7 ms·

UK's Housing Crisis Needs a London-Sized City to Fix It

28 points by jseliger 2y ago

smileybarry 2y ago
Unpaywalled mirror, saved by archive.today/archive.md: http://archive.today/2024.06.25-155719/https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-uk-housing-crisis/ http://archive.today/2024.06.25-155719/https://www.bloomberg... Also posted 14 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835727
bufio 2y ago
Rapidly increasing the population in this situation is probably not the smartest policy.
- 10u152 2y ago
  If the government makes policy to allow huge immigration, it should make corresponding policy to ensure these people are housed. The housing crisis is not from organic population growth.
  - gloryjulio 2y ago
    The government's goal is to use the population growth to prop up real estate while suppressing real wages. They were never ignorant. They were intentional. What you are suggesting is the opposite what they are trying to do
    - dsco 2y ago
      Where is this goal documented? I’ve seen some very counter productive immigration policies in the EU, but using migrants as a way to preserve asset prices and suppress real wages is as creative as thinking the earth is flat.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Politically, there are a lot of promised benefits that need to be delivered to old people and fewer and fewer working hands, meaning higher costs to deliver those benefits since labor prices rise. This would necessitate larger than desired tax increases on the politically influential. Solution: Reduce the quantity and quality of benefits as much as politically possible, but also import more working hands to reduce labor prices. That it helps support asset price increases is just an added benefit.
      - ein0p 2y ago
        That is always the goal with unskilled immigration. It’s not a coincidence, for example, that in the US the Koch brothers and some conservative think tanks opposed closing the border as Trump was clamping down on it. They too like labor to be cheap - their wealth depends on it.
      - ffgjgf1 2y ago
        > as creative as thinking the earth is flat. No, it’s just very basic (completely orthodox) supply/demand economics
    - cedws 2y ago
      Exactly. Immigration has been a massive wealth generator - but only for a subset of people who own businesses, land, and real estate. That wealth hasn’t been fed back into the NHS or public transport, it went into their pockets.
- citrin_ru 2y ago
  Is it rapidly increasing? First two links in google show it grows about 0.33% per year now, which doesn't look too much and lower than peak in 2010 around 0.84% A bigger issue IMHO is an internal migration from former industrial areas to the London commuter belt and South England more broadly without adequate supply of housing (which is a huge boon for real estate investors and hard to believe they don't lobby for red taping). Houses up north are cheaper but equally unaffordable because wages there are low and declining if adjusted to inflation.
- mmarq 2y ago
  How can you look after an older population that doesn’t work and whose pensions increase every year at least as much as salaries, without either increasing taxes or increasing the working population?
NoPicklez 2y ago
This is identical to the problem we have here in Australia Record immigration allowed, without anywhere near the housing to support it
- photonbeam 2y ago
  The problem is that many view the problem as a good problem to have
  - NoPicklez 2y ago
    The problem like many problems, is that it benefits someone, somewhere. In this case it's a good problem to have if you're looking to sell or get a return on an existing investment.
- tiew9Vii 2y ago
  Immigration is exacerbating Australian housing problems. Australia also has an obsession with property speculation as a tax efficient investment with capital gains discounts and negative gearing. Property in Australia isn’t about owning a home, it’s about having an investment. Pretty much all houses in Australia are sold at auction. It’s impossible to get an accurate guide price. Every dark pattern is used to maximise sale price at auction. The auctions them selves are something of a spectacle with real estate agents acting as minor celebrities. So much wealth in Australia is now in property, anything that reduces property value such as building more homes, increasing supply, abolishing negative gearing and capital gains discounts is political suicide. Prosperity owners in Australia have become dependent on the next owner paying more than the current owner to cover negative gearing and make a profit via capital gains. Text book definition of a pyramid scheme. Builders are land banking drip feeding supply. Why increase supply selling for less when they can maximise value by artificially limit supply. Then current own homers are a bunch of middle class NIMBYS. I live in a suburb the NSW government announced has a high priority suburb to build high density as it is along a rail route. Perfect place to build along a rail route with access to the city, central coast etc. The locals don’t want it. Sydney is now the second most expensive place to live in the world. It’s property problems has a lot more to it than immigration.
Proven 2y ago
[dead]
addicted 2y ago
Seems weird that so many of the comments are complaining about immigration (the depletion of which has fucked the NHS, for example) in an article which is talking about the UK not keeping up with building housing for 5 decades, and even if they’d kept pace with many peer European countries they would have had a London’s worth more housing.
- karmsingh 2y ago
  Not weird but expected, if you understand the British population and in particular the media. They're xenophobic and down right racist in their commentary, everything is zero-sum, they see other people doing well and think they must have stolen it from them. Brexit was driven largely by this toxic mix of misinformation and people craving to believe the narrative.
  - karmsingh 2y ago
    I am British and lived there for 30 years by the way and all of my family is there, in case anyone wonders how I know.
    - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
      Curious. I've lived here for 10 years and I don't see it like this.
    - fy20 2y ago
      As a Brit, who now lives in the EU, I would agree with this. Bear in mind that London and the rest of Britain are very different places.
  - randomcarbloke 2y ago
    what a load of nonsense, most international polls determine it to be one of the least xenophobic and most racially tolerant nations, variously coming in at anywhere from third to fifteenth.
    - 2y ago
mamonster 2y ago
Didn't even need to have the years on the X-axis for the first graph to know exactly when (and why) the underbuilding took off. Great job Maggie.
- sparkie 2y ago
  So you want to blame a Prime Minister who came to power in 1979 for something that very clearly started during the previous Labour government throughout the 1970s, and just continued afterwards? Seems to be missing a few details about the state of the British economy under Labour rule. You can also see that during the Blair years, house building declines at an even more rapid rate than during the previous Conservative government. The only thing you can blame Maggie for in this chart is what comes after 1989, which is when she introduced policy (suggested by Viscount Monckton) that allowed people in social housing to buy their homes from government for the first time.
  - Mo3 2y ago
    Same logic as "Biden caused inflation"
    - sparkie 2y ago
      Inflation was caused by lockdowns and the excessive money creation that happened during that time and nothing else. In Britain, they're still trying to blame Brexit for inflation, despite every other nation that wasn't involved in Brexit seeing similar levels of inflation. Clearly this wasn't a Biden policy, but it wasn't really a Trump policy either. It was a WHO/WEF policy that was force-fed to everyone, and supported by all Democrats and most Republicans. A major mistake that policy-makers all over the world still refuse to acknowledge. You can dig up the news articles from 2020 where they're saying "It won't cause inflation," in 2021 where they deny inflation is happening, and in 2022 where they say "it's transitory." Constant gaslighting from governments and media alike. I've described this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32645544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32645544, and also predicted it would happen when it was being proposed, but of course, I'm wrong, according to everyone who did not predict it.
jbu 2y ago
I keep hearing this, and it doesn't make sense. We don't have a london-sized tent city anywhere. But we have generations that can't afford to buy a home, and the rental market is brutal, but we have piles of london 'investment properties' sold offshore and then left empty as speculation (and other market distortions). We have enough houses, but we distribute them badly. was talking about this with a friend who knows more. He did point out we need to replace old housing stock, which we also don't do, so just have cold, mouldy old houses. But that's not what's being talked about here. I also had a twitter conv with a housing charity once, who agreed but pointed out that the financialization of property is hard to overturn, and it's easier to just advocate for more building. Problem I see here is that the new buildings will just be more stock for existing portfolios, and actual prices don't seem to reduce.
- dontpiratekids 2y ago
  we don't have a london sized tent city, but we do have people in their 40s living with multiple other people, as rent is so expensive in most cities. why is rent so expensive that young people are having to live like students far past their early 20s? because there is not enough housing. i myself am 29 and live with two other guys in london, our rent is collectively over £3k for a shoddy built-to-rent flat. looking at house prices in the uk, it's hard to think i'll ever own my own home.
  - jbu 2y ago
    ok. yep that's a thing.
pasabagi 2y ago
Eh, the per-capita housing situation in the UK is 1 house per three people, per gov.uk statistics[0]. A third of a house is plenty for most people. The problem is that these houses are very unevenly distributed, so a large majority are under-inhabited, then a minority are packed to the gills. Building more houses will not solve this - it will just result in yet more empty houses that most people can't afford to live in. [0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/net-supply-of-housing https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/net-supply-of-hous...

28 points by jseliger 2y ago

Unpaywalled mirror, saved by archive.today/archive.md: http://archive.today/2024.06.25-155719/https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-uk-housing-crisis/ http://archive.today/2024.06.25-155719/https://www.bloomberg... Also posted 14 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835727

bufio 2y ago

Rapidly increasing the population in this situation is probably not the smartest policy.

10u152 2y ago
If the government makes policy to allow huge immigration, it should make corresponding policy to ensure these people are housed. The housing crisis is not from organic population growth.
- gloryjulio 2y ago
  The government's goal is to use the population growth to prop up real estate while suppressing real wages. They were never ignorant. They were intentional. What you are suggesting is the opposite what they are trying to do
  - dsco 2y ago
    Where is this goal documented? I’ve seen some very counter productive immigration policies in the EU, but using migrants as a way to preserve asset prices and suppress real wages is as creative as thinking the earth is flat.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Politically, there are a lot of promised benefits that need to be delivered to old people and fewer and fewer working hands, meaning higher costs to deliver those benefits since labor prices rise. This would necessitate larger than desired tax increases on the politically influential. Solution: Reduce the quantity and quality of benefits as much as politically possible, but also import more working hands to reduce labor prices. That it helps support asset price increases is just an added benefit.
    - ein0p 2y ago
      That is always the goal with unskilled immigration. It’s not a coincidence, for example, that in the US the Koch brothers and some conservative think tanks opposed closing the border as Trump was clamping down on it. They too like labor to be cheap - their wealth depends on it.
    - ffgjgf1 2y ago
      > as creative as thinking the earth is flat. No, it’s just very basic (completely orthodox) supply/demand economics
  - cedws 2y ago
    Exactly. Immigration has been a massive wealth generator - but only for a subset of people who own businesses, land, and real estate. That wealth hasn’t been fed back into the NHS or public transport, it went into their pockets.
citrin_ru 2y ago
Is it rapidly increasing? First two links in google show it grows about 0.33% per year now, which doesn't look too much and lower than peak in 2010 around 0.84% A bigger issue IMHO is an internal migration from former industrial areas to the London commuter belt and South England more broadly without adequate supply of housing (which is a huge boon for real estate investors and hard to believe they don't lobby for red taping). Houses up north are cheaper but equally unaffordable because wages there are low and declining if adjusted to inflation.
mmarq 2y ago
How can you look after an older population that doesn’t work and whose pensions increase every year at least as much as salaries, without either increasing taxes or increasing the working population?

NoPicklez 2y ago

This is identical to the problem we have here in Australia Record immigration allowed, without anywhere near the housing to support it

photonbeam 2y ago
The problem is that many view the problem as a good problem to have
- NoPicklez 2y ago
  The problem like many problems, is that it benefits someone, somewhere. In this case it's a good problem to have if you're looking to sell or get a return on an existing investment.
tiew9Vii 2y ago
Immigration is exacerbating Australian housing problems. Australia also has an obsession with property speculation as a tax efficient investment with capital gains discounts and negative gearing. Property in Australia isn’t about owning a home, it’s about having an investment. Pretty much all houses in Australia are sold at auction. It’s impossible to get an accurate guide price. Every dark pattern is used to maximise sale price at auction. The auctions them selves are something of a spectacle with real estate agents acting as minor celebrities. So much wealth in Australia is now in property, anything that reduces property value such as building more homes, increasing supply, abolishing negative gearing and capital gains discounts is political suicide. Prosperity owners in Australia have become dependent on the next owner paying more than the current owner to cover negative gearing and make a profit via capital gains. Text book definition of a pyramid scheme. Builders are land banking drip feeding supply. Why increase supply selling for less when they can maximise value by artificially limit supply. Then current own homers are a bunch of middle class NIMBYS. I live in a suburb the NSW government announced has a high priority suburb to build high density as it is along a rail route. Perfect place to build along a rail route with access to the city, central coast etc. The locals don’t want it. Sydney is now the second most expensive place to live in the world. It’s property problems has a lot more to it than immigration.

Proven 2y ago

[dead]

addicted 2y ago

Seems weird that so many of the comments are complaining about immigration (the depletion of which has fucked the NHS, for example) in an article which is talking about the UK not keeping up with building housing for 5 decades, and even if they’d kept pace with many peer European countries they would have had a London’s worth more housing.

karmsingh 2y ago
Not weird but expected, if you understand the British population and in particular the media. They're xenophobic and down right racist in their commentary, everything is zero-sum, they see other people doing well and think they must have stolen it from them. Brexit was driven largely by this toxic mix of misinformation and people craving to believe the narrative.
- karmsingh 2y ago
  I am British and lived there for 30 years by the way and all of my family is there, in case anyone wonders how I know.
  - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
    Curious. I've lived here for 10 years and I don't see it like this.
  - fy20 2y ago
    As a Brit, who now lives in the EU, I would agree with this. Bear in mind that London and the rest of Britain are very different places.
- randomcarbloke 2y ago
  what a load of nonsense, most international polls determine it to be one of the least xenophobic and most racially tolerant nations, variously coming in at anywhere from third to fifteenth.
  - 2y ago

mamonster 2y ago

Didn't even need to have the years on the X-axis for the first graph to know exactly when (and why) the underbuilding took off. Great job Maggie.

sparkie 2y ago
So you want to blame a Prime Minister who came to power in 1979 for something that very clearly started during the previous Labour government throughout the 1970s, and just continued afterwards? Seems to be missing a few details about the state of the British economy under Labour rule. You can also see that during the Blair years, house building declines at an even more rapid rate than during the previous Conservative government. The only thing you can blame Maggie for in this chart is what comes after 1989, which is when she introduced policy (suggested by Viscount Monckton) that allowed people in social housing to buy their homes from government for the first time.
- Mo3 2y ago
  Same logic as "Biden caused inflation"
  - sparkie 2y ago
    Inflation was caused by lockdowns and the excessive money creation that happened during that time and nothing else. In Britain, they're still trying to blame Brexit for inflation, despite every other nation that wasn't involved in Brexit seeing similar levels of inflation. Clearly this wasn't a Biden policy, but it wasn't really a Trump policy either. It was a WHO/WEF policy that was force-fed to everyone, and supported by all Democrats and most Republicans. A major mistake that policy-makers all over the world still refuse to acknowledge. You can dig up the news articles from 2020 where they're saying "It won't cause inflation," in 2021 where they deny inflation is happening, and in 2022 where they say "it's transitory." Constant gaslighting from governments and media alike. I've described this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32645544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32645544, and also predicted it would happen when it was being proposed, but of course, I'm wrong, according to everyone who did not predict it.

jbu 2y ago

I keep hearing this, and it doesn't make sense. We don't have a london-sized tent city anywhere. But we have generations that can't afford to buy a home, and the rental market is brutal, but we have piles of london 'investment properties' sold offshore and then left empty as speculation (and other market distortions). We have enough houses, but we distribute them badly. was talking about this with a friend who knows more. He did point out we need to replace old housing stock, which we also don't do, so just have cold, mouldy old houses. But that's not what's being talked about here. I also had a twitter conv with a housing charity once, who agreed but pointed out that the financialization of property is hard to overturn, and it's easier to just advocate for more building. Problem I see here is that the new buildings will just be more stock for existing portfolios, and actual prices don't seem to reduce.

dontpiratekids 2y ago
we don't have a london sized tent city, but we do have people in their 40s living with multiple other people, as rent is so expensive in most cities. why is rent so expensive that young people are having to live like students far past their early 20s? because there is not enough housing. i myself am 29 and live with two other guys in london, our rent is collectively over £3k for a shoddy built-to-rent flat. looking at house prices in the uk, it's hard to think i'll ever own my own home.
- jbu 2y ago
  ok. yep that's a thing.

pasabagi 2y ago

Eh, the per-capita housing situation in the UK is 1 house per three people, per gov.uk statistics[0]. A third of a house is plenty for most people. The problem is that these houses are very unevenly distributed, so a large majority are under-inhabited, then a minority are packed to the gills. Building more houses will not solve this - it will just result in yet more empty houses that most people can't afford to live in. [0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/net-supply-of-housing https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/net-supply-of-hous...