Ann Arbor has an increasingly severe housing shortage. People with the lowest income see the largest impact of the shortage, but, as everyone's noticed by now, we're pricing out a lot of middle-income people as well.
The way out of this is to build more housing.
The new housing will be expensive. But that's OK--it still increases the number of units, which frees up older units for everyone else.
Sometimes people will say things like "Ann Arbor doesn't need new housing, it needs new *affordable* housing"! But that's not the way things work.
It always costs more to live in new construction.
That rule has one small but important exception: what governments call "affordable housing", which is means-tested--if you want to live in affordable housing, you'll have to apply and turn over your tax returns and bank statements. (And, unfortunately, get on a long wait list). Ann Arbor is making important progress towards building more affordable housing. We should do a lot more. But there is no realistic scenario where that makes up more than a small fraction of our new housing. Market-rate housing is where the big numbers are.
Anyway, there's no reason we have to choose one or the other! We should do as much of both as we can.