Housing in major cities has become unaffordable for many people who work in them.

In many big cities today, the price of houses and flats is so high that ordinary workers cannot afford to live there. This situation creates serious problems, but there are also some possible solutions.

The first problem is that important workers leave the city. Nurses, teachers, bus drivers and police officers do not earn a high salary, so they cannot pay the rent in the centre. When they move to another city, hospitals and schools do not have enough staff, and the quality of these services becomes worse for everybody.

Another problem is long travelling. Workers who stay must live far from the city and travel two or three hours every day. They are tired, they spend a lot of money on transport, and they have less time for their family. This also creates more traffic and more pollution in the city.

To solve these problems, the government should build more affordable housing. If there are more flats, the prices will go down. The government can also give financial help to workers such as nurses and teachers, so they can pay the rent.

In addition, companies can allow their staff to work from home for some days. Then workers do not need to live near the office and they can choose a cheaper city.

In conclusion, unaffordable housing makes cities lose their workers and forces long journeys, but building more homes and helping key workers can improve the situation.

In many large cities, housing costs have risen far beyond what people employed in those cities can pay. The consequences reach well beyond the individuals affected, and the remedies that work are narrower than the ones usually proposed.

The most damaging problem is that cities lose the workers they depend on. Nurses, teachers, transport staff and cleaners are paid on national or sector-wide scales that take no account of local rents, so as prices rise these are the first people priced out. The result is not simply personal hardship but a functional one: hospitals run short-staffed and schools struggle to recruit, which means the city's own basic services deteriorate. Those who do stay generally absorb the cost as distance instead, commuting two or three hours a day, and a workforce that arrives exhausted is a cost the employer pays for as well.

The solutions that address this have to increase the supply of homes where the jobs actually are, because subsidies alone tend to be absorbed into higher prices. That means allowing far more construction in exactly the well-connected areas where existing residents resist it, and building at higher density near transport rather than expanding outwards, which only lengthens the commutes described above. Alongside this, planning permission can be made conditional on a proportion of new homes being reserved at below-market rents for key workers, which targets the shortage where it does most damage to the city.

In conclusion, unaffordable housing costs cities their essential staff and imposes long journeys on those who remain. Since the underlying cause is a shortage of homes near employment, only measures that increase supply in those locations can genuinely solve it.

A city that cannot house the people who operate it has developed a problem quite different from ordinary expensive housing. The difficulty is not that some individuals cannot afford where they would like to live; it is that the labour a city requires and the housing it produces have come apart, and the consequences of that gap fall on the city itself as much as on the workers priced out of it.

The most serious effect is the quiet withdrawal of essential staff. Nurses, teachers, transport workers and carers are paid on scales set nationally or by sector, with no adjustment for what local rent has done, so each rise removes another layer of them first. What follows is not merely hardship but institutional failure: wards run below safe staffing, schools cannot recruit, and the services that make a city habitable degrade for everyone, including the wealthy residents whose housing costs caused the pressure. Those who stay convert the cost into distance, absorbing three-hour daily commutes — time taken directly from rest and family, and paid for again by employers in fatigue and turnover.

The remedy most often proposed is also the least effective. Direct subsidies and help-to-buy schemes raise what buyers and renters can pay without changing how many homes exist, and in a market with fixed supply that additional money is simply capitalised into higher prices. The subsidy ends up with the seller, which makes such policies self-defeating however well intentioned, and this is why decades of demand-side support have coincided with worsening affordability rather than relieving it.

What does work is unglamorous and politically difficult: permitting far more housing in the well-connected areas that currently resist it, and building at density around transport rather than pushing development outward, which only reproduces the commuting problem in a new place. Planning consent can then be used as leverage, requiring a defined share of new homes at below-market rents tied to the occupations the city cannot function without. That addresses the specific failure identified above rather than affordability in general.

In short, the problems are the loss of essential workers and the commuting burden on those who remain, and both stem from a shortage of homes near employment. Only supply reaches that cause; anything that raises what people can pay, without raising what exists to buy, will be absorbed by the market before it reaches them.