Want to solve your city's housing crisis? Simple - build more houses, any sort of houses

So much angst is being expended on trying to solve London's (and other places too - Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester and so forth) housing problems. It seems that the solution is rather simpler than all the think tanks, planners and mayors suggest:

It is not some magical mystery as to why Sydney's rental prices are declining. And it's certainly not due to rent control. It's because Sydney's seeing a building boom. The size of Sydney's apartment market has doubled in two years, and landlords have had to drop rents in order to get tenants.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported over the weekend that the city has seen more than 30,800 multi-unit dwellings built last year, a record for any Australian city. And there still are nearly 200,000 additional dwellings in various stages of development. The city is seeing a glut driven by investors. And those investors are now leasing out the apartments.

So it's easy. Allow more development. And to do this you have to encourage speculative investment:

About half of Australia’s apartments are likely to be owned by an investor. And lending to investors in NSW, rose sharply a few years ago, fuelling a real estate investment boom that created this massive rise in rental stock, Ms Owen said.

There are risks here but primarily (as connoisseurs of Spain's 2000s housing boom will know) for the investor not the renter or the taxpayer. So why is it that governments are stopping things that drive this investment (foreign buyers, Airbnb, liberal planning regulations) and then complaining that there aren't enough houses? Or, worse, blaming high rents on those investors - look at Barcelona's Airbnb protests - rather than on the failings of mayors and local councillors.

I appreciate that mayors want to placate the NIMBYs (remembering that current residents have votes while possible future residents don't) but if, in doing so, those mayors propose counterproductive ideas like rent controls, foreign investment controls and height limits then they should be bundled out of office for being dangerous fools.

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