I have a theory that the housing crisis is caused by the dating crisis. Statisticians estimate that in the Netherlands we're missing 400 000 houses, while we have 1,2 million people aged 30 to 60 living alone. If two-thirds of those people married each other, the entire housing crisis would be solved overnight. And it's worth pointing out that people used to marry each other at much higher rate than they do now, so it's not an unrealistic solution.

And it's not smartphones that broke our mating rituals, because the change was already happening long before. I'd argue that economic development exposed the dirty truth that people just don't like each other and given the choice between marriage or watching TV undisturbed, they'll choose the latter.

Something that doesn't intuitively click for me is, if the lack of housing is the issue, then why do we have historically low average number of people living in a single house.