This is why I groan when people talk about, say, how the government needs to "incentivize" increased building volume in order to solve the housing crisis. If yo

This is why I groan when people talk about, say, how the government needs to "incentivize" increased building volume in order to solve the housing crisis. If you accept the argument that there's a shortage of physical units (and not just a shortage of affordable units that haven't been converted to rentals, or just simply kept off the market)... the real estate market is never going to kneecap itself. No matter how much money we give them. The government needs to start building houses. Directly. Whatever loss is incurred will pale in comparison to the costs (social and otherwise) of another few decades of paying private corporations not to solve the problem. We REALLY should have learned our lesson after what happened with the broadband rollout in the early 2000s.