The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis

It doesn't say, which is a little weird. This article explains it better.

Basically as I understand it, before the 1980s, the government owned a lot of the housing and rented it to people at fixed prices. This meant that renting your property out purely for profit was tough, and a lot of landlords actually sold their property to the government as council housing. That changed under Thatcher, who enabled private sales of the council housing, which originally sounded like a good idea (you can own the home you're already living in instead of renting it from the government), but increased privatization led to rent for profit led to inflation of monthly rent led to oh no.

The simple fix I suspect, is for the government to start buying up properties again for rent-at-reasonable-prices to tenants, competing with private landlords and poking a hole in the bubble of ever-increasing rents (with popping the bubble giving a lot of extra leverage of societal benefit as compared with the amount of money they're actually putting into the system.)

Early on:

Rent controls, secure tenancies and high interest rates

were how landlords were put out of business the first time. Not regulation, but economic levers that made renting out property unprofitable.

Presumably, these levers still exist and can be pulled. It's mentioned right after that the Thatcher administration worked to undo these effects, but the article moved on without further discussing how in detail.

Where are you getting this? To me it looks like household size dropped precipitously between 1947 and 1990, and then stabilized around 2.6 in 1990, and now it's around 2.5. I think rent has gone up a little more than 4% since 1990 though.

I actually would guess that you're probably right about an increase in single people or couples or empty nesters as compared with big families, but that it's been offset by a rise in young or semi-young adults living with roommates. That's just me guessing though.

YIMBYism works - Tokyo housing is incredibly affordable not because of subsidies but because they just never stopped building more housing.

The problem with American housing is that it's too easy to block.

Unless I'm mistaken the revenue source for property developers is selling the property. They don't give a single fuck about how valuable it is after they've offloaded it.