There's simple answers, but no one wants to hear them because they're politically complicated:

• We treat housing like an investment
• We have a tax code that's excessively friendly to investment income, so we encourage the problem even more.
• We're unwilling to tax rich investors to pay for the gap in housing availability
• The CMHC gave up on directly building housing at scale 30 years ago, and successive neoliberal governments at every level have no appetite to do publicly-provided anything, let alone healthcare.

Housing, like healthcare, is a market failure, and our governments are still looking for market-based solutions which won't work as long as the market can make money off the problem's continued existence.

The "no simple answer" part gets worse every day, because the longer governments wait to intervene, the more of our economy gets tied to real estate. This could have been fixed in 2000 without too much pain, but now you'd be tanking the only retirement savings many Boomers and elder Xers have, so actions need to be gradual: a gradual clamp-down on investment, and a gradual ramp-up of direct building of housing.

Of course, what we're going to do is "more nothing" because even gradual moves will be fought tooth and nail by the rich. So they kick it down the curb another four years every time.