I agree that the current "housing crisis" is an artifact of politics. But I disagree with everything else posited here. This opinion piece is pandering our profession's outmoded anti-capitalist biases by serving up the old fallacies of socialist "economics" topped up with conspiracy theory.

I suggest we have to look for solutions in the opposite direction. Stop the heavy-handed political interference in the housing and real estate markets, scrap standards to let entrepreneurial creativity discover and deliver towards our real (rather than politically prescribed) divers needs.

Stop all the "affordability" impositions which benefit the politicians’ pandered pet groups with lobbying power (mostly already over-cushioned and privileged public sector "key workers") by making the new housing stock less affordable for everybody else.