Yes, but people keep voting for the party which doesn't want there to be social or affordable housing, and which wants to impoverish people in order to enrich corporations.
Not necessarily, when there's a system where you effectively get to choose between two options, you choose the one you dislike the least
Taking the topic in hand (PRS), the other choice is a bunch of financially illiterate people who believe (against all the past evidence) that (for example) rent controls are a good way of improving the quality of rented accommodation.
You mean distort the market.
The housing market is working exactly as a market works - it is anything but "broken" as some professional liars would have us believe. Demand is higher than the supply, therefore prices go up. Simples. "Help" in the form of some sort of subsidy to FTBs will do nothing except increase demand, and therefore drive prices higher.
I don't disagree at all with that.
And since you mention markets, there's plenty of evidence that free markets produce much better outcomes than centrally planned economies. In some cases there needs to be some control to avoid dominant parties from distorting it to their own ends, but in general a market will sort itself out.
With housing, I blame the Town and Country Planning Act of (IIRC) 1947 and it's subsequent versions. The primary purpose of the act is to introduce controls which distort the supply side of the market by restricting supply - and after several decades of such market restriction we are now reaping the result.
It was "interesting" to watch a series called "The Planners" a while ago on TV. I recall one case where a developer wanted to extend a village by building (IIRC) something like 100 houses on a green field site. One of the planners visited the site and met with objectors complaining that it would destroy the feel of the village. Every one of those protesters lived in a relatively modern house - ie something that was built as something they are now complaining about
And that's half the problem, pandering to the "I've got a nice house now, lets pull the ladder up and stop 'the wrong sort' being able to get theirs and spoil my view" types.
I took "provide" to mean "create", not offer. Private landlords cannot build developments of rental property. Governments can (local or central). Corporations can.
Really ? Governments (local or central) don't build houses, neither do corporations (generally) - what they
DO do is to pay others to build houses for them. There's an inference that a private individual cannot pay for a new house to be built ?
But most housing is built by organisations (of varying sizes) with a view to profit - ie they spot a suitable parcel of land, go through the process of getting some plans drawn up and approved, then build the houses and sell them (hopefully for a lot more than it cost them to get them built). In some cases it's the one "house builder" doing the lot, but often it's some form of joint venture between someone who owns the land and someone with the skills and resources to build the houses.
As I've mentioned, a number of groups have pointed out that there's a big investment that has to happen between starting the process and having houses you can sell to raise capital. That's why the developers like to sell off-plan even if it means a discount - it gives them cash up front to fund the development. Without that up-front cash, they reckon many developments just wouldn't happen.
What it really comes down to is the old "people with available money can buy things" - whether that's new build houses off-plan, or flashy cars on the drive. And FTBs don't tend to be the sort of people with the spare cash to buy a new house off-plan while also still paying rent.
As you point out, the fix for the supposedly broken market is really quite simple - make it so that those who can and want to build more houses can do so without too much in the way of red tape and costs (like the CIL 'bribes'). Houses (usually) sell for more than the cost of building, so if you allow them to be built, people will build them.
Near where I live, there's an old industrial site that got partially developed. It's lain derelict for many years as the developer ran out of money and the bank that ended up owning it couldn't find anyone who'd buy it from them. The problem ? The planning conditions meant that they had to sell a lot of the houses as "affordable housing" - to the extent that no-one would take it on. So the end result is that instead of getting some affordable housing alongside the rest - they've got nothing at all so far
