To help kick off our Social Housing Revival series, Peter Apps calls for a return to mass public house-building in cities around the world.

What does the future hold for our major cities" Urbanisation has been one of the most important trends of the modern era. More than half of the world's population now lives in urban areas ? increasingly in large, very densely populated cities ? and projections suggest this proportion will keep growing through to 2050.
But housing in urban centres is becoming increasingly unaffordable.
During recent years, enormous amounts of capital have been poured into acquiring real estate in cities, particularly after the global financial crisis of 2008 and the quantitative easing policies many central banks adopted in its aftermath.           'Housing in urban centres is becoming increasingly unaffordable'
In 2013/14, corporate buying of larger properties in the world's 100 largest cities rose from $600 billion to $1 trillion. A 2017 UN-backed report said real estate represented 60 per cent of the value of all global assets, with residential real estate comprising 75 per cent of that total.
"Housing is at the centre of an historic structural transformation in global investment and the economies of the industrialized world, with profound consequences for those in need of adequate housing," the report said.
People trying to find a decent home in our major cities now compete with funds like Blackstone, an asset investor whose weal...