Of course it's a political issue. Policies on housing ownership have pushed housing as an investment to normal people for decades, as something that will, almost certainly, go up in value. Many, many people have bought a house they might not even be very happy with just for the sake of parking their money in a "safe investment" that they can live inside in the meantime, until they can sell and purchase the next one, rinse and repeat.
If you want to crash prices by building more housing then you'll have a lot of angry common people who are paying a lot for their mortgages which will go under water, of course these people will push as much as possible, politically speaking, for that to not happen.
Personally I'd be extremely happy if more housing is built and housing prices are pushed down but we can't deny that the reality of policies that took us here, those policies were wrong, housing should have never been part of a speculative market and been traded as another kind of commodity. It's not a commodity, it's not a pure asset, it's shelter for humans, economical policies thought by and implemented by ideologues pushed down our throats that housing is just like any other tradable asset... And now we have a lot of people that would never want to see prices go down because they will lose their life savings.
So yes, how can this not be political? Saying that it's a "political issue and nothing more" is like denying the reality that it is political, there's no other way. You can't remove the political aspect of this issue, there's no "just build more housing" without the parties/politicians that implement it being absolutely hated by a segment of society. Would you still vote for a party that enacts policies that make your life investments lose 50% of value? In a democracy most things are political, that's the hard part of the solution for most social issues...
If you want to crash prices by building more housing then you'll have a lot of angry common people who are paying a lot for their mortgages which will go under water, of course these people will push as much as possible, politically speaking, for that to not happen.
Personally I'd be extremely happy if more housing is built and housing prices are pushed down but we can't deny that the reality of policies that took us here, those policies were wrong, housing should have never been part of a speculative market and been traded as another kind of commodity. It's not a commodity, it's not a pure asset, it's shelter for humans, economical policies thought by and implemented by ideologues pushed down our throats that housing is just like any other tradable asset... And now we have a lot of people that would never want to see prices go down because they will lose their life savings.
So yes, how can this not be political? Saying that it's a "political issue and nothing more" is like denying the reality that it is political, there's no other way. You can't remove the political aspect of this issue, there's no "just build more housing" without the parties/politicians that implement it being absolutely hated by a segment of society. Would you still vote for a party that enacts policies that make your life investments lose 50% of value? In a democracy most things are political, that's the hard part of the solution for most social issues...