Instead of finger pointing, what about rescinding the punitive taxes and relaxing the zoning restrictions. The free market does what it always does, which is respond to incentives. You can bet bottom euro that new housing stock will begin to be built if artificial restrictions on supply are done away with.
Hear, hear. The government keeps coming up with new help-to-buy schemes, while the most helpful course of action would be to take their greedy hands off.
Or more like their fumbling hands. The free market is the best decentralized decision making system humanity has ever invented. If the goal is to subsidize the poor, stuff like rent controls do a horrible job at that. Just pay the poor directly.