Okay, hear me out here. Maybe we should stop treating housing as a commodity and allowing companies and individuals to accumulate large property “portfolios”?

Because this is the fucking problem; homes are not commodities to hold in a portfolio, they’re homes for people to live in.

The UK seems to have this as a recurring problem, we are the only modern economy that has a fully privatised water supply, something which is essential for human existence. Housing is a basic right, yet we allow massive profit to take priority over that.

Less of a housing issue, more of a cost of living issue.

A world beating housing crisis you say?

Canada?

My rent is 60% of my income. That along with the cost of living crisis, I'm stuck in a debt spiral.

Something tells me the English people who said that haven't been to Canada.

But renters on Wednesday night issued their own warning that “lots of expensive market-rate housing won’t bring housing costs down to affordable levels for the millions of people trapped in poverty by sky-high rents”.

Sure it will. Housing price is a function of supply and demand, like everything else. If you don't have enough supply of housing in London for people who want to live in London, then what happens is that housing prices rise until sufficient people are priced out.

If a developer builds new housing, then someone is going to live in it. If that person is living in that housing, then they aren't living in some other housing in London, which will make that housing more-affordable.

But what if a developer only builds luxury housing and nobody wants to live in it?

A developer has a pretty strong incentive not to build something that nobody actually wants, so that's unlikely to be a serious problem -- their incentive is not to do this. But, sure, assume that happens. Then that developer is going to need to recoup what they can by selling the development for what they can, even at a loss. The parties who invested in that development will wind up covering some of the cost of buying housing for people in London.

What's at issue isn't "fancy housing" or "not-fancy housing". It's the quantity of housing. Build more of whatever type of housing, and the price of housing will drop.

As long as one can profitably build housing -- the price of land and the price of construction and a reasonable return is lower than the price of housing -- developers have every incentive to build. They only won't build if they aren't allowed to do so.

Removing or relaxing London's height restrictions might be a good place to start.

https://archive.ph/jRQIm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY_movement

This is the best summary I could come up with:

About a quarter of private renters in the UK are also “overburdened” by housing costs – spending more than 40% of income, compared with just 9% in France and 5% in Germany, according to OECD data.

Labour has said it might release greenbelt for building when it is “dilapidated, neglected scrubland” and will “put social and genuinely affordable housing at the very heart of our plans to jump-start the housebuilding industry”.

Stewart Baseley, the executive chair of the HBF said the figures are “a wake-up call, demonstrating the urgent need to act now to prevent us falling even further behind”.

The study found the UK has the lowest number of homes built since 1980 of any of Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.

The construction industry has been frustrated by the government’s stop-start approach to planning reforms, as it has weighed the need for more building against opposition from voters in Tory constituencies concerned about over-development.

By contrast the share of the population living with leaking roofs, damp or rot in Poland was 6% and 12% in Germany, figures from Eurostat show.

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