4 ms·

I've seen plenty of numbers on empty housing in London defined as "we asked the owners whether they live there and they said 'yes'". Anybody who doesn't think

• Lazare 9y ago
  > You could demolish that and build high rise flats for a thousand people there, maybe more. That sounds like a big argument in favour of "building more units will fix the problem" then. :) > Anybody who doesn't think this is a problem just needs to take a look at one Hyde park. I'm going to stick with data over anecdotes. If the data we have is flawed, then we need better data in order to make decisions; it doesn't mean we should just ignore data.
  • crdoconnor 9y ago
    >That sounds like a big argument in favour of "building more units will fix the problem" then. :) It's an argument in favour of building units people will live in (e.g. council housing) and against big units that consume large amounts of land that people won't live in (e.g. yet another block of luxury flats treated as gold-bar-like stores of wealth). The amount of property tax paid on those apartments is pitiful and amounts to a market distortion. It needs to be raised about 100x before the owners will be incentivized to yield hoarded land to more productive use. >I'm going to stick with data over anecdotes. So you think if the data is simply based upon asking people if they live in their properties that it is to be believed?