Every study that's been tried says that empty houses are overstated. I'm all for the socialist approach of taxpayer-funded government builders, but fundamentally you can't escape the actual cost of manpower and materials and wasted time caused by municipal barriers to housing.

Like, it looks like there's a zillion things under construction, but those are late in the massive lead-time of building. People inside the homebuilding industry say that the start of the pipeline has nothing coming, so in like 5 years we're going to be right back to "everything is expensive and nothing is under construction to solve that problem". And the reason for that is costs - the same costs that a government builder would face. Municipalities sucking up the productive effort into fees and obstructionism and delay.