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Supply and demand is pretty basic, apolitical economics, but it is true that if there's a shortage, it's going to hit hardest those with less money.
Which means we should aim for an abundance of necessary goods like housing and food. We should do that by building both more market rate and subsidized housing in the places people want to live.
Trickle down is a political label used by people to attack policies they don't like by claiming a policy helps wealthier people at the expense of less wealthy people.
But that's not the mechanism we're talking about with housing at all.
What we're talking about with housing is that there are 5 houses and 10 people, and in that kind of scarcity environment, 5 people are going to lose out. In most cases, it's going to be the 5 people with the least money.
But even if you do a lottery or something else, 5 people are still going to lose out and that's bad.
Build more housing.
As the wikipedia article says, "trickle down" is a political term. Any proposed tax policy deserves real debate on the pros and cons - using political terms like "trickle down" (or for that matter terms like "tax and spend", "bleeding heart" etc.) are not done to help advance the debate. They aren't trying to advance an argument - they are trying to shut down debate. People who use political terms like that are usually trying to either poison the well or are creating a straw man.
Is letting them run hog wild through our cities replacing neighborhoods with luxury high rises for foreign investors any different?
Obviously we could always use more updated housing in urban areas, but you are either stupid or acting like it when you pretend the argument is not about who should be building that housing and whether anyone should profit from owning it.
Uh... existing homeowners are the ones making bank hand over fist thanks to the housing shortage:
https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2021/03/16/who-benefits-f...
We bought our first house about seven years ago and are about to sell it. The house appreciated almost 75% over that span of time. We bought a new house in the same price range. I'm just transferring the appreciation of the the first house to the second house. But since it's a higher real dollar amount, I was able to put a much higher percentage down on the new house and get a better total cost of the loan as a result. I still have all of the gains I made, even if they're locked in equity in the house, and was able to leverage them for additional value in reduced interest paid. Because I had more equity from the first house, it also made it easier for me to outbid other bidders, because I didn't have the same debt-to-income constraints they did.
Even if the gains aren't liquid, homeowners gain at the expense of non-homeowners.
Need to pay for your child’s tuition? Start a business? Unexpected major expenses? You have a relatively cheap line of credit compared to every other option on the market.
That’s still wealth no matter how you slice it. And, not even that long ago, that was wealth people could access for almost nothing, who knows what the interest rate environment will be in 5 years.
Everyone knows that luxury means “new”, or at best, “shiny stainless steel appliances and quartz countertops”. The fact that it is new, and so has to comply with the most updated standards, is probably the most luxury aspect of all since materials and connections and whatnot have improved.
This designation of new and old is more important in the apartment market than house markets because apartments tend to get neglected by landlords, whereas houses either get updated or can be updated by the owner.
Also, in the case of houses, where a lot more money and due diligence is required, simply using luxury to describe them is insufficient, and not very useful to sell new housing developments.
It's a rhetorical device that carries no substance, whether it happens to be NIMBYs using it as a political weapon to demonize, or developers using it to sell a product.
However, I am going to focus criticism on NIMBYs when they are doing it, since they are the ones being dishonest and hypocritical when they only apply such labels to apartments. At least if a developer/agent was to try to sell a house, they'd try to find similar flowery language in order to market it, instead of only singling out apartments for that treatment in order to push their damaging political agenda.