“The city/county says, if you want to build here then X number of units can’t be more than Y dollars. You either accept or not. They have full control over what gets built. How do you fight that?”
You don’t build in that city/county.
“You don’t build in that city/county.”
There’s an entire ecology to being a builder. You have a lot of people you work with and can call. If you suddenly went somewhere else, none of that applies and a number of what I’ll call soft factors will combine to make building extremely difficult or impossible. Also, the way funding is linked it may not be possible to even get approval for a large project. Also, large projects are intimately connected with local politics. You simply can’t go where you want and build what you want without getting in bed with the local politicians. As a reporter I attended large builder events and present were politicians of every stripe. I could tell from conversations I overheard it was very much a I’ll-scratch-your-back-you’ll-scratch-mine type of thing. The simple solutions I’ve seen proposed on FR simply don’t exist in the real world.
Politicians back “affordable” housing because it gets them elected by people who have no idea what “affordable” actually means to them. Not backing “affordable” means not getting elected.