[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.