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The two hardest and most unforgiving facts in housing policy are that it actually costs a lot of money to build new homes and that the rents that poor people can afford are not enough to pay off the cost of construction.

Weirdly, we understand this intuitively with cars and understand that buying used is the solution. Nobody demands that car companies manufacture a quota of "affordable" models

Houses don't increase in value without substantial time and money spent. It's the underlying land value that goes up faster than the structure goes down.

They aren’t realistically separable though.

Oh but sometimes they do! Remember what happened to used car prices in the aftermath of Covid? We effectively stopped new car construction for months in 2020 and then with a shift to suburban/exurban living demand for cars spikes. New supply failed to meet demand so used car prices spiked.

That's called the exception that proves the rule.

Yup. It was a great, real life example of what we know from microeconomics. When you reduce the supply of a good you also increase the price of close substitutes.

They would if we regulated cars like housing and strictly limited the number of desirable cars that can be built.