How to fix the housing crisis

The real scandal isn't so much the lack of houses, says David C Stevenson. It's the state subsidies paid to landlords.

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The "housing crisis" is mostly hot air
(Image credit: Credit: Jonathan Larsen/Diadem Images / Alamy Stock Photo)

The national housing crisis is rarely off the front pages these days. "Our housing market is broken", says Sajid Javid, the minister overseeing housing policy, while a recent white paper set out the myriad ways the government would tackle this national shame. The problem is that this fight against the crisis is mostly a struggle against a non-existent enemy. Yes, there are some horribly tricky issues relating to our national and regional housing markets, but we have to ask whether the drastic proposed cures for the crisis such as concreting over the green belt are really necessary. We need to be more specific and focused about what problem we're trying to solve.

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David C. Stevenson
Contributor

David Stevenson has been writing the Financial Times Adventurous Investor column for nearly 15 years and is also a regular columnist for Citywire. He writes his own widely read Adventurous Investor SubStack newsletter at davidstevenson.substack.com

David has also had a successful career as a media entrepreneur setting up the big European fintech news and event outfit www.altfi.com as well as www.etfstream.com in the asset management space. 

Before that, he was a founding partner in the Rocket Science Group, a successful corporate comms business. 

David has also written a number of books on investing, funds, ETFs, and stock picking and is currently a non-executive director on a number of stockmarket-listed funds including Gresham House Energy Storage and the Aurora Investment Trust. 

In what remains of his spare time he is a presiding justice on the Southampton magistrates bench.