>People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.

Wait. Why? Do they?

If the problem is the lack of housing. Why wouldn't building more be a solution?

Or are you refering that the phrase itself is dismissive of existing issues?

The key word is just. If all the new apartments are luxury or investment properties and your economy is unequal enough then investors will buy them all up and sit on them forever (because selling would drop the value of their portfolio). That keeps them off the market so housing prices never go down.

On the other hand if you also have public and co-op projects, rent control, vacancy and second home taxes to complement private developers then prices will definitely go down or at least stop growing faster than inflation. The housing market can never be competitive without state involvement because land is a natural monopoly.

Of course making building easier is also an important piece of the solution. One radical change I support is replace top-down zoning with a community vote so corrupt developers can't bribe their way to gentrification, and loud NIMBYs can't stop projects everyone else wants. Architects will hate it but cities are for the locals not for aesthetics.

> If the problem is the lack of housing.

It's not. I don't have statistics for the Netherlands ready, but I would bet that they have more housing units than households. In the US, there's 1.1 housing unit per household.

> Why wouldn't building more be a solution?

Because it's not a housing problem. It's a problem with housing near dense city cores in an ever-dwindling number of cities.

Economic forces concentrate people into dense areas: dense population provides a larger talent pool for employers, so companies with offices in dense city cores have a long-term competitive advantage. This in turn attracts more people. Rinse, wash, repeat.

The solution is to recognize the externalities and properly manage them. For example: cap&trade/tax the dense office space, give tax incentives for remote work, provide tax holidays for people in sparse areas, and so on.