5 ms·

There has been some talk of support for renters. I'm fairly convinced that this is a bad idea, as any increased will go to the property owners. Bring rental p

by rwj 6y ago

There has been some talk of support for renters. I'm fairly convinced that this is a bad idea, as any increased will go to the property owners. Bring rental prices down means increasing stock, but I'm not sure anyone has a plan for that.

noir_lord 6y ago
I mean we have the plan. The state building decent affordable housing on a massive scale to increase the supply and bring down the absurd prices. The UK managed it post-WW2 when it occurred to the government that hundreds of thousands of well trained, very fit young men who'd been taught to kill where going to need somewhere to live over the next two decades. At the peak of that in the 60's we built 400,000 council houses (in addition to private housing) per year. In 2017 we built 160,000 in total. Also back in the 60's there where strict rules on the size of family council (state) built housing around size - so those 400,000 houses had more generous room sizes on average. The thing the plan lacks is a plan to get around the fact that home-owners will go ballistic and that government disproportionately listens to them and I say this as someone who will be buying a house in the next couple of years. Ironically I'll be putting an ex-council house high on my list because a lot of them where built like battleships, had high ceilings and nice room sizes and frequently decent sized gardens. Picking one I know from growing up. https://www.google.com/maps/@53.7817901,-0.2459041,3a,75y,319.37h,90.67t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swaPjkUQdem4JcfzeugkIHQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@53.7817901,-0.2459041,3a,75y,31... Oh and to make it worse, Covid has and will decimate the house building industry, it's already an ogliopoly (the top 10 builders account for >50% of all houses built and artificially restrict supply to protect prices) - the remaining small builders are basically knackered at this point. They really did build some nice ones. What we really need is people with a bold vision of how to solve the problems, someone like Ebenezer Howard who started the garden city movement in the late victorian era but frankly we don't have them and if we did they likely wouldn't get elected anyway. It seems like we are stuck on this one way downward spiral when it comes to housing for no sensible reason I can see.

by rwj 6y ago

noir_lord 6y ago

I mean we have the plan. The state building decent affordable housing on a massive scale to increase the supply and bring down the absurd prices. The UK managed it post-WW2 when it occurred to the government that hundreds of thousands of well trained, very fit young men who'd been taught to kill where going to need somewhere to live over the next two decades. At the peak of that in the 60's we built 400,000 council houses (in addition to private housing) per year. In 2017 we built 160,000 in total. Also back in the 60's there where strict rules on the size of family council (state) built housing around size - so those 400,000 houses had more generous room sizes on average. The thing the plan lacks is a plan to get around the fact that home-owners will go ballistic and that government disproportionately listens to them and I say this as someone who will be buying a house in the next couple of years. Ironically I'll be putting an ex-council house high on my list because a lot of them where built like battleships, had high ceilings and nice room sizes and frequently decent sized gardens. Picking one I know from growing up. https://www.google.com/maps/@53.7817901,-0.2459041,3a,75y,319.37h,90.67t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swaPjkUQdem4JcfzeugkIHQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@53.7817901,-0.2459041,3a,75y,31... Oh and to make it worse, Covid has and will decimate the house building industry, it's already an ogliopoly (the top 10 builders account for >50% of all houses built and artificially restrict supply to protect prices) - the remaining small builders are basically knackered at this point. They really did build some nice ones. What we really need is people with a bold vision of how to solve the problems, someone like Ebenezer Howard who started the garden city movement in the late victorian era but frankly we don't have them and if we did they likely wouldn't get elected anyway. It seems like we are stuck on this one way downward spiral when it comes to housing for no sensible reason I can see.