"Actually, in the area of housing, market is probably the best known distribution mechanism. There are really no other acceptable alternatives. What would you rather have instead of markets - Inheritance? Personal connections? Voting? Bureaucratic fiat? All of these strike me as breeding grounds for nepotism, favoritism, or discrimination."
Well, in the UK we have bureaucratic fiat, breeding nepotism, favouritism and discrimination. The planning laws are designed to arrest new developments, hemming in cities behind so-called green belts, to prevent the plebs from invading the countryside. On top of that we had the Urban Taskforce and their injunction to 'build up, not out'.
The outcome was the lowest level of housing starts since 1945. Whether the market would have corrected these imbalances is a bit of an academic point, because there is no free market in land in the UK. And developers seem quite happy to make a living selling fewer, over-priced homes than more cheaper ones.
This is the case I set out in Let's Build! Why we need five million homes in the next 10 years