Voters don't actually want house prices to come down. Voters, in aggregate, want rents to fall and prices to rise, roughly divided by renters vs owners. Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war. Perhaps because rents are downstream of values, and so it's politically easier for owners to make the correct choices to advance their agenda than it is for renters, which have an extra logical leap required of them.

> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters in this political tug-of-war.

Demographics. Homeowners skew old, which gives them a bunch of advantages in enacting their political power. Higher turnout, baby boom giving them numerical superiority, and the time advantage of being able to enact policy decades ago.

In the US, this is supplemented by matters of race, where because of past redlining policies, "pro-homeowner" policy (esp. suburban single-family-homes) in the last half-century has been a way to primarily benefit white people.

> Voters don't actually want house prices to come down.

You have this wrong.

> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters

First lets look at homeownership rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S Home ownership is a functionally unmovable number staying around 63%

Home owners are in the majority.

Do you know what one of the biggest predictors of voting is? It is home ownership and local elections with zoning issues (or things that might impact home values) will drive turn out: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-...

Meanwhile to the original article, 80s TV like Golden Girls (shared housing) and Boosom Buddies (boarding houses) are quaint historic notes, the reality is that our use of housing stock has made the problem of where to live worse: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...

When you dig down into the data, the article is highlighting a real problem. We have destroyed a lot of historical co-habitation that kept the system working and healthy. We did this with zoning (getting rid of high density to prop up home values) banning types of housing (dense single room, affordable) and making other types impossible (owning a home and renting a room or two, people dont do this because of tenants rights issues).

> Voters, in aggregate, want rents to fall and prices to rise, roughly divided by renters vs owners

I assure you, a lot of people in the UK want house prices to fall too. There are too many renters who don't want to be renting, and the proportion is increasing. They wish they could buy instead, but can't either because of price, inability to save enough for a down-payment as fast as prices rise (while large rent rises impede their saving or even drain it, and incomes rise more slowly than prices), or inability to obtain a mortgage despite a history of consistently paying more than a mortgage in rent. For the latter category, who can afford a mortgage but can't get one, and are already paying more in rent, their main problem isn't income or price, it's the tighter restrictions on mortgage availability since the 2008 financial crises. But they would still like lower prices.

Most people in the US live in a home owned by themselves or a member of their immediate family.

On top of that, more of those people vote than the renters in their area.

There's not really much more to it than that.

Somehow? Homeowners are obviously the more powerful group, and real estate ownership in the bigger picture is tied to even more powerful entities (big companies, banks, billionaires).

How many in the top 10% of the wealth distribution do you think are renters? How many in the bottom 20% do you think are homeowners?