Population is going down in the developed world. The housing supply is not. If you can't afford housing where you live, then it can only be because more people are demanding housing where you live, having left where they were previously living.
The solution to the "problem of home ownership" is to stop making areas undesirable places to live. Portland springs to mind but there's San Fran. NYC, L.A. but it's not just the Big Blue cities in the US and elsewhere, it's nations run by totalitarians everywhere.
The solution is to export prosperity around the world. Then we can all enjoy the benefits of the developed world's population crash which translates into cheaper housing, amongst other things, both good and bad.
Since The Economist is looking everywhere for the West's biggest mistake, today's their lucky day, I happen to have it right here.
The West should have demanded of China and every other non-democratic regime in the world, as a condition of receiving manufacturing and industries and the privilege of importing their products duty-free, that they liberalize their political systems in ways which are hard to reverse.
This had the power to transform regions from Mexico and Central America to China.
We could have created a schedule of increasingly substantive requirements composed of democratic institutions, free speech and political assembly, (truly) free markets and anti-corruption metrics which had to be met in order to benefit from trade with the West. But we didn't.
We didn't because a small group of industry beneficiaries made small and large fortunes by outsourcing the West's industrialization. They leveraged the lack of environmental and labor standards endured by the world's poor, living under corrupt and totalitarian regimes, to lower the cost of goods sold then sell back into the first world at first world prices.
That's what the elite have been doing since Clinton gave China MFN status and even before.
Now no one in the West can afford the most basic thing every mammal requires- a place of their own. A home. A burrow. A nest. A place to which they can retreat, which they can control and experience sheer animal comfort and safety. Now even that has to go to satiate the boundless greed of our elites.
The only thing left for them to come after is reproduction. We should probably also start thinking about turning our mates over to them, since they can provide for them better than we can.