It's not just our government having problems

It appears that New Zealand suffers too:

The New Zealand government has scrapped its target to build 100,000 homes in 10 years, saying it was “overly ambitious”.

Do tell.

In June, Ardern replaced her housing minister and appointed a team of senior officials to fix New Zealand’s housing problems after KiwiBuild, the government’s flagship project for building 100,000 affordable homes in ten years, missed every several deadline.

As of 4 September, the number of homes built was 258, according to KiwiBuild’s website – thousands less than the target.

Certainly market failures exist - although the definition, accurately, is the absence of a properly functioning market, not failure of the market system. That doesn’t then justify whatever plans the government might have, for government failure is also something that exists.

Woods did not set any new target for KiwiBuild, saying the government would focus on building as many homes as it could, and targets had led to KiwiBuild homes being constructed in towns such as Wanaka that had no market for first-home buyers, and where they now languished empty for months.

Ah, it’s worse, those that were built are where no one wants any.

From which a useful guide to our own housing problems. The stated desire is that we have 300,000 new houses a year in the UK. The last time the private sector managed this was in the 1930s - before the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. Current government efforts are getting nowhere near close to that target. The solution would therefore seem to be to bypass government failure, blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, and return to having a properly functioning market.

After all, we do have the evidence that it solves the problem being discussed.