I can't speak for every place on earth, but where I live in the south of Portugal, that is very much the problem. And affordable long term rent has been destroyed in all of Europe by Airbnb and similar initiatives. And no, this is not a scapegoat theory. All you have to do is access housing registrations and match against citizenship registered to addresses in the same area and then you start to see the problem. There's a lot more houses than people that have their permanent address registered to the same area. So then the problem can't be housing in itself. When one starts to look closer we start to notice a lot of titles to the same people and the same last names as we all would expect. The house to person ratio is quite disproportionate in its distribution. I can tell you that this has been exposed time and time again over time, but since 2008 that it has indeed gotten worse and more so exponentially every year since then.

The problem in just simply building more housing is that the same thing will happen to those new homes. They'll just be absorbed into this same phenomenon of asset flipping and market speculation in which even rent, not just owning property reaches prices beyond what locals can afford with long term rent even becoming entirely unavailable due to Airbnb and other initiatives alike.

That's why the governments have to intervene. Especially at a local level. But if a rewiring of the general population doesn't occur, it will just be lobbied back to the same as before. As it has happened. Because what is simply enforced is not learned. And this is what you are referring to when you speak to the public aversion to government intervention. If not understood and learned, what is then witnessed is the same rope pull of do and undo between governmental administrations, that wears off and alienates the public.

But yes, sometimes the problem in itself can be an increase of population density that exploded beyond the local availability of houses. And then new housing development is required or people will have to choose (more like forced without an option) to relocate.

That is why I said "the problem is not a lack of housing in itself necessarily". In which I meant it as not always the source of the problem. I didn't say the lack of housing in itself is NEVER the problem.

There are many contributors to this issue.

Environmental changes and war are also intertwined as they both lead to resource depletion, and become part of the same feedback loop that plays a part in the whole of the Metacrisis. In which both will cause mass migrations. And mass migrations will always cause a disparity between demand and availability in housing, which leads to more inflation and more conflicts over resources, which in turn leads to more mass migrations and on and on and on... This is "systems thinking" and the general public has not caught up to the descent we're in yet. Or is in denial and refusing to engage in the face of its enormity.

Most problems that are detected by most people are real and feeding into one another. What I said is true and what you said is true and anyone who doubts that is possible is not engaging with the complexity of the world as it is.