Why is greed so bad here? The problem isn’t greed it’s the demand in the face of the lack of supply.
Make other places more attractive or increase the supply available in this location.
Make other places more attractive or increase the supply available in this location.
Greed is bad in this situation because you can make more money of luxury apartments than those suitable for people who are somewhere between the poverty line and upper middle class. Hence new apartments in major cities tend to be more and more expensive to satisfy the demand of wealthier people. Greed is also bad when existing apartments are made much more expensive, thereby forcing senior citizens who have been living there for decades and who are barely able to afford the rent to basically leave town, family and friends.
Think of this like a domino effect: those earning $10M per year buy luxury residence, leaving their old house for those earning $1M, who in turn leave their own houses to those earning $500K, who leave their apartments for those earning $200k, and so on, and so on.
In the end everybody benefits from new housing being built, even if it's only luxury housing.
Also, increasing supply keeps prices down, thus decreasing profitability of buying houses as investment, causing larger share of apartments to be bought by people who actually plan to live in them.
EDIT: yes, this effect might not work as described if is limited to just one city, because there might be a lot of people wanting to move from elswhere. Or more precisely: it will work, eventually, but it would require much more housing to be built to meet the demand.
So what that leaves you with is disproportionate increase of demand and prices for smaller cheaper units.
Building luxury housing doesn't push prices lower on the bottom half of the housing spectrum, it just makes the top end higher. "Trickle down" housing takes way too long to be realized, while subsidized housing has a much stronger and immediate impact[0]
[0]https://www.urbandisplacement.org/sites/default/files/images...
This assumes that a) rents don't increase for the new residents (which is false) and b) people only move within a city and there's no high demand from people outside to move into the city (which is false too).