Canada

Capitalism is literally moving us back into feudalism. Everything is for sale. Even democracy, it seems. Perhaps fascism would be more profitable? Market is bullish on fascism!

AirBnB's a significant part of the issue. Short term rentals don't provide a place for people to actually live, while often providing a higher return over the short term than a long term rental unit.

Real estate speculators, too, add extra pressure to the housing market. Speculators often don't rent the property out at all, and attempt to treat housing as a raw commodity, buying up homes and just waiting for real estate prices to increase as the bubble continues to grow.

There may be real housing constraints in the country, but they're severely exacerbated by the view of housing as capital, rather than as homes.

Nobody is homeless waiting for a home to be built they can purchase. There isn't a physical housing shortage.

Theres no one single issue, but all of the above happening at once AND a population boom at the same time to top it off. We need an all-of-the-above approach to fix it too. Remove zoning restrictions, make lending for multiplexes easier, build public housing as fast and as much as possible, and found new towns... to name a few.

It's both.

If you just look at supply and demand graphs.

Where S is supply, D is demand, N is number of people, I is number of investors, and P is price you'd have:

1. S[=N+0]=D[=N+0], P-
2. S[=N+0]N+0]>D[=N+0], P▼
3. S[N+0]>D[=N+0], P▼
4. S[>N+I]>D[=N+I], P▼

The problem really is twofold: yes, it is supply, but there's also an extreme amount of reticence to do anything about both supply and speculation.

This is largely because the profits of the current system accrue to people who bear experience none of the pain of it (which is also why healthcare is broken, and why transit is broken, and why nothing gets done about climate change). Taxes are kept low, assets keep going up and it takes very little effort to stay rich. And money talks.

"Building like mad" isn't going to happen because "building just enough to stop people from rioting" is more profitable. No builder is going to build public housing when they can make more on McMansions and condos, and no homeowner or speculator wants to see policies that would increase their tax burden or decrease the value of their asset.

Building like mad would help, but you'd achieve similar effects by smacking down the investment side of the problem, without requiring the government to, eg, directly buy equipment, supplies and employ tradespeople to build homes, which they'd have to do as bribing developers to do it doesn't seem to work. Plus, if you tax speculation hard, maybe you can use that tax revenue to build?

The real, core issue, though, is housing in Canada at the moment is the perfect neoliberal failure, and our policymakers are so wedded to neoliberal orthodoxy that the solution (massive, direct public investment) isn't just heretical, it's inconcievable. Most of our MPs/MPPs/MLAs and civil servants don't even remember a pre-Reagan/Thatcher era of massive public investment. They don't seem to understand it's even an option.