I agree with your intentions but not the mechanism. New apartments are generally going to be expensive because they’re new and automatically more desirable than similar-sized existing housing stock. Income subsidized units in buildings like the Marlow and Juniper are actually pretty laughable solutions to affordable housing. They’re always outrageously expensive for people who actually meet the income limits, and there is always some tiny number of affordable units allocated to check a box. A much better solution for affordable housing is simply to let builders build more and denser housing. And Marlow and Juniper are examples of builders doing exactly that. Even if they stay top end for a while, their construction will increase supply and lower the prices of the rest of the apartment housing stock. Meanwhile many neighborhoods in Columbia fight hard against this kind of dense construction even though it was Rouse’s vision to mix more dense and less dense housing together. Generally it’s all these building restrictions that have pushed up prices to ridiculous levels—for the most extreme examples, see Silicon Valley.