Yes, housing can be cheaper
Land in Vancouver is scarce and expensive, but we can build more apartments
A discussion on Reddit:
They should be making policies that will result in housing prices going down, but that's a losing political strategy. People are already mad, they'll be even more so if their house can't sell for as much.
In Vancouver, I think land prices will stay high (with the ocean and the mountains, we simply don't have that much land), which means that for somebody in a detached house, it's probably not going to go down. But there's no reason for apartments in Vancouver to be so super-scarce and expensive - we should build a lot more, bringing down prices and rents. As recently as 2013, people were saying that there were too many condos, so prices had been flat for the previous five years.
Townhouses and multiplexes will be somewhere in between. Allowing four-plexes instead of just a detached house means that there'll be a lot more of them, but how affordable they can be is limited by the amount of land that they use.
A couple examples of more supply putting downward pressure on prices and rents:
Austin is building so many apartments that rents dropped 12% in the year to December 2023.
If we build a lot more apartments in Vancouver, how livable will they be? How European cities make livable family-size apartments - the size of a modest single-detached house, but on one floor.