[crdoconnor]

>People don't want to live in the London green belt?

I'd rather live centrally. If height restrictions were eliminated and councils started building pretty much everybody who wanted to, could. The housing crisis was entirely a deliberate creation of both the Tories (and to an extent, New Labour).

>I think you vastly underestimate the suffering millions of people in the UK are enduring

I think you're vastly overestimating the effect this would have on alleviating that.

Corbyn's approach (let councils start building again) is a far more rational approach than this.

[mrec]

> Corbyn's approach (let councils start building again) is a far more rational approach than this.

Leaving aside the question of where the money and land comes from (both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last few GEs, and nobody's even come close to hitting them), doesn't this run afoul of parliamentary sovereignty?

If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give them all away again as electoral bribes?

My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment. That's certainly not the only problem, but it's addressable relatively cheaply via macroprudential measures and tax law, so I'd like to see uk.gov start there and then see what further action is needed.

[crdoconnor]

>Leaving aside the question of where the money and land comes

The money would come from "people's QE" and lifting the housing revenue account cap.

Building UP, as I mentioned before, is a better way of packing more people in than creating sprawling suburbs in the green belt. For a city its size London's density has been ridiculously restrained.

>both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last few GEs, and nobody's even come close to hitting them

Neither Blair's government nor the Tories have ever had any intention of building council housing, instead setting targets for the private sector.

>If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give them all away again as electoral bribes

Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you want.

>My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment.

The financialization of housing exacerbated the problems caused by the shortage of housing, they obviously didn't create them.

[mrec]

> The money would come from "people's QE"

Oh, yet more printy printy. Wonderful.

> Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you want.

No, I wouldn't prefer that. I'd quite like an affordable home of my own at some point before I die, thank you very much. I believe social housing - free from the inflationary incentives of the PRS - has an important role to play in keeping the PRS honest, much like (AUIU) the NHS does a lot to keep the UK's private health sector honest compared to the situation in the US. But after the past few decades I don't trust uk.gov to treat social housing as an asset in the long term.

> The financialization of housing exacerbated the problems caused by the shortage of housing, they obviously didn't create them.

I don't think that's at all obvious. When some "investors" are buying houses and leaving them empty while they appreciate, that seems to demonstrate that this is at least as much a demand-side problem as a supply-side one. Where I live, new high-rise housing is going up everywhere you look, and prices for a 1-bed are still stuck at around 15x average earnings.

I know I sound negative. 20 years of watching this madness unfold will do that to you. I have a kneejerk suspicion of "just build on brownfield land" - it's the housing equivalent of "we'll improve services and reduce taxes by cutting red tape and reducing government waste" - sounds nice, doesn't frighten anyone, but if it were really that easy you'd think it would have actually happened the last 20 times someone said it.

[crdoconnor]

>I know I sound negative. 20 years of watching this madness unfold will do that to you. I have a kneejerk suspicion of "just build on brownfield land" - it's the housing equivalent of "we'll improve services and reduce taxes by cutting red tape and reducing government waste" - sounds nice, doesn't frighten anyone

Of course it frightens people. Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall in value is terrifying. Building a vast amount of housing will do that.

I've watched this madness for 20 years as well and it's painfully clear to me that high house prices was a deliberate choice. The "crisis" made the ultra-wealthy very happy and a large part of middle England were fairly okay with it too.

[mrec]

> Owning mortgaged property and watching it fall in value is terrifying. Building a vast amount of housing will do that.

Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry whenever anyone even starts looking sideways at the green belt. Nobody is terrified of brownfield, which is why I strongly suspect that brownfield alone isn't going to make a damn bit of difference; to steal a phrase, "if building on brownfield changed anything they'd make it illegal".

> it's painfully clear to me that high house prices was a deliberate choice

Yes, very obviously. And not just in the obvious "pandering to donor builders and smug homeowners" sense, either; debt creation through mortgage lending is at the heart of UK monetary policy now. Probably the most extreme example I've ever seen of jam today at the cost of long-term disaster.

[crdoconnor]

>Exactly. And yet "why can't they build on brownfield?" is the immediate cry whenever anyone even starts looking sideways at the green belt.

The kinds of the people who start looking sideways at the greenbelt (the Economist very much included) implies to me that it's more about building big expensive houses for the wealthy in a nice green area than it is about building affordable housing for Londoners.

The very fact that the Economist would lobby for this while simultaneously slamming the "ultra left wing" Corbyn policy of "just build more council housing" ought to be a sign that something is amiss.

[lhopki01]

> My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment.

Does this mean you think that supply is adequate and the only issue is that? We have been running a deficit of 200,000 units of housing a year for over 30 years. The shortfall has been made up, in London at least, by turning flat living rooms into bedrooms and splitting up housing into smaller and smaller units.

Also 200,000 units over 5 years is not impressive it's downright pathetic. We used to build 200,000 units of council housing a year as well as 200,000 units of private housing a year.

I don't care if a party gives away the housing as an electoral bribe down the line I just want the housing to be built now and continue to be built to keep house prices from ever going up.

[mrec]

> Does this mean you think that supply is adequate and the only issue is that?

If only I'd written a second sentence directly after the one you quoted which could have answered such questions...

I want lots of housing built too, and I want prices to collapse and stay collapsed, and I want Mark Carney tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail, but as you say we seem to have become congenitally useless at building houses in this country.

By all means let's work on improving that, but we're probably looking at more decades even in the best case. I think the sentiment and finance and speculative aspects of the problem could be tackled much more quickly if the politics align to allow it.

[lhopki01]

While I agree that buy to let inflates prices a tiny bit the biggest issue is still lack of supply. For all the cheap credit out there many can still not get a house. It's not that they can't afford to pay the mortgage (often mortgages are cheaper than renting) it's that they can't get a mortgage big enough because you can only get a mortgage at 5 times your salary.

In the best case if developers were forced to build once they had planning permission rather than sitting on land and the government built houses like it used to the problem would be mostly gone within a decade.

[djmobley]

> I'd rather live centrally. If height restrictions were eliminated and councils started building pretty much everybody who wanted to, could.

High-rise buildings are a hugely inefficient use of land and energy. 5-6 storey mansion blocks would be the optimum.

But it is not height restrictions that preclude that kind of development in central London. The foremost problem is a lack of available land.

We could build millions and millions of houses in the green belt. In a country of ~20m homes, that will necessarily have a huge effect.

If we can break free of the notion of UK property as an ever-appreciating safe investment, we may also deter some speculators and crater prices entirely.

[crdoconnor]

>High-rise buildings are a hugely inefficient use of land and energy.

High rise buildings are MORE efficient, not less. The more dense the city, the more energy efficient it is: http://www.citylab.com/work/2012/04/why-bigger-cities-are-gr...

>But it is not height restrictions that preclude that kind of development in central London. The foremost problem is a lack of available land.

You just have to look at the number of people packed into a smaller area in Manhattan to see that that isn't true.

>We could build millions and millions of houses in the green belt.

You could also build millions of apartments inside it and then maybe people wouldn't have to live in Uxbridge and Barnet AND you wouldn't have to make air quality in London even worse.