65 ms·

Why Britain doesn’t build

246 points by Twixes 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago
Britain's energy-per-capita has collapsed since 1965 [0]. How are they meant to build houses and live in them without energy? Construction is one of the most energy-intensive activities we have, and maintaining a warm home is up there. Britain is one of the usual suspects who listened to environmentalists, fought nuclear, let fossil fuels slide and bet big on renewables. They're going to need to have a bit of a focus on finding some energy somewhere if they want to reclaim the "glory" of even the 1950s. Standards have to drop. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy https://ourworldindata.org/energy
- yrro 3y ago
  energy-use-per-capita. Not sure what switching to energy efficient lightbulbs and vacuum cleaners has to do with the collapse in housing supply.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Run me through, order of magnitude, where you think this 25% reduction in per capita energy use is coming from. Lightbulbs and vacuum cleaners aren't going to cover anything interesting.
    - ricardo81 3y ago
      Efficiency gains. Transport, combi boilers, electronic devices (such as TV) are all far more efficient. Also the transition from manufacturing to service sector. Quite likely that the inefficient burning of coal would explain away some of the difference. We barely burn any coal for electricity generation now, and residential coal fires are far less common.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        You didn't even guess at orders of magnitude. Probably because if you had you'd be nervous. > Efficiency gains. Transport... Picking on this first one, population in the UK has gone from 50 to ~70 million since the 1950s. Transport energy use has risen from <30 to ~50 mtoe over the same period ([0], collapsed 2019-2020 for obvious reasons not related to efficiencies). Something increasing faster than population cannot account for per capita reductions in energy use. It is statistically impossible. Ironically, thanks to the logic of Jevon's Paradox, transport probably is much more efficient. That is why it is consuming more energy per-capita than it did before. And how much do you think electronics efficiency gains can explain since the 50s? Electronics didn't exist at any significant market penetration in the 50s. Computers may as well not have existed. Ditto phones. What we're seeing is the UK de-industrialising, and likely that is being accompanied by reductions in goods availability (and building things like houses). > combi boilers How much of the 25% per capita energy reductions do you think this accounts for, and with what justification? > Quite likely that the inefficient burning of coal The BBC says there is an energy crisis [1]. They say global, China is surprised by that. Based on the countries they name, it seems to be a euphemism for "places with no fossil fuels". So much for these efficiencies gained by not using fossil fuels. [0] chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1061644/Energy_Consumption_in_the_UK_2021.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60112068 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60112068
        ricardo81 3y ago
        Did you factor in that China makes a lot of the products that were once created in the UK for UK use?
        roenxi 3y ago
        How much impact do you think that makes, order of magnitude? & why do you think that?
- dijit 3y ago
  I mean, there's a few things inaccurate with this statement. The UK's targets meet the very minimum which they agreed to with other nations (Paris Accords: https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement) but are trotted out by the conservatives as if they're very forward thinking. However, it was 2008 that the UK agreed that it would build more nuclear energy generation plants, and EDF planned to build 4 of those by 2017. On 26 January 2017, the UK notified the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) of its intention to withdraw, following on from its decision to withdraw from the European Union. Leaving has wide-ranging implications for Britain's nuclear industry, including regulation and research, access to nuclear materials and impacts about twenty nuclear co-operation agreements with non-EU countries. The UK withdrawal raises the question of nuclear fuel availability in the UK, and the need for the UK to enter into new treaties relating to the transportation of nuclear materials, which haven't even begun. In 2020, nuclear power generated 46 terawatt hours (TWh) of UK electricity, just over 15% of gross electricity generation, and about half its 1998 peak of 91 TWh. The new EDF sites aren't ready and are expected to be commissioned by 2026, just in time for Hartlepool and Heysham 1 to close down.
- lukeck 3y ago
  Energy use per capita has dropped because people are using less electricity, and generation has dropped to match. Power systems need to be operated so that demand very closely matched supply from second to second. If people use more, more power can be generated. The grid is not at capacity. I agree with you that cheap, sustainable power sources need to be found but I’m not quite understanding your argument for why.
- deathgripsss 3y ago
  Britain moved away from being a manufacturing to a service based economy which uses significantly less energy.
bluescrn 3y ago
There's loads of houses being built in the UK (often of questionable quality, built for maximum profit, packed into minimal amounts of space). It may still not be enough to match the demand, but the real problem is we don't seem to be building any infrastructure to support these homes. More people and more homes requires more roads, railways, hospitals, police stations, power stations, sewer capacity, even reservoirs, and lots more. And this rarely seems mentioned in discussions of the housing crisis or rising immigration. And as a nation we're incapable of building infrastructure without cost and/or timescale spiralling completely out of control. See HS2.
- dairylee 3y ago
  The infrastructure is often insufficient for existing homes nevermind for any expansion. I've recently moved house but I'm having to stay registered to my Dentist & Doctors 30 miles away because the wait list to get registered in my new town is months.
  - muteor 3y ago
    They just built over 1000 homes near me, but not one dentist or doctors. Now the small local surgeries are expected to take these new households on. Again government policy not holding up to community needs.
    - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
      To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor like you can a home. First the homes come, then the residents move in. Those residents will have demands, such as health and dental care. Once those demands are heard, the doctors and dentists will finally build their offices.
      - jwestbury 3y ago
        Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world. But this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable by government intervention.
ggm 3y ago
I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights declarations. What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix housing when states can do precisely that? Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes. It made individual householders deliriously happy, enshrined them as Tory voters for decades and from shelter statistics left 1.5 million families functionally homeless. Millions live in penury, in squalid hotels because councils are disincentivised from fixing things, penalised even. Australia's housing crisis is just as bad. Truly sordid tropes about rent caps and freezes are trotted out again and again, as if simply reciting them makes them axioms: they're not. All statements about effects on housing stocks are contextual and depend on other social policy, including (surprise surprise) building more rental homes by the state. I'm a home-owner at the end of my working life. If I was a young person, this above all other things would radicalise me. Our elected leadership are captive to stupid market force arguments. I'd rather they tried and failed than sat on their hands.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  > Our elected leadership are captive to stupid market force arguments Perhaps recently, but the state driven housebuilding programs have met similar failures. Local authorities and their residents seem equally hostile to housebuilding whether it's made by the private sector or public sector (see the backlash faced by Labour governments under Harold Wilson or Tony Blair). Perhaps one of the better arguments against democracy in general is that it makes housebuilding so difficult.
  - cnity 3y ago
    > Local authorities and their residents seem equally hostile to housebuilding whether it's made by the private sector or public sector In my experience (in Edinburgh) the vast majority of people I speak to tend to view the private developments (especially the insatiable appetite for student accommodation) and short term lets far less favourably. Granted, Edinburgh is a special case with an incredibly high demand for short term letting and students.
tsukikage 3y ago
TLDR: once people own a house, it is no longer in their interest to let anyone else build one, and in Britain this tail wags the dog.
leg100 3y ago
The housing crisis is universal. There's been growing inability to build in many countries, as the article readily admits. People can't afford homes across the world: USA, Canada, Australia, even China, where supply isn't a problem per se. The article should then address this global phenomenon rather than conclude it is a "political problem", suggesting it is some kind of peculiar ideology exported out of Britain.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  That's neoliberalism, baby. You'll see the same pattern with healthcare, water, waste, media, energy, etc; every common good is being scooped up as much as possible by private interests. The ultra-wealthy have a sophisticated playbook for doing this which maximises profit at the expense of the vast majority of the population. It's international. A complicit media owned by the same private interests acts like this is all a big mystery, and any individual or group that gets too effective at making this plain is systematically irrelevanced.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  So China has an overbuilding problem, right? To the point of demolishing apartment blocks, etc. How does this marry up? Is it the age old problem of building too much in suburbs people don't want to actually live in? Or the old problem of new build apartments being too expensive for most people, so require a bubble?
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    China's problem is two fold afaik: They allowed apartment buildings to be built that aren't up to code or even structurally sound enough to live in and must be demolished because they're completely unsafe, and all of the ones that were up to code were immediately bought up as investments and left empty by real estate speculators. Letting people have homes would kill demand and lower prices of course, can't have that.
    - Grimburger 3y ago
      This is hilariously wrong. Yes in a country of 1 billion people there are dodgy apartments, but then again in my country of 26 million people an estimated 60% of new apartments have flaws, big ones in the middle of Sydney have been deemed unlivable only a few years after being built. China overbuilds entire cities and everyone mocks them for it, but a few years later those cities fill up and people conveniently forget about that. Even the commentator who coined the term Ghost Cities admits they have become functional economic powerhouses. > Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...
thesaintlives 3y ago
One word - corruption. Britain builds plenty but not on a social basis. Profit is king. To get planning permission costs money. Appeal committees must be bought. Britain is the most corrupt country not in Europe..
- easytiger 3y ago
  > Appeal committees must be bought. Britain is the most corrupt country not in Europe.. Local authorities refusing planning isn't corruption. And if you think Britain is corrupt I assume you have no familiarity with other countries.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    Local authorities refusing planning, then granting it when you write a cheque for 10k for the planning officer is corruption. It wasnt a cheque, but a pair of first class tickets to the bahamas for the planning officer and their wife, totally worth it thought. Its not even an open secret, its a known fact. https://www.theplanner.co.uk/2020/08/03/local-authorities-are-unable-prevent-corruption-planning-says-report https://www.theplanner.co.uk/2020/08/03/local-authorities-ar...
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      > councils should ensure all meetings between councillors, developers and their agents in major planning decisions are attended by at least one council official Unfortunately many councils (including my own) are now run by an executive consisting of officials. People have known for decades that the planning committee is crooked; but I guess that's what you get in a university town where the uni owns most of the best land in the town, is the largest employer, and even used to have it's own parliamentary seat.
      - blitzar 3y ago
        > councils should ensure all meetings between councillors, developers and their agents in major planning decisions are attended by at least one council official Of course council officials want to be in the room ... They want a piece of the action. The planning officers were kicking back only a small portion of the bribes to the councilors and pocketing the bulk for themselves.
danjac 3y ago
This is an interesting political trap for the ruling Conservatives that they have made for themselves. The traditional Conservative voter is a home-owner. So you might be a rabid socialist in your youth, but once you get a job, save up for a deposit, and buy your own home, you eventually transition to become yet another middle-aged Tory voter. That pipeline is now broken - young people are unable to save up for their own home or get a mortgage, unless they have generational wealth. House rises have risen sharply and wages have remained stagnant, and now we have inflation - for necessities like food and bills - eating into what little people had to begin with. The solution of course is damn the torpedoes and embark on a massive house-building programme like in the post-war period, but a) the post-Thatcher Conservatives consider that against everything they believe in, and b) current home owners - their ageing voting base - are NIMBYs who don't want the wrong sort of people living near them and any reduction in demand that would reduce their value of their homes (and they're going to need to sell their homes soon, to pay for social and health care in an increasingly threadbare welfare state). The British press of course likes to blame "woke millenials" or whatever to keep their geriatric readership happy but this is the real reason for the collapse in the Tory vote in the under 50s.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  The British Army were fought to a standstill by communist rebels in Malaya. The war only turned when the puppet government was persuaded to give the peasants land and homes.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  Sounds like a problem that will fix itself? According to you, do nothing and the Tories will be out.
  - bluescrn 3y ago
    A change of government won't fix any fundamental problems with housing/infrastructure. These are long-term problems and government thinking is inherently short-term.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
bloqs 3y ago
Something cannot both be a good investment and accessible to all. The decision was made to make them a good investment, and thus our lazy, entitled economy that is addicted to foreign goods and services became what it is today.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dumpsterdiver 3y ago
  > Something cannot both be a good investment and accessible to all. Roads are a perfect example of a good investment that is accessible to all. It's called a "common good", and it exists.
  - bloqs 3y ago
    I mean in a financial sense. A good investment with a high guarantee of high return cannot also be financially accessible to all (read: affordable)
  - 8bp 3y ago
    Who's out here speculating on roads?
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Nobody, and it should be the damn same with housing.
    - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      ASTM, sovereign wealth funds, etc. Toll roads can be a pretty good investment.
  - beisner 3y ago
    OP means something more like "a security which appreciates on average faster than inflation", AKA an asset I can purchase and hold and sell later for more than I paid for it+improvements in real terms.
Jochim 3y ago
Planning permission was granted for 2.78m homes between 2011-2021. Only 1.6m homes were built[0]. I find it interesting, given the length of the article, that this wasn't mentioned. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/08/over-1m-homes-in-england-with-planning-permission-not-built https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/08/over-1m-home...
- blitzar 3y ago
  Housing, housebuilding, planning etc is such a divisive topic, where everyone has anchored in to a heavy bias that there is little rational conversation. The problems are so poorly diagnosed that the solutions (that people then double down on) only worsen all the problems.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    I don't necessarily agree. Different countries have different issues but in the case of the UK neo-liberal policy has clearly been the root cause. Social housing stock was sold off, ostensibly to occupiers, at significantly less than market value. This comical scheme is still going on today, imagine the reaction of landlords if private renters were offered a 70% discount[0] on the purchase price of a property. An interesting phenomenon occurred when the scheme was introduced as well, neighbourhoods were canvassed with offers to purchase the house they rented. Many of the people living in these houses wouldn't be approved for a mortgage, so on the same day many of these houses were sold at their insane discount, they would be sold on immediately to a private investor. At the same time councils were prevented from reinvesting that capital in the construction of new housing stock. The result is that the UK has some of the highest rents in Europe and also some of the poorest housing quality. Privately rented flats are often full of mold, with tenants are unable to assert their rights due to fear of retaliation. It has also contributed to the majority of the economy being centralised in London. Putting aside the intentional annihilation of the UK's productive industries for a moment. Private builders are incentivised to invest where demand is currently hottest leaving other regions to deteriorate. The result is that even more economic activity is now occurring in the region which encourages ever more economic concentration. State provisioned housing is concerned with wider societal benefit. Short term profit matters much less, meaning they can invest in rural or currently unproductive areas in hope of nurturing economic growth there. This simply doesn't occur otherwise. The power wielded by the kind of large enterprise encouraged by neo-liberal policy prevents the kind of organic growth that makes most communities a pleasant place to live. We can see that in the total dearth of parks, green space, local shops, doctors offices and schools in the UK's new build developments. I won't go into much detail about the raft of other problems that neo-liberalism introduces but disposable income only recently recovered to 1960s levels, both members of the household are now working and yet they're often struggling to afford basic necessities. All of these contribute to the issue of housing affordability and provision. [0] https://www.gov.uk/right-to-buy-buying-your-council-home/discounts https://www.gov.uk/right-to-buy-buying-your-council-home/dis...
DrBazza 3y ago
That article has one chart in it that isn't emphasized enough - home ownership in the UK is a new thing, and historically not typical. Perhaps it's going to become the 'new normal'. Britain isn't flat, especially compared to Belgium and Holland, or even France, which is twice the size. And everyone wants to live in the South East because London is the economic centre, for better or worse. The situation in the south east where we can either grow crops on flat land, or build houses, on the same flat land. And then house builders have the bare faced cheek to name the streets of the new estates after things they've destroyed or you'll never see again. Which brings us to the spoke (and no wheel) arrangement of railway lines into London. HS1, and soon HS2 allowing more dormitory towns further out from London where the land is cheaper. London also had a historic height restrictions on buildings, and even now, has restrictions if they block the view of St Paul's Cathedral. When the 'new tallest building', the NatWest tower was built to a colossal... 600ft (183m), it was controversial [1] in the 1970s. At least now there are tower blocks getting built in London that are tall. Except they're expensive, get bought out by foreign investors. And then left empty. So they're not much help to anyone other than speculators and developers. It feels like something is going to break in the UK, but it's been like this for at least 30 years. It seems like far too much of the UK economy is based on this Ponzi scheme of property. You get better returns on property than any other kind of investment. There's whole industries based off of the back of it too (personal investment, and corporate investment, and pension investment funds, estate agents, legal, builders, development, architects, etc.) and the vast amount of tax the govt. takes from all of that. If the UK somehow gets the property market under control (whatever that means), it would have serious implications for the economy as a whole. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_42#Design_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_42#Design_and_developmen...
- troad 3y ago
  > At least now there are tower blocks getting built in London that are tall. Except they're expensive, get bought out by foreign investors. And then left empty. So they're not much help to anyone other than speculators and developers. I can't help but be reminded of this meme: https://ifunny.co/picture/big-real-estate-companies-intentionally-keep-apartments-vacant-because-it-JrWO2CUQA https://ifunny.co/picture/big-real-estate-companies-intentio... There is no circumstance in which it is more profitable to leave an apartment empty than to rent it out, and both speculators and developers understand this. Other than that I don't disagree with you - there is a cottage industry around the 'housing only ever goes up' assumption, and a lot of legislative moats designed to ensure it stays that way. Until these are defeated - and I'm a lot less optimistic about the UK and Australia than the US on this - housing will sadly remain unaffordable for most.
Joeri 3y ago
So the article claims that the housing construction boom that ended at the second WW led to a massive stock of housing, which has since declined due to planning issues, leading to a shortage of housing and therefore a rise in prices. This does not hold up statistically. 1939: 11.3 million dwellings in the UK, population 47.9 million people = 4.2 people per dwelling today: 27 million dwellings in the UK, population 67.7 million people = 2.5 people per dwelling A thought occurred: maybe there are now fewer people per household. This however does not hold up to scrutiny either. The number of UK households rose 19% in 27 years, a rate comparable to the increase in housing stock. If anything there is more housing than ever in the UK relative to population size. If prices have risen, it's not because of a lack of housing.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  > A thought occurred: maybe there are now fewer people per household. This however does not hold up to scrutiny either what do you mean? it makes perfect sense given the definition of household that it'll be extremely similar to the number of houses. The ratio you're talking about is exactly a reduction in the average number of people per household.
- kieranmaine 3y ago
  My understanding is it's because of lack of house in the places with highest demand. The article gives the following example: "The economist Paul Cheshire notes that between 1980 and 2018 the declining industrial areas of Burnley and Doncaster built 56,340 houses while adding 22,796 new residents. By comparison, the high-wage university towns of Cambridge and Oxford built just 29,340 houses for a combined population growth of 95,079"
- dignick 3y ago
  Housing stock is growing faster than population. There are other more complex issues behind our inflating housing market than just ‘not enough homes’, but nobody seems to want to talk about them: https://positivemoney.org/2023/01/more-than-building-new-houses/ https://positivemoney.org/2023/01/more-than-building-new-hou...
breakingrules 3y ago
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LatteLazy 3y ago
There are 100 ways we could solve this. And 100 groups, one to veto each way. So nothing will be done, it's the bystander effect. The same basic thing prevents action on climate change.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  The West has moved to a Vetocracy. It prevents things from becoming significantly worse, but also things from becoming much better.
  - LatteLazy 3y ago
    I think nations always devolve into this if there is no leadership or central purpose...
black_13 3y ago
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isaacremuant 3y ago
I don't know about Britain but London builds and keeps tearing down homes and low quality repurposing them into 3/4 units and creating a perpetual construction state instead of descentralizing. Planning permits are questionable in their legality and you feel things just get rubber stamped and there's a pretense of process in the same vein of the first chapter of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.
dahwolf 3y ago
In the Netherlands we don't really have a big NIMBY issue and we still can't keep up supply with demand. Supply is complicated and not just restricted by zoning. One key thing to understand is that private companies build homes, not governments. And if it's not profitable to do so, it will simply stop. And if not at least 75% of the project is sold beforehand, the project is stopped altogether. And this is how our government's ambitious plan to build ~100K new homes per year got crushed. In particular due to rate hikes, making mortgages even more expensive than before, so potential buyers opt-out. This part is critically important to reflect on as it keeps happening. There's an economic downturn and the building of new homes slows down or stops. This happened over here from 2008-2014 creating a massive backlog, in turn leading to a pricing boom in recent years. Ideally, you'd keep building during a downturn but nobody knows how as there's no buyers and it's too big to subsidize. Hence, at least in the Netherlands, unaffordable prices are not due to zoning, they are a supply deficit based on downturns. There's also labor shortage, material shortage/inflation, far more complicated construction due to the energy transition. And yes, higher than usual immigration is a factor. One of many factors. And guess what? In my area, the grid is full. A few more homes can get connected but not a single new company can connect for the coming 10 years or so and it takes billions in investments to fix. This in reference to new housing supply having lots of other dependencies. We also tried rent control on private rent. Guess what? The land lords simply sell the property, now you'll have even less rent supply. Well done. My point being: increasing supply is not easy in this perfect storm. Surely the entire western world would not have this problem if it was a simple as a policy change. It very much involves constraints in the physical and economical world.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  The Netherlands has basically the highest long-term private:public building rate in Europe. Uk is second. Other Western European countries have publicly built units as a higher proportion, so it feels it ought to be possible for the Netherlands government to build more public housing. Doubt it’s necessary though. I expect there might be some kind of public-private middle ground that gets classified differently in NL, but that’s a guess.
- pas 3y ago
  one of the big problems is runaway costs (and not just due to grid upgrades and need for new transport lines, but because construction is still ridiculously labor intensive and undercapitalized), simply put it's at the same time too small scale and complex (and fragmented) to industrialize. only scale can get the same quality for lower price. but construction happens in small batches. even though the inputs are very similar, there's no aggregate market force pushing down costs (as it's not trivial to substitute local inputs with cheaper ones). and to get bigger scale folks would need to accept new technologies and of course new building arrangements. and, obviously, no developed democratic government wants to risk such a big project.
gumballindie 3y ago
If you wish to solve the housing issue then make it easier for individuals to build homes. Build quality in the uk is appalling anyway so why not streamline the process for people to buy land, build on said land? Also incentivise companies to allow work from home. There is no need for people to cram into overcrowded cities for jobs that dont require in office presence. That way folks can spread around, as i did, in cleaner, safer, less crowded areas of the country.
renewiltord 3y ago
Remember: regulations are written in blood. You can't simply build things willy nilly. The Grenfell Tower fire is a recent and stark reminder of what happens when you don't apply a lot of trained and expert input into things.
- asdff 3y ago
  You can, however, build willy nilly copies of things that you've already approved previously and deemed are still habitable. Even that though is unpalatable, by right development hardly happens anywhere these days.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    The thing that changes is where you're building it. China tried the cookie-cutter approach and see what they got: buildings falling down. It turns out that even if you approved something in one circumstance it doesn't apply to another. Since the ground conditions are different, each building is truly different. This isn't software where you can put it in a Docker container. There's a reason why everything requires planning approval in almost every big city in America: lives matter. People matter.
    - asdff 3y ago
      If you got rid of cookie cutter buildings because they might be fraught then you'd have to condemn most of nyc and most of london. The home era boom these articles all cite came because they were just churning out the same floorplans or more or less the same buildings with the same materials all day. In the US you could even order one of these standardized homes from the sears catalog, have it shipped to you already cut and build it yourself or hire a contractor who does these same homes all day. I really believe we are letting perfect be the enemy of good here, and saying we'd rather tolerate things like people living in overcrowded tenemant conditions or in cars or tents, because that's the status quo today for many of the working poor with these prices, over potential unknowns of reusing a building plan.
      - 3y ago
IceHegel 3y ago
It seems like lots of places that used to build don't anymore (USA anyone) and detailed analysis about why a particular nation or sector is having issues is always helpful. That being said, I think there is also a background issue of much of the "democratic" (really oligarchic) way of governing being overall spent and exhausted. It can't focus energy at anywhere near the intensity it used to. Compare the New Deal to recent infrastructure bills. Imagine building the CA Highway 1 today... that was one of hundreds of successful new deal projects. But you can't repeat the past and we keep trying to with ever larger bureaucracies doing fainter and fainter imitations of the new deal.
jraedisch 3y ago
For people to be able to save and expand their wealth in land, land needs to remain desirable. Desire is driven by the need for housing. Need for housing stays high if the rate of new housing stays low. Thus, rate of new housing stays low. Else we would have a lot more very beautiful sky scrapers.
raylad 3y ago
TL/DR (according to ChatGPT-4): The article titled "Why Britain doesn’t build" by Samuel Watling, published on 23rd May 2023, discusses the history and challenges of housing development in Britain. Here are the key points: Post-War Housing Crisis: After the Second World War, Britain faced a severe housing crisis due to strict planning rules enacted by both Labour and Conservative governments. These rules gave local councils the power to block nearly all housebuilding, with little incentive to permit it. Despite various attempts to address this issue, such as regional planning, a land commission, New Towns, and attempts to loosen planning controls, all of these efforts failed. Historical Context: Britain's housing situation has been shaped by its historical context. From the Victorian period onwards, cities expanded with the help of trains, trams, and underground railways, creating the world’s first suburbs. However, housing supply collapsed during the First World War due to the mobilization of potential construction workers for the army, leading to a housing shortage and subsequent rent strikes. Green Belts and New Towns: The concept of green belts and New Towns was introduced to control urban expansion. However, this led to a shortage of building land and an increase in its price from 1955. The green belt around London expanded from a 9- to a 35-mile radius, as neighboring counties rushed to end the prospect of displaced development from the original green belt areas. Land Commission and Housing Production: The Wilson government set up a Land Commission in 1965 to deal with the shortage of land designated for housebuilding and the resulting high land prices. However, local administrations in the South East of England and the Midlands opposed the measures and refused to cooperate with the commission. The Commission was disbanded in 1970, leading to a flatlining of overall housing production in the mid-1960s. Current Situation: The article concludes by stating that the housing crisis in Britain is not due to a lack of political will but due to a lack of understanding of the political dynamics of housebuilding. The author suggests that future leaders should learn from past mistakes and devise smarter strategies to address the housing crisis.
x3874 3y ago
At least in my and other countries, there seems no city with restrictions on moving in. Would solve some issues and stop making public sector, traffic worse for true locals. (HN seems to fancy a ban on Airbnbs, as if your quiet single tourist poses an issue...) As if an ever-expanding human dwelling is desirable. Immigration quotas for countries exist (well, at least for sensible countries), we should apply that on a regional and even local level too. And don't account for that typical Middle Eastern large family in such numbers, they shouldn't be there anyway.
- x3874 3y ago
  Hey come on 'Progressives', give me some more of your well-earned downvote ability! That's all you got!
esskay 3y ago
Like a lot of things in Britain there's a chronic lack of development, and a 'pass the buck' trend. Our water infrastructure is another prime example. There's been no real investment in decades and the system we have in place was designed for a population in the 1950s. As a result our reserves are woefully inadiquate, resulting in the annual 'hose pipe ban'. The rhetoric around it has changed recently though. According to one of the water boards its "because everyones working from home", ignoring the fact that we've had these issues long before the uptick in WFH. Our electricity supply is just as bad, although this is one area thats getting a fair bit of private investment with offshore wind, but the lack of storage ability makes this useless at certain times of the year, resulting in situations like we had in late 2022 where old mothballed power stations had to be turned back on to meet demand. Our housing issues are extremely frustrating. What little development does happen is often carried out to the bare minimum specifications to pass building regulations, with houses that may as well be made of paper and rooms the size of clossets due to massive overdevelopment on each plot of land. Really we should've been building 3-4 new major cities spread around the country. We've had a few smaller scale towns (Cambourne comes to mind) but they don't go nearly far enough to solve the issue. We've also got huge swaths of abandoned industrial land in the north, and whilst there has been some regeneration it's often "premium" tiny apartments in places like Manchester and Sheffield, primarily being sold to landlords who then let them out to university students.
- nsteel 3y ago
  I'm not sure we have the ability to just build a new city from scratch. They already tried to build New Towns and politics got in the way, as detailed further in the article.
nomaD_ 3y ago
I am in Indian immigrant living in the UK for past 5 years. The housing system here feels extremely stupid to me. They basically resell houses 100+ years old at 5% higher value every year. It's kinda like gold or bitcoin, except those assets are actually very limited in number. But housing is simply artificially limited due to policies. Total UK housing stock is worth 10T GBP vs 2.2T GBP GDP output. Don't think any other country comes even close in terms of skewed reliance on housing as a driver of wealth. I can't imagine the reduction in net worth of citizens (65% are owners) when house prices crash 20% due to higher interest rates. That would be 2T of the 10T value - almost the same as GDP. Anecdotally, every British person I know has a common long term goal - save enough money for a 5-10% deposit on a mortgage. The incentives here are all wrong. You build wealth by investing in a house & taking 90% loan to value mortgages instead of actually working harder. Work is just a means to save enough for deposit & afford a mortgage premiums and maybe 1-2 holidays a year. People complain UK is stagnating. Companies don't want to IPO in London. I can tell why - banks don't want to lend to SMEs. 50% of their lending is actually housing mortgages. Same with people - they would overwhelmingly invest in a house rather than own company shares. Housing is the root cause of malaise in the economy. Take away the incentives to own a house by building more homes, increasing mortgage rates and eliminating government policies helping people to buy & this country would just become much better
- kypro 3y ago
  Great comment. You've described the issue at the upper-end of the income spectrum well. I think you're correct that excess income in this country tends to largely be funnelled into real estate rather than building businesses, but equally on the lower income spectrum (where individuals don't have the income to afford their own homes) their income gets redistributed to the wealthy via high rents (and I'd argue taxation too, but that's another topic). That said, I'm not sure housing is the root cause of our economic problems – although it's certainly part of it. I think the primary issue is government underinvestment and that we just generally don't have very good incentives to build or work here. This has probably been the case for the last 20 or so years and now with these latest economic challenges the consequences are really starting to show. On the wealthier end of the economy I'd argue culturally entrepreneurs and investors are far more risk adverse here. Technology and startups are viewed with more scepticism and less optimism and for this reason people tend do less innovative things. This is compounded by the fact our government has done very little to encourage innovation. So for this reason startups here tend to just apply tech to existing business models. Eg, "we're a bank but with a tech focus", "we're an insurance startup but with a tech focus", "we're an energy company but with a tech focus". This is literally the height of innovation in the UK. We rarely build anything truly new or interesting in the same way I'd argue Scandinavian countries do. Then on top of this you have the government crippling innovation via excessive taxation and regulation – although this is more of a general European issue. On the lower-income side of the equation I have no idea why people work anymore. If you know what you're doing you can earn around £20,000 (tax free) on benefits in the UK. Additionally the government will give you a house (and often a car) so in total you'll generally have a far higher living standard on benefits than getting a working class job paying you £22,000. Whenever I say this I always have middle class people say I'm exaggerating or somehow slandering working class people as being lazy – and to be clear I'm not. I'm from a working class background and the majority of my family are on benefits because it just makes sense.
gadders 3y ago
"Since the Second World War, housing in Britain has become increasingly expensive and scarce. " Net migration was 600,000 people for the previous year. It's not really a surprise.
cbeach 3y ago
In the UK, property developers are forced by the govt to build a certain proportion of social housing into their developments, or to subsidise the building of social housing elsewhere. Obviously, this means the high end property is less desirable (because big spenders are forced to live next-door to social housing tenants). And the social housing built will be boxy and low standard, so again, less desirable, and unprofitable for the developer. Whenever the govt distorts free markets, it creates shortages. And housing is one of those markets where we REALLY need the private sector to be allowed to build properties that will meet true market demands, rather than properties that will satisfy govt ideologies. If housebuilding was unconstrained, there would be more of it, which would be good for people at both ends of the market. More high end property means lower prices at the high end, more people moving up out of mid-scale housing, and so on. Prices would fall across the board, and eventually no one would need social housing. We’d ALL benefit.
- angrais 3y ago
  For reference, this isn't always the case. It is possible for building companies to provide incentives to local authorities to bypass this (£££). Absolutely ridiculous but unfortunately true.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Social housing doesn't have to be bad. It has a (justified) bad reputation because of the crime and antisocial behavior it brings along, which it can do because law enforcement has completely dropped the ball. Social housing can be fine as long as any antisocial behavior is properly addressed by criminal prosecution and evicting problematic tenants. The problem is that isn't happening in practice, and property managers themselves can't do anything about it (dissuasive measures such as CCTV no longer work from my experience, as in my building people from the "affordable" area - or their friends - are happily vandalizing doors and stealing mail in full view of the CCTV).
  - nsteel 3y ago
    This is bang on the money. And exactly describes the state of my building in London, perhaps you are my neighbour. In my case, we've just been given the option to vote (cause that always works so well) to take on a private security service to do the job the police are not able - control the drug dealing and ASB that's ruining the area. It strikes me as pretty odd that since a chunk of the development is social housing, is the state essentially paying for part of the private security?
Lastodon 3y ago
Tldr: Churchill was a good wartime leader, but during his second term he screwed up the housing regulations so bad it broke up one of the longest conservative runs of all time with Attlee coming in to try and fix the mess.
tomaytotomato 3y ago
To summarise: - Lack of political willpower either due to competing priorities, or lobbying - Banks and economy are tightly coupled to UK housing market - Lots of people aren't willing to move to less desirable areas - Lots of people want a McMansion with little/no maintenance - Since WW2 we have been dependant on lumber from outside the UK for timber frame constructions. Its less so nowadays, but still a reason. - Immigration + low supply = demand = profit!
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Immigration Impossible! Brexit was meant to fix that. /s
DeathArrow 3y ago
One way to lower the house prices is slashing the demand. They can do that by limiting immigration.
ftyers 3y ago
It doesn't mention that most land in England is owned by large landowners, including aristocracy and the state. There is no real record of who owns what either. https://map.whoownsengland.org https://map.whoownsengland.org ... We have never really had a real land reform.

246 points by Twixes 3y ago

Britain's energy-per-capita has collapsed since 1965 [0]. How are they meant to build houses and live in them without energy? Construction is one of the most energy-intensive activities we have, and maintaining a warm home is up there. Britain is one of the usual suspects who listened to environmentalists, fought nuclear, let fossil fuels slide and bet big on renewables. They're going to need to have a bit of a focus on finding some energy somewhere if they want to reclaim the "glory" of even the 1950s. Standards have to drop. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy https://ourworldindata.org/energy

yrro 3y ago
energy-use-per-capita. Not sure what switching to energy efficient lightbulbs and vacuum cleaners has to do with the collapse in housing supply.
- roenxi 3y ago
  Run me through, order of magnitude, where you think this 25% reduction in per capita energy use is coming from. Lightbulbs and vacuum cleaners aren't going to cover anything interesting.
  - ricardo81 3y ago
    Efficiency gains. Transport, combi boilers, electronic devices (such as TV) are all far more efficient. Also the transition from manufacturing to service sector. Quite likely that the inefficient burning of coal would explain away some of the difference. We barely burn any coal for electricity generation now, and residential coal fires are far less common.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      You didn't even guess at orders of magnitude. Probably because if you had you'd be nervous. > Efficiency gains. Transport... Picking on this first one, population in the UK has gone from 50 to ~70 million since the 1950s. Transport energy use has risen from <30 to ~50 mtoe over the same period ([0], collapsed 2019-2020 for obvious reasons not related to efficiencies). Something increasing faster than population cannot account for per capita reductions in energy use. It is statistically impossible. Ironically, thanks to the logic of Jevon's Paradox, transport probably is much more efficient. That is why it is consuming more energy per-capita than it did before. And how much do you think electronics efficiency gains can explain since the 50s? Electronics didn't exist at any significant market penetration in the 50s. Computers may as well not have existed. Ditto phones. What we're seeing is the UK de-industrialising, and likely that is being accompanied by reductions in goods availability (and building things like houses). > combi boilers How much of the 25% per capita energy reductions do you think this accounts for, and with what justification? > Quite likely that the inefficient burning of coal The BBC says there is an energy crisis [1]. They say global, China is surprised by that. Based on the countries they name, it seems to be a euphemism for "places with no fossil fuels". So much for these efficiencies gained by not using fossil fuels. [0] chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1061644/Energy_Consumption_in_the_UK_2021.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60112068 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60112068
      - ricardo81 3y ago
        Did you factor in that China makes a lot of the products that were once created in the UK for UK use?
        roenxi 3y ago
        How much impact do you think that makes, order of magnitude? & why do you think that?
dijit 3y ago
I mean, there's a few things inaccurate with this statement. The UK's targets meet the very minimum which they agreed to with other nations (Paris Accords: https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement) but are trotted out by the conservatives as if they're very forward thinking. However, it was 2008 that the UK agreed that it would build more nuclear energy generation plants, and EDF planned to build 4 of those by 2017. On 26 January 2017, the UK notified the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) of its intention to withdraw, following on from its decision to withdraw from the European Union. Leaving has wide-ranging implications for Britain's nuclear industry, including regulation and research, access to nuclear materials and impacts about twenty nuclear co-operation agreements with non-EU countries. The UK withdrawal raises the question of nuclear fuel availability in the UK, and the need for the UK to enter into new treaties relating to the transportation of nuclear materials, which haven't even begun. In 2020, nuclear power generated 46 terawatt hours (TWh) of UK electricity, just over 15% of gross electricity generation, and about half its 1998 peak of 91 TWh. The new EDF sites aren't ready and are expected to be commissioned by 2026, just in time for Hartlepool and Heysham 1 to close down.
lukeck 3y ago
Energy use per capita has dropped because people are using less electricity, and generation has dropped to match. Power systems need to be operated so that demand very closely matched supply from second to second. If people use more, more power can be generated. The grid is not at capacity. I agree with you that cheap, sustainable power sources need to be found but I’m not quite understanding your argument for why.
deathgripsss 3y ago
Britain moved away from being a manufacturing to a service based economy which uses significantly less energy.

bluescrn 3y ago

There's loads of houses being built in the UK (often of questionable quality, built for maximum profit, packed into minimal amounts of space). It may still not be enough to match the demand, but the real problem is we don't seem to be building any infrastructure to support these homes. More people and more homes requires more roads, railways, hospitals, police stations, power stations, sewer capacity, even reservoirs, and lots more. And this rarely seems mentioned in discussions of the housing crisis or rising immigration. And as a nation we're incapable of building infrastructure without cost and/or timescale spiralling completely out of control. See HS2.

dairylee 3y ago
The infrastructure is often insufficient for existing homes nevermind for any expansion. I've recently moved house but I'm having to stay registered to my Dentist & Doctors 30 miles away because the wait list to get registered in my new town is months.
- muteor 3y ago
  They just built over 1000 homes near me, but not one dentist or doctors. Now the small local surgeries are expected to take these new households on. Again government policy not holding up to community needs.
  - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
    To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor like you can a home. First the homes come, then the residents move in. Those residents will have demands, such as health and dental care. Once those demands are heard, the doctors and dentists will finally build their offices.
    - jwestbury 3y ago
      Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world. But this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable by government intervention.

ggm 3y ago

I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights declarations. What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix housing when states can do precisely that? Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes. It made individual householders deliriously happy, enshrined them as Tory voters for decades and from shelter statistics left 1.5 million families functionally homeless. Millions live in penury, in squalid hotels because councils are disincentivised from fixing things, penalised even. Australia's housing crisis is just as bad. Truly sordid tropes about rent caps and freezes are trotted out again and again, as if simply reciting them makes them axioms: they're not. All statements about effects on housing stocks are contextual and depend on other social policy, including (surprise surprise) building more rental homes by the state. I'm a home-owner at the end of my working life. If I was a young person, this above all other things would radicalise me. Our elected leadership are captive to stupid market force arguments. I'd rather they tried and failed than sat on their hands.

spacebanana7 3y ago
> Our elected leadership are captive to stupid market force arguments Perhaps recently, but the state driven housebuilding programs have met similar failures. Local authorities and their residents seem equally hostile to housebuilding whether it's made by the private sector or public sector (see the backlash faced by Labour governments under Harold Wilson or Tony Blair). Perhaps one of the better arguments against democracy in general is that it makes housebuilding so difficult.
- cnity 3y ago
  > Local authorities and their residents seem equally hostile to housebuilding whether it's made by the private sector or public sector In my experience (in Edinburgh) the vast majority of people I speak to tend to view the private developments (especially the insatiable appetite for student accommodation) and short term lets far less favourably. Granted, Edinburgh is a special case with an incredibly high demand for short term letting and students.

tsukikage 3y ago

TLDR: once people own a house, it is no longer in their interest to let anyone else build one, and in Britain this tail wags the dog.

leg100 3y ago

The housing crisis is universal. There's been growing inability to build in many countries, as the article readily admits. People can't afford homes across the world: USA, Canada, Australia, even China, where supply isn't a problem per se. The article should then address this global phenomenon rather than conclude it is a "political problem", suggesting it is some kind of peculiar ideology exported out of Britain.

mandmandam 3y ago
That's neoliberalism, baby. You'll see the same pattern with healthcare, water, waste, media, energy, etc; every common good is being scooped up as much as possible by private interests. The ultra-wealthy have a sophisticated playbook for doing this which maximises profit at the expense of the vast majority of the population. It's international. A complicit media owned by the same private interests acts like this is all a big mystery, and any individual or group that gets too effective at making this plain is systematically irrelevanced.
quickthrower2 3y ago
So China has an overbuilding problem, right? To the point of demolishing apartment blocks, etc. How does this marry up? Is it the age old problem of building too much in suburbs people don't want to actually live in? Or the old problem of new build apartments being too expensive for most people, so require a bubble?
- moffkalast 3y ago
  China's problem is two fold afaik: They allowed apartment buildings to be built that aren't up to code or even structurally sound enough to live in and must be demolished because they're completely unsafe, and all of the ones that were up to code were immediately bought up as investments and left empty by real estate speculators. Letting people have homes would kill demand and lower prices of course, can't have that.
  - Grimburger 3y ago
    This is hilariously wrong. Yes in a country of 1 billion people there are dodgy apartments, but then again in my country of 26 million people an estimated 60% of new apartments have flaws, big ones in the middle of Sydney have been deemed unlivable only a few years after being built. China overbuilds entire cities and everyone mocks them for it, but a few years later those cities fill up and people conveniently forget about that. Even the commentator who coined the term Ghost Cities admits they have become functional economic powerhouses. > Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...

thesaintlives 3y ago

One word - corruption. Britain builds plenty but not on a social basis. Profit is king. To get planning permission costs money. Appeal committees must be bought. Britain is the most corrupt country not in Europe..

easytiger 3y ago
> Appeal committees must be bought. Britain is the most corrupt country not in Europe.. Local authorities refusing planning isn't corruption. And if you think Britain is corrupt I assume you have no familiarity with other countries.
- blitzar 3y ago
  Local authorities refusing planning, then granting it when you write a cheque for 10k for the planning officer is corruption. It wasnt a cheque, but a pair of first class tickets to the bahamas for the planning officer and their wife, totally worth it thought. Its not even an open secret, its a known fact. https://www.theplanner.co.uk/2020/08/03/local-authorities-are-unable-prevent-corruption-planning-says-report https://www.theplanner.co.uk/2020/08/03/local-authorities-ar...
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > councils should ensure all meetings between councillors, developers and their agents in major planning decisions are attended by at least one council official Unfortunately many councils (including my own) are now run by an executive consisting of officials. People have known for decades that the planning committee is crooked; but I guess that's what you get in a university town where the uni owns most of the best land in the town, is the largest employer, and even used to have it's own parliamentary seat.
    - blitzar 3y ago
      > councils should ensure all meetings between councillors, developers and their agents in major planning decisions are attended by at least one council official Of course council officials want to be in the room ... They want a piece of the action. The planning officers were kicking back only a small portion of the bribes to the councilors and pocketing the bulk for themselves.

danjac 3y ago

This is an interesting political trap for the ruling Conservatives that they have made for themselves. The traditional Conservative voter is a home-owner. So you might be a rabid socialist in your youth, but once you get a job, save up for a deposit, and buy your own home, you eventually transition to become yet another middle-aged Tory voter. That pipeline is now broken - young people are unable to save up for their own home or get a mortgage, unless they have generational wealth. House rises have risen sharply and wages have remained stagnant, and now we have inflation - for necessities like food and bills - eating into what little people had to begin with. The solution of course is damn the torpedoes and embark on a massive house-building programme like in the post-war period, but a) the post-Thatcher Conservatives consider that against everything they believe in, and b) current home owners - their ageing voting base - are NIMBYs who don't want the wrong sort of people living near them and any reduction in demand that would reduce their value of their homes (and they're going to need to sell their homes soon, to pay for social and health care in an increasingly threadbare welfare state). The British press of course likes to blame "woke millenials" or whatever to keep their geriatric readership happy but this is the real reason for the collapse in the Tory vote in the under 50s.

denton-scratch 3y ago
The British Army were fought to a standstill by communist rebels in Malaya. The war only turned when the puppet government was persuaded to give the peasants land and homes.
hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
Sounds like a problem that will fix itself? According to you, do nothing and the Tories will be out.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  A change of government won't fix any fundamental problems with housing/infrastructure. These are long-term problems and government thinking is inherently short-term.
- rcxdude 3y ago

bloqs 3y ago

Something cannot both be a good investment and accessible to all. The decision was made to make them a good investment, and thus our lazy, entitled economy that is addicted to foreign goods and services became what it is today.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dumpsterdiver 3y ago
> Something cannot both be a good investment and accessible to all. Roads are a perfect example of a good investment that is accessible to all. It's called a "common good", and it exists.
- bloqs 3y ago
  I mean in a financial sense. A good investment with a high guarantee of high return cannot also be financially accessible to all (read: affordable)
- 8bp 3y ago
  Who's out here speculating on roads?
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Nobody, and it should be the damn same with housing.
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    ASTM, sovereign wealth funds, etc. Toll roads can be a pretty good investment.
- beisner 3y ago
  OP means something more like "a security which appreciates on average faster than inflation", AKA an asset I can purchase and hold and sell later for more than I paid for it+improvements in real terms.

Jochim 3y ago

Planning permission was granted for 2.78m homes between 2011-2021. Only 1.6m homes were built[0]. I find it interesting, given the length of the article, that this wasn't mentioned. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/08/over-1m-homes-in-england-with-planning-permission-not-built https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/08/over-1m-home...

blitzar 3y ago
Housing, housebuilding, planning etc is such a divisive topic, where everyone has anchored in to a heavy bias that there is little rational conversation. The problems are so poorly diagnosed that the solutions (that people then double down on) only worsen all the problems.
- Jochim 3y ago
  I don't necessarily agree. Different countries have different issues but in the case of the UK neo-liberal policy has clearly been the root cause. Social housing stock was sold off, ostensibly to occupiers, at significantly less than market value. This comical scheme is still going on today, imagine the reaction of landlords if private renters were offered a 70% discount[0] on the purchase price of a property. An interesting phenomenon occurred when the scheme was introduced as well, neighbourhoods were canvassed with offers to purchase the house they rented. Many of the people living in these houses wouldn't be approved for a mortgage, so on the same day many of these houses were sold at their insane discount, they would be sold on immediately to a private investor. At the same time councils were prevented from reinvesting that capital in the construction of new housing stock. The result is that the UK has some of the highest rents in Europe and also some of the poorest housing quality. Privately rented flats are often full of mold, with tenants are unable to assert their rights due to fear of retaliation. It has also contributed to the majority of the economy being centralised in London. Putting aside the intentional annihilation of the UK's productive industries for a moment. Private builders are incentivised to invest where demand is currently hottest leaving other regions to deteriorate. The result is that even more economic activity is now occurring in the region which encourages ever more economic concentration. State provisioned housing is concerned with wider societal benefit. Short term profit matters much less, meaning they can invest in rural or currently unproductive areas in hope of nurturing economic growth there. This simply doesn't occur otherwise. The power wielded by the kind of large enterprise encouraged by neo-liberal policy prevents the kind of organic growth that makes most communities a pleasant place to live. We can see that in the total dearth of parks, green space, local shops, doctors offices and schools in the UK's new build developments. I won't go into much detail about the raft of other problems that neo-liberalism introduces but disposable income only recently recovered to 1960s levels, both members of the household are now working and yet they're often struggling to afford basic necessities. All of these contribute to the issue of housing affordability and provision. [0] https://www.gov.uk/right-to-buy-buying-your-council-home/discounts https://www.gov.uk/right-to-buy-buying-your-council-home/dis...

DrBazza 3y ago

That article has one chart in it that isn't emphasized enough - home ownership in the UK is a new thing, and historically not typical. Perhaps it's going to become the 'new normal'. Britain isn't flat, especially compared to Belgium and Holland, or even France, which is twice the size. And everyone wants to live in the South East because London is the economic centre, for better or worse. The situation in the south east where we can either grow crops on flat land, or build houses, on the same flat land. And then house builders have the bare faced cheek to name the streets of the new estates after things they've destroyed or you'll never see again. Which brings us to the spoke (and no wheel) arrangement of railway lines into London. HS1, and soon HS2 allowing more dormitory towns further out from London where the land is cheaper. London also had a historic height restrictions on buildings, and even now, has restrictions if they block the view of St Paul's Cathedral. When the 'new tallest building', the NatWest tower was built to a colossal... 600ft (183m), it was controversial [1] in the 1970s. At least now there are tower blocks getting built in London that are tall. Except they're expensive, get bought out by foreign investors. And then left empty. So they're not much help to anyone other than speculators and developers. It feels like something is going to break in the UK, but it's been like this for at least 30 years. It seems like far too much of the UK economy is based on this Ponzi scheme of property. You get better returns on property than any other kind of investment. There's whole industries based off of the back of it too (personal investment, and corporate investment, and pension investment funds, estate agents, legal, builders, development, architects, etc.) and the vast amount of tax the govt. takes from all of that. If the UK somehow gets the property market under control (whatever that means), it would have serious implications for the economy as a whole. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_42#Design_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_42#Design_and_developmen...

troad 3y ago
> At least now there are tower blocks getting built in London that are tall. Except they're expensive, get bought out by foreign investors. And then left empty. So they're not much help to anyone other than speculators and developers. I can't help but be reminded of this meme: https://ifunny.co/picture/big-real-estate-companies-intentionally-keep-apartments-vacant-because-it-JrWO2CUQA https://ifunny.co/picture/big-real-estate-companies-intentio... There is no circumstance in which it is more profitable to leave an apartment empty than to rent it out, and both speculators and developers understand this. Other than that I don't disagree with you - there is a cottage industry around the 'housing only ever goes up' assumption, and a lot of legislative moats designed to ensure it stays that way. Until these are defeated - and I'm a lot less optimistic about the UK and Australia than the US on this - housing will sadly remain unaffordable for most.

Joeri 3y ago

So the article claims that the housing construction boom that ended at the second WW led to a massive stock of housing, which has since declined due to planning issues, leading to a shortage of housing and therefore a rise in prices. This does not hold up statistically. 1939: 11.3 million dwellings in the UK, population 47.9 million people = 4.2 people per dwelling today: 27 million dwellings in the UK, population 67.7 million people = 2.5 people per dwelling A thought occurred: maybe there are now fewer people per household. This however does not hold up to scrutiny either. The number of UK households rose 19% in 27 years, a rate comparable to the increase in housing stock. If anything there is more housing than ever in the UK relative to population size. If prices have risen, it's not because of a lack of housing.

rcxdude 3y ago
> A thought occurred: maybe there are now fewer people per household. This however does not hold up to scrutiny either what do you mean? it makes perfect sense given the definition of household that it'll be extremely similar to the number of houses. The ratio you're talking about is exactly a reduction in the average number of people per household.
kieranmaine 3y ago
My understanding is it's because of lack of house in the places with highest demand. The article gives the following example: "The economist Paul Cheshire notes that between 1980 and 2018 the declining industrial areas of Burnley and Doncaster built 56,340 houses while adding 22,796 new residents. By comparison, the high-wage university towns of Cambridge and Oxford built just 29,340 houses for a combined population growth of 95,079"
dignick 3y ago
Housing stock is growing faster than population. There are other more complex issues behind our inflating housing market than just ‘not enough homes’, but nobody seems to want to talk about them: https://positivemoney.org/2023/01/more-than-building-new-houses/ https://positivemoney.org/2023/01/more-than-building-new-hou...

breakingrules 3y ago

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LatteLazy 3y ago

There are 100 ways we could solve this. And 100 groups, one to veto each way. So nothing will be done, it's the bystander effect. The same basic thing prevents action on climate change.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago
The West has moved to a Vetocracy. It prevents things from becoming significantly worse, but also things from becoming much better.
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  I think nations always devolve into this if there is no leadership or central purpose...

black_13 3y ago

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isaacremuant 3y ago

I don't know about Britain but London builds and keeps tearing down homes and low quality repurposing them into 3/4 units and creating a perpetual construction state instead of descentralizing. Planning permits are questionable in their legality and you feel things just get rubber stamped and there's a pretense of process in the same vein of the first chapter of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.

dahwolf 3y ago

In the Netherlands we don't really have a big NIMBY issue and we still can't keep up supply with demand. Supply is complicated and not just restricted by zoning. One key thing to understand is that private companies build homes, not governments. And if it's not profitable to do so, it will simply stop. And if not at least 75% of the project is sold beforehand, the project is stopped altogether. And this is how our government's ambitious plan to build ~100K new homes per year got crushed. In particular due to rate hikes, making mortgages even more expensive than before, so potential buyers opt-out. This part is critically important to reflect on as it keeps happening. There's an economic downturn and the building of new homes slows down or stops. This happened over here from 2008-2014 creating a massive backlog, in turn leading to a pricing boom in recent years. Ideally, you'd keep building during a downturn but nobody knows how as there's no buyers and it's too big to subsidize. Hence, at least in the Netherlands, unaffordable prices are not due to zoning, they are a supply deficit based on downturns. There's also labor shortage, material shortage/inflation, far more complicated construction due to the energy transition. And yes, higher than usual immigration is a factor. One of many factors. And guess what? In my area, the grid is full. A few more homes can get connected but not a single new company can connect for the coming 10 years or so and it takes billions in investments to fix. This in reference to new housing supply having lots of other dependencies. We also tried rent control on private rent. Guess what? The land lords simply sell the property, now you'll have even less rent supply. Well done. My point being: increasing supply is not easy in this perfect storm. Surely the entire western world would not have this problem if it was a simple as a policy change. It very much involves constraints in the physical and economical world.

dan-robertson 3y ago
The Netherlands has basically the highest long-term private:public building rate in Europe. Uk is second. Other Western European countries have publicly built units as a higher proportion, so it feels it ought to be possible for the Netherlands government to build more public housing. Doubt it’s necessary though. I expect there might be some kind of public-private middle ground that gets classified differently in NL, but that’s a guess.
pas 3y ago
one of the big problems is runaway costs (and not just due to grid upgrades and need for new transport lines, but because construction is still ridiculously labor intensive and undercapitalized), simply put it's at the same time too small scale and complex (and fragmented) to industrialize. only scale can get the same quality for lower price. but construction happens in small batches. even though the inputs are very similar, there's no aggregate market force pushing down costs (as it's not trivial to substitute local inputs with cheaper ones). and to get bigger scale folks would need to accept new technologies and of course new building arrangements. and, obviously, no developed democratic government wants to risk such a big project.

gumballindie 3y ago

If you wish to solve the housing issue then make it easier for individuals to build homes. Build quality in the uk is appalling anyway so why not streamline the process for people to buy land, build on said land? Also incentivise companies to allow work from home. There is no need for people to cram into overcrowded cities for jobs that dont require in office presence. That way folks can spread around, as i did, in cleaner, safer, less crowded areas of the country.

renewiltord 3y ago

Remember: regulations are written in blood. You can't simply build things willy nilly. The Grenfell Tower fire is a recent and stark reminder of what happens when you don't apply a lot of trained and expert input into things.

asdff 3y ago
You can, however, build willy nilly copies of things that you've already approved previously and deemed are still habitable. Even that though is unpalatable, by right development hardly happens anywhere these days.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  The thing that changes is where you're building it. China tried the cookie-cutter approach and see what they got: buildings falling down. It turns out that even if you approved something in one circumstance it doesn't apply to another. Since the ground conditions are different, each building is truly different. This isn't software where you can put it in a Docker container. There's a reason why everything requires planning approval in almost every big city in America: lives matter. People matter.
  - asdff 3y ago
    If you got rid of cookie cutter buildings because they might be fraught then you'd have to condemn most of nyc and most of london. The home era boom these articles all cite came because they were just churning out the same floorplans or more or less the same buildings with the same materials all day. In the US you could even order one of these standardized homes from the sears catalog, have it shipped to you already cut and build it yourself or hire a contractor who does these same homes all day. I really believe we are letting perfect be the enemy of good here, and saying we'd rather tolerate things like people living in overcrowded tenemant conditions or in cars or tents, because that's the status quo today for many of the working poor with these prices, over potential unknowns of reusing a building plan.
    - 3y ago

IceHegel 3y ago

It seems like lots of places that used to build don't anymore (USA anyone) and detailed analysis about why a particular nation or sector is having issues is always helpful. That being said, I think there is also a background issue of much of the "democratic" (really oligarchic) way of governing being overall spent and exhausted. It can't focus energy at anywhere near the intensity it used to. Compare the New Deal to recent infrastructure bills. Imagine building the CA Highway 1 today... that was one of hundreds of successful new deal projects. But you can't repeat the past and we keep trying to with ever larger bureaucracies doing fainter and fainter imitations of the new deal.

jraedisch 3y ago

For people to be able to save and expand their wealth in land, land needs to remain desirable. Desire is driven by the need for housing. Need for housing stays high if the rate of new housing stays low. Thus, rate of new housing stays low. Else we would have a lot more very beautiful sky scrapers.

raylad 3y ago

TL/DR (according to ChatGPT-4): The article titled "Why Britain doesn’t build" by Samuel Watling, published on 23rd May 2023, discusses the history and challenges of housing development in Britain. Here are the key points: Post-War Housing Crisis: After the Second World War, Britain faced a severe housing crisis due to strict planning rules enacted by both Labour and Conservative governments. These rules gave local councils the power to block nearly all housebuilding, with little incentive to permit it. Despite various attempts to address this issue, such as regional planning, a land commission, New Towns, and attempts to loosen planning controls, all of these efforts failed. Historical Context: Britain's housing situation has been shaped by its historical context. From the Victorian period onwards, cities expanded with the help of trains, trams, and underground railways, creating the world’s first suburbs. However, housing supply collapsed during the First World War due to the mobilization of potential construction workers for the army, leading to a housing shortage and subsequent rent strikes. Green Belts and New Towns: The concept of green belts and New Towns was introduced to control urban expansion. However, this led to a shortage of building land and an increase in its price from 1955. The green belt around London expanded from a 9- to a 35-mile radius, as neighboring counties rushed to end the prospect of displaced development from the original green belt areas. Land Commission and Housing Production: The Wilson government set up a Land Commission in 1965 to deal with the shortage of land designated for housebuilding and the resulting high land prices. However, local administrations in the South East of England and the Midlands opposed the measures and refused to cooperate with the commission. The Commission was disbanded in 1970, leading to a flatlining of overall housing production in the mid-1960s. Current Situation: The article concludes by stating that the housing crisis in Britain is not due to a lack of political will but due to a lack of understanding of the political dynamics of housebuilding. The author suggests that future leaders should learn from past mistakes and devise smarter strategies to address the housing crisis.

x3874 3y ago

At least in my and other countries, there seems no city with restrictions on moving in. Would solve some issues and stop making public sector, traffic worse for true locals. (HN seems to fancy a ban on Airbnbs, as if your quiet single tourist poses an issue...) As if an ever-expanding human dwelling is desirable. Immigration quotas for countries exist (well, at least for sensible countries), we should apply that on a regional and even local level too. And don't account for that typical Middle Eastern large family in such numbers, they shouldn't be there anyway.

x3874 3y ago
Hey come on 'Progressives', give me some more of your well-earned downvote ability! That's all you got!

esskay 3y ago

Like a lot of things in Britain there's a chronic lack of development, and a 'pass the buck' trend. Our water infrastructure is another prime example. There's been no real investment in decades and the system we have in place was designed for a population in the 1950s. As a result our reserves are woefully inadiquate, resulting in the annual 'hose pipe ban'. The rhetoric around it has changed recently though. According to one of the water boards its "because everyones working from home", ignoring the fact that we've had these issues long before the uptick in WFH. Our electricity supply is just as bad, although this is one area thats getting a fair bit of private investment with offshore wind, but the lack of storage ability makes this useless at certain times of the year, resulting in situations like we had in late 2022 where old mothballed power stations had to be turned back on to meet demand. Our housing issues are extremely frustrating. What little development does happen is often carried out to the bare minimum specifications to pass building regulations, with houses that may as well be made of paper and rooms the size of clossets due to massive overdevelopment on each plot of land. Really we should've been building 3-4 new major cities spread around the country. We've had a few smaller scale towns (Cambourne comes to mind) but they don't go nearly far enough to solve the issue. We've also got huge swaths of abandoned industrial land in the north, and whilst there has been some regeneration it's often "premium" tiny apartments in places like Manchester and Sheffield, primarily being sold to landlords who then let them out to university students.

nsteel 3y ago
I'm not sure we have the ability to just build a new city from scratch. They already tried to build New Towns and politics got in the way, as detailed further in the article.

nomaD_ 3y ago

I am in Indian immigrant living in the UK for past 5 years. The housing system here feels extremely stupid to me. They basically resell houses 100+ years old at 5% higher value every year. It's kinda like gold or bitcoin, except those assets are actually very limited in number. But housing is simply artificially limited due to policies. Total UK housing stock is worth 10T GBP vs 2.2T GBP GDP output. Don't think any other country comes even close in terms of skewed reliance on housing as a driver of wealth. I can't imagine the reduction in net worth of citizens (65% are owners) when house prices crash 20% due to higher interest rates. That would be 2T of the 10T value - almost the same as GDP. Anecdotally, every British person I know has a common long term goal - save enough money for a 5-10% deposit on a mortgage. The incentives here are all wrong. You build wealth by investing in a house & taking 90% loan to value mortgages instead of actually working harder. Work is just a means to save enough for deposit & afford a mortgage premiums and maybe 1-2 holidays a year. People complain UK is stagnating. Companies don't want to IPO in London. I can tell why - banks don't want to lend to SMEs. 50% of their lending is actually housing mortgages. Same with people - they would overwhelmingly invest in a house rather than own company shares. Housing is the root cause of malaise in the economy. Take away the incentives to own a house by building more homes, increasing mortgage rates and eliminating government policies helping people to buy & this country would just become much better

kypro 3y ago
Great comment. You've described the issue at the upper-end of the income spectrum well. I think you're correct that excess income in this country tends to largely be funnelled into real estate rather than building businesses, but equally on the lower income spectrum (where individuals don't have the income to afford their own homes) their income gets redistributed to the wealthy via high rents (and I'd argue taxation too, but that's another topic). That said, I'm not sure housing is the root cause of our economic problems – although it's certainly part of it. I think the primary issue is government underinvestment and that we just generally don't have very good incentives to build or work here. This has probably been the case for the last 20 or so years and now with these latest economic challenges the consequences are really starting to show. On the wealthier end of the economy I'd argue culturally entrepreneurs and investors are far more risk adverse here. Technology and startups are viewed with more scepticism and less optimism and for this reason people tend do less innovative things. This is compounded by the fact our government has done very little to encourage innovation. So for this reason startups here tend to just apply tech to existing business models. Eg, "we're a bank but with a tech focus", "we're an insurance startup but with a tech focus", "we're an energy company but with a tech focus". This is literally the height of innovation in the UK. We rarely build anything truly new or interesting in the same way I'd argue Scandinavian countries do. Then on top of this you have the government crippling innovation via excessive taxation and regulation – although this is more of a general European issue. On the lower-income side of the equation I have no idea why people work anymore. If you know what you're doing you can earn around £20,000 (tax free) on benefits in the UK. Additionally the government will give you a house (and often a car) so in total you'll generally have a far higher living standard on benefits than getting a working class job paying you £22,000. Whenever I say this I always have middle class people say I'm exaggerating or somehow slandering working class people as being lazy – and to be clear I'm not. I'm from a working class background and the majority of my family are on benefits because it just makes sense.

gadders 3y ago

"Since the Second World War, housing in Britain has become increasingly expensive and scarce. " Net migration was 600,000 people for the previous year. It's not really a surprise.

cbeach 3y ago

In the UK, property developers are forced by the govt to build a certain proportion of social housing into their developments, or to subsidise the building of social housing elsewhere. Obviously, this means the high end property is less desirable (because big spenders are forced to live next-door to social housing tenants). And the social housing built will be boxy and low standard, so again, less desirable, and unprofitable for the developer. Whenever the govt distorts free markets, it creates shortages. And housing is one of those markets where we REALLY need the private sector to be allowed to build properties that will meet true market demands, rather than properties that will satisfy govt ideologies. If housebuilding was unconstrained, there would be more of it, which would be good for people at both ends of the market. More high end property means lower prices at the high end, more people moving up out of mid-scale housing, and so on. Prices would fall across the board, and eventually no one would need social housing. We’d ALL benefit.

angrais 3y ago
For reference, this isn't always the case. It is possible for building companies to provide incentives to local authorities to bypass this (£££). Absolutely ridiculous but unfortunately true.
Nextgrid 3y ago
Social housing doesn't have to be bad. It has a (justified) bad reputation because of the crime and antisocial behavior it brings along, which it can do because law enforcement has completely dropped the ball. Social housing can be fine as long as any antisocial behavior is properly addressed by criminal prosecution and evicting problematic tenants. The problem is that isn't happening in practice, and property managers themselves can't do anything about it (dissuasive measures such as CCTV no longer work from my experience, as in my building people from the "affordable" area - or their friends - are happily vandalizing doors and stealing mail in full view of the CCTV).
- nsteel 3y ago
  This is bang on the money. And exactly describes the state of my building in London, perhaps you are my neighbour. In my case, we've just been given the option to vote (cause that always works so well) to take on a private security service to do the job the police are not able - control the drug dealing and ASB that's ruining the area. It strikes me as pretty odd that since a chunk of the development is social housing, is the state essentially paying for part of the private security?

Lastodon 3y ago

Tldr: Churchill was a good wartime leader, but during his second term he screwed up the housing regulations so bad it broke up one of the longest conservative runs of all time with Attlee coming in to try and fix the mess.

tomaytotomato 3y ago

To summarise: - Lack of political willpower either due to competing priorities, or lobbying - Banks and economy are tightly coupled to UK housing market - Lots of people aren't willing to move to less desirable areas - Lots of people want a McMansion with little/no maintenance - Since WW2 we have been dependant on lumber from outside the UK for timber frame constructions. Its less so nowadays, but still a reason. - Immigration + low supply = demand = profit!

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Immigration Impossible! Brexit was meant to fix that. /s

DeathArrow 3y ago

One way to lower the house prices is slashing the demand. They can do that by limiting immigration.

ftyers 3y ago

It doesn't mention that most land in England is owned by large landowners, including aristocracy and the state. There is no real record of who owns what either. https://map.whoownsengland.org https://map.whoownsengland.org ... We have never really had a real land reform.