Here in the Netherlands we've had a supply shortage since WW2, which makes a supply shortage the status quo. There's no hidden conspiracy or grand government po

Here in the Netherlands we've had a supply shortage since WW2, which makes a supply shortage the status quo. There's no hidden conspiracy or grand government policy that causes it. There's multiple root causes but an overlooked one is the delayed supply shock effect of an economic downturn. During the crash years of 2008-2014, we pretty much stopped building. Because nobody was buying. This has created a backlog of a few 100K homes never built compared to what population growth would normally require. It is this backlog that creates a boom 10 years later where for a few years in a row homes appreciate by 15-20% per year. They always appreciate a little, but it is mostly these price spike events that makes homes unaffordable. So ideally, you keep building even during a downturn, but nobody can subsidize that. The budget would be eye-watering and would be coming at the time of budget cuts, not increases. We're already working on a new deficit. A lot of projects are stopped because due to the high interest rates, demand has crashed. Similarly, a lot of well intended policies have the exact opposite effect. We're more heavily taxing citizens renting out their second homes. As it then becomes barely profitable, they just sell it. Even less rental homes. We're heavily constraining investors that do big projects. Fair enough, we'll just not do the project then. We even went as far as to mandate some new homes to be exclusively built for particular professions, say a teacher. They need affordable homes close to the city. A builder looks at this and will simply build the same home elsewhere, and sell it for a 100K more. You can tweak taxes for newcomers on the market, giving them more budget to buy their first home. This makes houses more expensive, not cheaper. And I'm not even addressing the political realities of government and municipality budgets depending on tax revenue based on current valuations (or at least high valuations), or the fact that the voter majority is aging and this being part of their retirement. You can take somebody from GenZ and give them dictator powers and they still can't solve it, without the "solution" being worse than the problem. You can't fix this. You can tweak and improve, but you cannot truly move the needle.