Housing shortages aren’t just causing issues in the UK. Most western countries are in the same boat. They are also trying solve it in different ways. They are even taking to repeating things that haven’t worked elsewhere.
The UK had MIRAS for many years. Mortgage Interest Relief At Source.
Basically qualifying home purchases literally paid less interest, via a tax relief, that was knocked off the payments you made.
The effect of course was to make houses cheaper to buy for those that live in them. It was abolished so long ago it’s not worth looking up and of course for almost ten years the UK has now gone the other way and decided to make it harder for investors to buy properties. Thos looking to the other side of the world and wondering if we will see this I’d be very surprised. That said the UK did of course have the Help to Buy scheme which aimed to make homeownership easier.
Tinkering won’t really make much difference though. Building houses might help but they don’t seem to want to get that done…