It's not as easy as just snap headlines.
First though, please do bear in mind that "homeless" does not mean "having nowhere to live".
The vast majority classed as "homeless" are not living on the streets but are unable to buy their own homes, so are stuck lodging with their parents, other relatives or friends who do own their own houses.
The letting market is being destroyed. Landlords are finding it harder and harder by both their own increasing costs such as the mortgage, and increasing regulations that benefit the tenants but help make the arrangement less and less practicable and viable. Most landlords are not the big money-traders owning city tower-blocks, but private individuals. Many saw letting as a sort of "pension pot" when they bought the places twenty, thirty or more years ago but now find the house a financial mill-stone. Yet it also becoming harder to evict anyone simply to reclaim the home (the so-called "no-fault evictions" you cite), so the combination deters future availability of homes to rent.
Many home-buyers now struggle thanks to lenders' greed. At one time a typical mortgage cost about three times your annual income, but greed led lenders to offer dangerously high loans, low deposits and long times, attracting buyers now caught by rapidly rising living costs when previously, the repayments would have slowly become easier with time.
While in the many attractive areas of the country, large numbers of houses are bought for second-homes and holiday-letting. This is destroying many villages and small towns because the locals cannot afford to live there on whatever work may be available, and the week-ending occupants do not usually want most of the local public services and businesses.
Many of the sprawling housing-estates springing up around towns even a hundred miles or from London, but on good railway routes to the capital, are advertised in London at prices Canary Wharf would think reasonable - unaffordable to most locals. As typical examples, I once saw double-page advertisement for the "Brimsmore" such estate, of about 3000 homes, in the London Evening News - "Brimsmore" is near Yeovil in Somerset: by train about 60 miles from Bristol and 120 miles from London (Waterloo).) While another building-site I passed near Banbury, in Oxfordshire, proudly claimed only three-quarters of an hour by train from there to London (Marylebone). HS2, if it is ever completed, is likely only to push the Canary Wharf commuter-belt out to the Birmingham and further-North areas; hence raising house prices there further still.
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More homes?
Yes - but no attempt is made to plan housing properly, hence what I call "AA Book Of The Road Planning" by remote officials and NIMBY developers who think £300 000, too cheap.
By this I mean randomly pick from the road atlas a small town far from London or Manchester, and fill its nearest large polygon of roads with 3000 little boxes. Choose purely on housing statistics; ignore all local employment, needs and wishes, public utilities and services, selling cost, landscape and agricultural values, and physical geography.
"30% affordable" claims the disingenuous publicity with deliberately deceitful "artist's impressions".
"Affordable" to whom? A single teacher, nurse or local-government administrative-officer? A local-authority lorry-driver married to a teaching-assistant? A professional physicist wed to a company-law barrister? Does this meaningless publicity claim render 1400 of those 3000 houses too expensive for anyone?
Even Sandbanks is "affordable"... to some people. (A row of houses adjoining Poole Harbour, possibly England's most expensive outside of London.) Anyway the developers will gain the planning-permission then say "Oh, we need reduce that 30% to 20% to make the scheme viable". Oh aye?
So don't just shout "Thousands Homeless!"
Ask what it really means, how many, where do they live in fact, and why it happens - and what constructively can be done to help them.
