It's amazing how much we let city governments get away with zoning restrictions. Almost universally city governments will say they're "pro affordable housing", yet they will never budge an inch and give away some of their zoning power.
https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-h....
Actually, it's probably harder to build low cost units because bankers prefer a higher upside and psychologically tend to identify more with wealth than poverty...I mean people usually don't go into banking to alleviate poverty, misery, and suffering...although I have known bankers and they were all pretty decent people. It's just that their day to day work was serving wealth.
Of course developers are going to build for what generates the most revenue.
I recently became a home-owner, and while I live in a place that is undeniably in a housing crisis, I don't want 'them' to make drastic changes to housing policy now that I have most of my net worth tied into a home. From a clinically logical perspective, I fully support drastic changes that would make building more and denser housing MUCH easier. Just -ya know- not so close to my back yard.
Preventing building a 50 stories skyscraper in the middle though? Obviously not gonna happen, but if it did, can the infrastructure, the sewers, the streets take it? Is it just going to make thousands of people miserable, can the schools take it? Obviously this is a silly extreme case, but there's plenty of borderline situations that aren't super cut and dry.
Having SOME zoning in certain areas makes sense. Of course the ones discussed in this case aren't for these reasons, and they're probably bad. There's still a lot of subtleties to that problem space.