[ELI5] Why is nobody building affordable houses to de crowd the rental market?

What you’re describing is the more or less the UK council house system. It kinda works to put houses in the hands of poorer people, but gets politically challenging as you end up with a situation where very wealthy people can afford to live in high cost of living cities, very poor people can live there too, but people who have a moderate amount of money aren’t able to buy houses that they see poorer people able to live in. This quickly starts to undermine political support for the whole deal.

It’s also very difficult to provide large scale housing in this manner without ending up grouping a very large number of poor people into a single area, which then leads to well noted problems with inter generational poverty and all the great stuff that comes with that.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread