Rail-powered Rent-seeking

From City AM:
Housebuilders have added to the call for the government to firmly commit to Crossrail 2, saying it will be crucial in helping address the capital's housing crisis.
Some 66 homebuilding and property figures, including representatives from Taylor Wimpey, Berkeley, British Land and Derwent have written to the government saying the infrastructure project will help unlock new homes, as well as commercial space...
In the letter, the homebuilding and property representatives, argue the new railway will transform transport capacity, as well as connectivity, for underdeveloped areas of the capital like the Upper Lea Valley. Housebuilders said it would give them the certainty to accelerate the development of up to 200,000 new homes.
Tony Pidgley, chairman at Berkeley, said: “Crossrail 2 is a fantastic opportunity to improve London and the South East’s infrastructure, and will help us build the homes this region desperately needs."
Could they be any more blatant when they are holding out the begging bowl?
City AM makes the fundamental error of believing its own propaganda, it is so hard-core Home-Owner-Ist that it somehow thinks this is normal, that the point of spending taxpayers' money on railways etc is to generate bigger profits for land bankers.
The other point being that all these lovely new roads and railways will do naff-all do "address the capital's housing crisis", it will merely stoke demand and attract yet more people/businesses and rents and prices will not fall in the slightest, they might even go up on the whole. To put it crudely, if they really wanted to do something about "affordability", they could just shut down London transport and rents and prices would plummet.