zoning laws, nimbyism , and recently corporate landlords buying out houses and preventing new ones from being built.

Are those houses where people want to live though?

In Japan we have houses in the country you can buy for less than €1000 but there's no work there.

we can change that, you can sign european initiative at right-to-housing.eu, there is a link to official page from european commission

Lots of city planners advocate for it. Of course not every building can be converted but most of them can and they're actually fairly popular.

At the moment, the corporate buzz swings in the opposite direction.
More and more back to office with limited HO days.

you can sign the initiative at right-to-housing.eu, their are collecting signatures to make this a law

This only makes sense if the large landlord conglomerate that likely owns them isn't happy to just leave them empty to keep the upward pressure on rents.

This is also why we'll continue to have problems unless we get state-owned construction companies - the landlord conglomerates that have the money to get new apartments built will never commission enough apartment blocks to actually drive down prices, instead trickling in supply to keep prices where they are, or higher (regardless of the incentives). These are the problems we face in Amsterdam, anyway.

Get out of lemmy with your common sense.

regulate it, for example some tax for people who dont use it and don't rent it

Nobody tell this person about nationalizing industry, they might have an aneurysm.

I'm very suspicious of this line. The whole Western-world has the same issue: a housing crisis. It's more likely a minority are buying everything and leaving houses empty to jack up rents using computer systems. In Australia the real estate agents all use the same system. It's a software monopoly controlling the whole market. Australia, Canada, USA, europe? All have a housing crisis? Really? Meanwhile China... just fucking build commie blocks.

Same story everywhere. Here in Australia there's more than enough empty houses to house our growing homeless population. Housing is a human right.

I just want to state: it's a fact asset classes have been over inflated over the decades as a result of asinine monetary policy. This is a disaster. Governments have failed their citizens.