Those buildings are almost always rental apartments, so nobody has to buy them. The bigger force behind them is state housing law. California assigns every city unit targets it has to plan for; Huntington Beach's state-mandated allocation is on the order of 13,000 units. On land that is already largely built out, the only realistic way to hit a number like that is building vertically on the remaining infill lots, which is why dense projects cluster near major corridors. A portion of those units carry government-mandated affordable set-asides. In our view that is a small, distortive patch rather than a real fix for supply, and it does not change the underlying math much. The honest read is that these projects sit inside an unresolved fight between residents who do not want density near them and people who argue building more is the only path to affordability. Reasonable people land on both sides, which is why the battles keep replaying at the city level. If a specific proposal near you matters, the city's housing element and its state allocation numbers are public and worth reading before you form a view.