We can’t build our way out of the growing housing crisis

‘For ordinary families to have any chance of buying, the market needs puncturing by further structural change.’ Photograph: Joel Goodman/The Guardian

One implication of your editorial on housing (1 December) is that greater supply would make housing more affordable. That would mean developers increasing supply to the point where they’d have to drop prices, and then keep building as prices continued to fall. They won’t do it.

Average prices have gone from 3.6 times average earnings to nine times over the last 25 years – through cheap borrowing, inherited property wealth snowballing on a rising market and, latterly, George Osborne’s help-to-buy scheme, which saddled buyers with more debt than the banks thought they could afford.