£3m to fix the UK’s housing crisis? Ha ha ha ha ha, your royal highness | Zoe Williams

I don't want to be churlish about Prince William's new Homewards foundation. However ...

Prince William is going to solve homelessness with a new royal foundation, launching a project called Homewards that starts with 3m for six towns and cities across the UK. It's such a short sentence to make so little sense. You can look at the housing crisis from a range of perspectives. Some people are obsessed with planning permission; some have a supply-side fetish. You don't have to chalk it all up to the ever more feudal rentier economy. Nevertheless, we could agree, I think, that dropping half a mil into a city, even if it might put a roof over a handful of heads, would barely scratch the surface.

Furthermore, whatever your view on equality - and again, there's a spectrum, with some people thinking great concentrations of unearned wealth are good for motivation or whatnot - it would still, I think, strike you as piquant that a man with housing plenty beyond anything he could ever use would style himself as ambassador for the business of getting people off the streets.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist