In city after city, the housing conversation returns to the same arithmetic: for years, the number of new homes has lagged behind the number of new households, and the gap shows up as high prices, rising rents and young adults living with parents far longer than they planned. Economists disagree about many details, but the central role of supply is now hard to dispute. Where more homes are built — of the right types, in the right places — price pressures ease. Where building stalls, scarcity is shared out through cost.
That does not make the politics any easier. New housing is popular in the abstract and contested on every specific street. Readers of hefkervelt.org will recognise the familiar arguments about traffic, shadows, character and infrastructure. The evidence increasingly suggests, however, that blocking development in prosperous areas does not stop growth; it displaces it into higher prices and longer commutes.
What actually gets more homes built
Places that have made progress share a few features. They allow more homes near jobs and public transport, including apartments in areas once reserved for single houses. They make approvals faster and more predictable, so builders can plan. And they invest in the water, power and transport capacity that new neighbourhoods need, rather than treating infrastructure as an afterthought. Research summarised by the OECD links restrictive land-use rules with weaker affordability and lower mobility across many advanced economies.
Local answers matter because housing markets are local. A national target means little if individual permits are refused; equally, a single determined council can change its area’s trajectory by approving well-designed density around stations and high streets. Our 2024 section regularly covers these local decisions, which cumulatively decide whether a generation can afford to live where it works.
Building homes is not only about houses
Supply includes rental homes, social housing, conversions of empty offices and shops, and better use of existing buildings. It also includes construction capacity: many countries face shortages of skilled trades, planning officers and materials that limit how fast output can rise even when permission is granted. Training, modern construction methods and steadier pipelines of work all help, because builders invest when demand for their services looks durable rather than stop-start.
Reporting by The Guardian’s society desk and others has documented the human side of the shortage — overcrowding, insecure tenancies and families in temporary accommodation. Those stories are the reason supply is not an abstract economic variable. Every missing home is a household paying more, travelling further or putting off decisions about work and family.
The honest trade-offs
More building brings real costs: pressure on services, changed neighbourhoods and environmental impacts that must be managed through good design and proper standards. Pretending otherwise undermines trust. But the alternative — continued scarcity — also has costs, and they fall hardest on renters, the young and the less well-off, who have the least voice in planning debates.
Local answers, national consequences
No single reform will fix housing, and imported solutions rarely transplant neatly. Yet the direction of travel is clear: permit more homes where people want to live, fund the infrastructure to support them and judge policies by homes completed, not announcements made. The shortage was built decision by decision over decades. It will be eased the same way — locally, persistently and with the arithmetic finally taken seriously.
Tenants’ experience underlines why the debate cannot be left to averages. In supply-starved markets, renters describe bidding for ordinary flats, accepting homes in poor condition because alternatives are scarce, and staying in jobs or relationships they would otherwise leave because moving is unaffordable. Landlords in such markets face little pressure to maintain standards. Where building has kept pace, by contrast, older rental stock competes for tenants and quality improves. Housing researchers make this point repeatedly: new supply does not only house its first occupants. It loosens the whole chain beneath it, freeing existing homes and shifting bargaining power, however modestly, towards the people who live in them.