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"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. Bu
by rickdeckard 2y ago
"These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth."
I can't find this mentioned anywhere in the article, but the current imbalance of supply and demand and the resulting high prices is quite beneficial for parts of the real estate lobby which don't focus on building houses but on maximizing value from existing properties.
Approximately one in five Members of UK Parliament are landlords or have investments in the property market.
So while the article is advocating for the removal of "barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do", it seems to be blissfully unaware of the powerful forces outside and likely WITHIN the political parties that rather prefer to maintain this imbalance...
- f6v 2y ago> Approximately one in five Members of UK Parliament are landlords or have investments in the property market. Ah, the class-based society.
- thepaulmcbride 2y agoEverybody wants affordable housing until it’s their housing becoming affordable.
- rickdeckard 2y agoIf only those people outside of my window would just "vote with their wallets" and stop demanding a roof to live under, demand would die down and prices would stabilize again. It's simple free market economics! /s
- robertlagrant 2y agoIt is indeed simple free market economics: far more demand for housing than there is supply.
- HPsquared 2y agoMission accomplished, in other words.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoHere in Australia, there are 227 sitting Members of Parliament, of those: one in three federal politicians (71) own two properties; one in three (77) own three or more properties, and about one in three (67) own one property. Eleven federal politicians don't own a home, at least not in their name, and of those only one is known to be a renter. I don't know why we call it Parliament House, it should be call the House of Lords. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-16/how-many-properties-do-australian-federal-politicians-own/104476596 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-16/how-many-properties-d...
- rickdeckard 2y agoOr Lords of Housing
- taneq 2y agoAnd somehow this group, in the name of 'affordable housing', keeps coming up with ways to enable people to pay more and more for houses, rather than coming up with ways to make home ownership less expensive. I guess it's just one of those mysteries we may never solve.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoHere's some more Recreational Statistics (a branch of Recreation Mathematics): There are about 11.1 million residential properties in Australia, 30% of which, some 3.25 million residential properties, are held by investors.[1] There are 25 million people in Australia, about 17.5 million of those are adults aged 25 years or older, of which about 12.8%, or 2.25 million, own one or more investment properties.[1,2] Let's assume the majority of investment property owners also own their own home. So, about 13% of Australian adults own about 60% of the housing. Does that sound reasonable? I don't know if there's some alternate timeline where housing is more evenly distributed and life is better, or how to get there if we think that's a good idea. 1. https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-many-australians-own-investment-properties-in-2024 https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-... 2. https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-many-australians-own-investment-properties-in-2024/ https://realtyai.com.au/inside-australias-property-boom-how-...
- graemep 2y agoThis is absolutely key. The lobbies are very rich (because they own lots of land) and therefore very influential.
- lucidguppy 2y agoThe Normans strike again!
- nickdothutton 2y agoAbout 70% of the land in the UK will never be built on for various reasons. This leaves 30%. That 30% contains all the towns, cities, suburbs, and various industrial estates, ports, airports and so on. The actual amount of land vaguely available for projects of any sort is rather small, and those projects face heavy headwinds in terms of planning permissions, NIMBYs, and other interests expressed often by people living nowhere near the land in question.
- robertlagrant 2y agoYou don't even need lobbies. Anyone who owns a house isn't bothered by this, unless they are particularly fair-minded. It only affects people who don't own their own home, which is a much smaller voting group.
- throwawayffffas 2y agoNot only are they not bothered. If they are even slightly aware of the situation they know it's in their financial interest. And if they are not aware of the economics most still have a bias against new construction especially high density in their area, because of the "nuisance" that construction will cause.
- lenerdenator 2y agoSounds like it's time to make them bothered. It's the same problem as here in the US: a bunch of people who have gotten fat off of not providing an equal or better future for the next generation.
- mytailorisrich 2y agoIn the year ending June 2024 the net migration into the UK was 728,000. That is the root cause. The government (and this hasn't started with the current government) has a policy of high immigration then makes noise about the need of doing more to solve the "housing crisis"...
- rickdeckard 2y agoCoincidentally that's also roughly the birth-rate of the UK 20 years prior (2004: 715,996 [0]), a group of people I assume also arrived on the housing-market by now. The population (and this hasn't started with the current population) has a tendency to shag around and then make noise about the need of housing (and food, and education, and...) [0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/annualbirthratesfrom2000to2016 https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
- mytailorisrich 2y agoExcept that with immigration you add adults and families that need housing as soon as they get into the country. Additionally the birth rate has now been below replacement rate for long enough that population would start to decrease without immigration (and the need for housing would obviously decrease with it). I can't understand this disparaging stance against anyone who brings the issue of immigration up. It is at the highest level on record and the only cause of increasing population but, no the only issue is that we should build more apparently. And we should also do that while saving the climate and the environment. There are many contradictions and cognitive dissonance here... And the way my comment is shut down is very telling of that.
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- mc32 2y agoA big part of the problem is the UK used to let in about 100 thou immigrants yearly, that figure is now over a million per year. That means putting up a new house every few minutes. Unless you let Lagos or Caracas-style slums flourish, that’s not going to happen.
- nickdothutton 2y agoOne of the reasons the Grenfell Tower disaster was so bad, is you had about 130 apartments with about 650 people in them. Illegally sub-let by the official council tenant.
- throwawayffffas 2y agoThe Grenfell Tower disaster happened because they chose to clad the building in plastic. If the building had in-wall insulation and no cladding or non-flammable cladding like say steel the whole thing would be a minor fire in one apartment.
- immibis 2y agoIs it better to deliver low-quality housing or none at all? The guy with no housing would be better served even with a large cardboard box, but the police would come and take it away from him if he tried. Banning the symptoms of the problem doesn't solve the problem.
- mc32 2y agoThe problem is high pop growth. If they regulated the growth to a manageable level, the problem would be manageable. As it is they are importing other countries' housing problems. We saw that in the Us in the 1920s where we had slums and boarding houses. At least in the US we have land. Places like the UK and Japan have limited land. Canada, Brazil, Argentine, Libya have lots of land, the UK does not.
- lenerdenator 2y agoIf you can't get local population to grow, you have to bring in your labor from somewhere else. And of course, like most wealthy nations, the British birth rate has been in the toilet since the 70s. This is also a reason that Brexit happened. Arguably the reason, even. There are a lot of working-class people whose families have been in the British Isles for centuries who look at the lack of progress relative to what their ancestors saw during the Empire and postwar eras, and want someone to blame. In this case it was Brussels' migration policies, even though it was providing essential labor that the British economy needs and cannot get from "real British" people because they don't have kids at the necessary rate.
- noja 2y agoWhy is the answer always more real estate, and not private ownership of housing? If you don’t live in it you can’t have it.
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- ben_w 2y agoUK House ownership rates are pretty high, but they went down right after the global financial crisis, presumably because the banks had tighter lending rules: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/214874/economics/why-its-become-difficult-to-buy-a-house-in-the-uk/ https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/214874/economics/why-its-... House prices are also way up. Lots of people who own them really like this, but it makes it harder to become a home owner in the first place.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoFor most people who own houses it's probably not relevant that the value has gone up? If you upgrade you pay the margin, which is higher. Legal/admin/moving costs tend to be a percentage of house value, so costs are higher. When you retire you might downsize and release a lot of equity, but that's not going to be true for most house owners (happy to be proved wrong) - downsizing is for the wealthy, if I ever downsize it will be to a cardboard box. Most home owners will have children, prices being high negatively effects them, and finances tend to be somewhat shared (from 0% upwards...) so prices being high is a problem here too. Maybe I'm missing something about the situation. I guess my kids will be happy for the money when I die, but it'll be easily eaten up by their housing debts. So people without dependents; people who are very wealthy. Apart from those groups I don't really see how house value changing after purchase helps
- ben_w 2y ago> If you upgrade you pay the margin, which is higher. Legal/admin/moving costs tend to be a percentage of house value, so costs are higher. Indeed. But psychology: monkey likes seeing number go up.
- alexb_ 2y agoHave we tried just taxing land?
- happymellon 2y agoSet tax bands radiating from the centre of a city. The centre gets a higher rate than the edges? We get a lot of dead towns because of speculation on land.
- rmk 2y agoIt does mention a previous instance of the Thatcher government failing because the insider had this exact mindset...