That plan needs to be bold. As the first-ever EU housing commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, noted in an interview with this newspaper last month, spiralling house prices and rents constitute a modern social crisis. The inability of societies to provide a decent home for first-time buyers making their way in life, and the pricing out of key workers from areas where they contribute every day to the common good, breaches the social contract in the most basic way. Politically, the issue has become a recruiting sergeant for the anti-immigrant far right, as asylum seekers and migrants are scapegoated over a shortage which is in reality a market failure.