the best option, which is backed up by decades of data.

I’ve seen some housing projects around my city that are actually quite nice. They didn’t end up being shabby because they were built poorly. They were shabby because they were reserved for the very poor and, consequently, became extreme concentrations of poverty and crime. This makes people unwilling to invest in maintenance and continued improvement of their homes.

If the government just went on a building binge of housing to be sold at market rate, or even set an upper bound before qualifying to buy them at a middle class income, it’d work out fine. That’s basically how Singapore does it only they couple it with somewhat aggressive policies to encourage people to downsize their living situations once they’re empty nesting to free up family dwellings for people with families. We probably wouldn’t need to do that second part since we’re not a claustrophobic island, and could just count on natural turnover.