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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

Cars don't appreciate in value like houses do.

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.

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.

But to increase the supply of housing, builders need new materials, so the comparison to used cars doesn't seem relevant.

Existing home sales outnumbered new home sales by around 6-1 in the US For cars it was 1 new car for every roughly 2.3 used cars It’s not a perfect analogy, nothing is, but it’s illustrative