One way the left tries to make housing affordable is by passing rent control laws that don't allow landlords to charge more than a certain amount.  When that amount is too low landlords can't afford to pay to maintain buildings or to pay the mortgage and taxes on their buildings and they foreclose.  That means they give up their property to the bank and no longer pay anything on the buildings.  Milton Friedman shows what happened in the South Bronx after rent control in the video below.

When this happens to landlords they stop building new buildings.  The result is that there are too few buildings.  When a lot of people compete for a few apartments those willing to pay the most will get the apartments and the price will go up.  That is the law of supply and demand.  So the left by passing rent control laws actually cause rents to go up!  The rent controlled apartments become broken down places where no one wants to live. 

There is danger that a lot of people are going to lose their apartments because landlords can't pay the costs in NYC as of Jan 2026.  Here is a video about this.

I know of rent controlled apartments which are not broken down.  They are in buildings where most of the apartments are not rent controlled.  In those cases the landlord can still make a profit. However, the more rent control there is, the less profit there is for the landlord and the less incentive to build new buildings.