| >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. |
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.