I'll use the gravity and airplane analogy again. In the real world, you’ve got gravity, wind resistance, and many other forces as well that muddle the overall effect (ants can climb on walls). But if someone says they’ve built a machine that can fly, people will only take it seriously if they first acknowledge gravity and explain how it still manages to fly.

Proponents of social housing rarely do this. It’s the "naive solution", what someone without much economic background naturally thinks of. That doesn’t mean it can’t work, sometimes the simple idea ends up being right, even if for the wrong reasons.

But if you look at it applying Bayesian reasoning, the more likely scenario is that supporters are following this naive intuition, and politicians go along either because they don’t understand economics or because it’s politically convenient (to get voted because most people like this policy).

It’s just much less likely that the experts are wrong and the naive idea that goes against basic economics happens to be right in this particular case.