[someone123]

Yeah, actually low-rise and affordable housing are mutually exclusive in areas with significant land costs, which is probably a category the Quinpool area fits into.

If you have land costs of $5M and you insist on 50 units on 3 floors instead of 150 units on 9 floors you've tripled the land cost per unit and bumped it up to $100,000 minimum before any shovels even hit the ground.

Any subsidy spent to reduce this cost could be redirected more productively toward adding more units to an existing development. So you are effectively trading away affordable housing either way so other people who already have housing can live near shorter developments. Generally this is a terrible trade-off, and the only reason why it happens is that the people who want to cut back on housing development don't pay the high costs of their preferences. If we made people pay $50,000 each to make the development next door shorter few of them would do it.