4 ms·

> The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level

> The two main factors for this are: two-person income households up-bidding, making it less affordable for single people/mums/dads, and an unsustainable level of immigration. No, the one main factor is lack of new housing, mainly due to the green belt. On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration. Unless you want some sort of dystopian mass sterilisation policy, or simple a mass slaughter of young people, the only solution is to build more houses. Government policy is unfortunately concentrated on giving first time buyers access to bigger mortgages, but of course this is just going to drive up prices. In a free market, that would incentivise house builders to build more houses, but with no land to build them on there's no way for that to happen.

HPsquared 2y ago
Reproduction is below replacement across the entire developed world. (Edit: Israel has 2.9 TFR but that's an exceptional case, and Saudi has 2.3 but that's more of an emerging market)
philipallstar 2y ago
> On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration This is from ONS[0]: > Natural change has previously been the main driver of UK population growth. However, since the 1990s, the influence of net migration has increased, becoming the main source of growth. The UK is not a devoping country. It would have a very stable population, or even a fractionally declining population, without net migration. And house prices for young people would look very different. [0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/2020#Net+migration https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
- quietbritishjim 2y ago
  Hmm, I'll admit I'm wrong. Thanks for the source. I do think there's a cause and effect reversal though: if housing supply was plentiful enough to allow young people to move out as early as boomers could, there would quite likely be much higher natural population growth. (i,e. it's hard for people in their twenties to have relationships when both sides are living at home)
  - philipallstar 2y ago
    I'm not commenting on whether overall it's a good thing economically, although I'd be astonished if it is. I'm just saying it's clearly one of the two main factors for making life incredibly difficult for younger people trying to buy a house.
  - flir 2y ago
    You're not wrong. Yes, the composition of our population growth has changed, but we've had constant population growth (more or less) for decades. Sometimes it runs a little ahead, sometimes it runs a little behind, but on the whole it's a remarkably straight line. Our house building has always kept up with our population growth before - immigration isn't a sudden surprise that nobody could have seen coming, it's literally business as usual, and the failure to build enough houses for the entire population is a failure. If you want to be a bit higher-level about it, government has pursued mutually exclusive policies (underbuilding and high immigration) and now the consequences are starting to bite. But IMO, if immigration had been cut, housebuilding would have been cut even further - house price inflation has been popular with the electorate, historically. https://www.statista.com/statistics/281296/uk-population/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/281296/uk-population/
    - gadders 2y ago
      >>Yes, the composition of our population growth has changed, but we've had constant population growth (more or less) for decades. I think if you look at Net Migration, the jump is very sudden: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-fig... >> government has pursued mutually exclusive policies (underbuilding and high immigration) Both policies are popular with the capital owning "rich" - it keeps the value of the property high, and it keeps employee wages low.
      - flir 2y ago
        Those policies were popular with "people who voted", not just the rich. > I think if you look at Net Migration, the jump is very sudden: That's the composition of the growth, not the population growth itself. I'm saying that if population growth was 100% from local births, or if population growth was much lower, we'd still be in this situation. The source of the population growth is immaterial.
xienze 2y ago
> On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration. No, it’s really not. When a citizen is born, they don’t need their own place to live until they’re 18-20 years old. There’s time for the housing supply to catch up. When a citizen is imported, they need housing TODAY. No two ways about it, 1M births every year is a lot more sustainable from a new housing perspective than 1M immigrants every year (on top of births!).
- schnitzelstoat 2y ago
  The immigrants also pay taxes from today though. And have their own purchasing power for the private market. The issue is more NIMBY's preventing supply from meeting demand and local government not using the increased revenue effectively enough to provide sufficient infrastructure and services.
  - xienze 2y ago
    > The immigrants also pay taxes from today though. But do they also consume less in social services than they contribute in taxes? Everyone has this romantic picture in their head that the never ending waves of immigrants to western countries are all doctors, lawyers, and nuclear physicists. In the US we seem fixated on bringing in poor, uneducated Central Americans. In Europe it’s a lot of poor, uneducated Africans. Perhaps through sheer numbers the GDP goes up, but the net value is debatable. > The issue is more NIMBY's preventing supply Wow, imagine that. People who bought a nice single family home don’t want a thirty story low income housing project plopped down next to them. There’s plenty of room on the outskirts of any given town to build the hundreds of skyscrapers needed annually to house these people, why not do that instead of trying to jam it all in existing areas and pissing off people who didn’t sign up for it?
    - gadders 2y ago
      >>Perhaps through sheer numbers the GDP goes up, but the net value is debatable. GDP is going up, but GDP per capita is currently declining.
- 2y ago
Angostura 2y ago
Or is the main factor foreign investors treating residential property as an investment, rather than somewhere to live in?
- ben_w 2y ago
  Foreign investment requires either the property can be resold later for more, or let out for the duration. The former is a bubble that eventually collapses, the latter still has people living in those properties for whatever the market rates are.
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    > The former is a bubble that eventually collapses The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. There's lots of incentives from everyone involved (all the way up to the government itself) to ensure this bubble never collapses, bending the rules and everything else around it if necessary - not too dissimilar to how the speed of light remains a static constant regardless of an observer's own speed, with space and time adjusting around them as needed to ensure this.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Indeed. But: > There's lots of incentives from everyone involved (all the way up to the government itself) to ensure this bubble never collapses, bending the rules and everything else around it if necessary The more this happens, the harder the resulting crash. The same argument as the Laffer curve for taxes, but for rent: when it gets to 100% of income, there's no incentive to bother immigrating, and all the reason to emigrate.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  In a normal functioning market, foreign investment would mean more houses getting built.
globular-toast 2y ago
Women had 1.9 children on average in 2017: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42110846 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42110846 More than 50% of women aged 30 were child-free in 2022: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/27/women-child-free-30-ons https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/27/women-c... Has reproduction increased a lot since then? If we build houses everywhere where do we grow food? Where do we go to get some peace and quiet? We don't all want to live in a hell hole where the only chance of quiet is in a small sealed box.
- zelos 2y ago
  Building houses is never going to have a significant impact on food growth in the UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england-2022/land-use-statistics-england-2022 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england...
kypro 2y ago
Obviously it's a multi-facade problem, but the other commenter was closer to the truth imo. There is no natural population growth in the UK anymore. We have below replacement rate birth rates. Immigration is the only net driver of population growth today and immigration is currently growing the population at around 2% annually. We saw similar problems with housing affordability in Canada after their mass-migration experiment. It honestly surprises me that there are still people who deny that mass-immigration policy without a comparable mass-home-building policy would increase house prices. The UK would need to build something like 500,000 homes a year just to keep up with the current rate of immigration. This isn't feasible in any near-term time frame. As it stands, if you want mass-immigration to continue you must accept increased home unaffordability. Obviously you can offset the impact of immigration by building more houses, and the UK should build more houses, but to say that you would need a sterilisation policy to fix is obviously wrong – you just need to slow the flow immigration and the growth of the population to levels which match the rate at which the UK can build homes and new infrastructure. The bidding up of property prices in the UK is also an issue and the parent commenter is right to raise it. It's not just dual-income families responsible there though, but also wealthy, foreign and corporate buyers. In the UK property is seen more as an investment than somewhere to live. So here it's quite common for people to buy and hold property simply for the return. Often properties in the UK are brought by foreign investors and left unoccupied. We've tried to make changes to stop this in recent years, but it's a problem.

HPsquared 2y ago

Reproduction is below replacement across the entire developed world. (Edit: Israel has 2.9 TFR but that's an exceptional case, and Saudi has 2.3 but that's more of an emerging market)

philipallstar 2y ago

> On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration This is from ONS[0]: > Natural change has previously been the main driver of UK population growth. However, since the 1990s, the influence of net migration has increased, becoming the main source of growth. The UK is not a devoping country. It would have a very stable population, or even a fractionally declining population, without net migration. And house prices for young people would look very different. [0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/2020#Net+migration https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

quietbritishjim 2y ago
Hmm, I'll admit I'm wrong. Thanks for the source. I do think there's a cause and effect reversal though: if housing supply was plentiful enough to allow young people to move out as early as boomers could, there would quite likely be much higher natural population growth. (i,e. it's hard for people in their twenties to have relationships when both sides are living at home)
- philipallstar 2y ago
  I'm not commenting on whether overall it's a good thing economically, although I'd be astonished if it is. I'm just saying it's clearly one of the two main factors for making life incredibly difficult for younger people trying to buy a house.
- flir 2y ago
  You're not wrong. Yes, the composition of our population growth has changed, but we've had constant population growth (more or less) for decades. Sometimes it runs a little ahead, sometimes it runs a little behind, but on the whole it's a remarkably straight line. Our house building has always kept up with our population growth before - immigration isn't a sudden surprise that nobody could have seen coming, it's literally business as usual, and the failure to build enough houses for the entire population is a failure. If you want to be a bit higher-level about it, government has pursued mutually exclusive policies (underbuilding and high immigration) and now the consequences are starting to bite. But IMO, if immigration had been cut, housebuilding would have been cut even further - house price inflation has been popular with the electorate, historically. https://www.statista.com/statistics/281296/uk-population/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/281296/uk-population/
  - gadders 2y ago
    >>Yes, the composition of our population growth has changed, but we've had constant population growth (more or less) for decades. I think if you look at Net Migration, the jump is very sudden: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-fig... >> government has pursued mutually exclusive policies (underbuilding and high immigration) Both policies are popular with the capital owning "rich" - it keeps the value of the property high, and it keeps employee wages low.
    - flir 2y ago
      Those policies were popular with "people who voted", not just the rich. > I think if you look at Net Migration, the jump is very sudden: That's the composition of the growth, not the population growth itself. I'm saying that if population growth was 100% from local births, or if population growth was much lower, we'd still be in this situation. The source of the population growth is immaterial.

xienze 2y ago

> On the supply side, natural population growth due to reproduction is surely a bigger driver than immigration. No, it’s really not. When a citizen is born, they don’t need their own place to live until they’re 18-20 years old. There’s time for the housing supply to catch up. When a citizen is imported, they need housing TODAY. No two ways about it, 1M births every year is a lot more sustainable from a new housing perspective than 1M immigrants every year (on top of births!).

schnitzelstoat 2y ago
The immigrants also pay taxes from today though. And have their own purchasing power for the private market. The issue is more NIMBY's preventing supply from meeting demand and local government not using the increased revenue effectively enough to provide sufficient infrastructure and services.
- xienze 2y ago
  > The immigrants also pay taxes from today though. But do they also consume less in social services than they contribute in taxes? Everyone has this romantic picture in their head that the never ending waves of immigrants to western countries are all doctors, lawyers, and nuclear physicists. In the US we seem fixated on bringing in poor, uneducated Central Americans. In Europe it’s a lot of poor, uneducated Africans. Perhaps through sheer numbers the GDP goes up, but the net value is debatable. > The issue is more NIMBY's preventing supply Wow, imagine that. People who bought a nice single family home don’t want a thirty story low income housing project plopped down next to them. There’s plenty of room on the outskirts of any given town to build the hundreds of skyscrapers needed annually to house these people, why not do that instead of trying to jam it all in existing areas and pissing off people who didn’t sign up for it?
  - gadders 2y ago
    >>Perhaps through sheer numbers the GDP goes up, but the net value is debatable. GDP is going up, but GDP per capita is currently declining.
2y ago

Angostura 2y ago

Or is the main factor foreign investors treating residential property as an investment, rather than somewhere to live in?

ben_w 2y ago
Foreign investment requires either the property can be resold later for more, or let out for the duration. The former is a bubble that eventually collapses, the latter still has people living in those properties for whatever the market rates are.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  > The former is a bubble that eventually collapses The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. There's lots of incentives from everyone involved (all the way up to the government itself) to ensure this bubble never collapses, bending the rules and everything else around it if necessary - not too dissimilar to how the speed of light remains a static constant regardless of an observer's own speed, with space and time adjusting around them as needed to ensure this.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Indeed. But: > There's lots of incentives from everyone involved (all the way up to the government itself) to ensure this bubble never collapses, bending the rules and everything else around it if necessary The more this happens, the harder the resulting crash. The same argument as the Laffer curve for taxes, but for rent: when it gets to 100% of income, there's no incentive to bother immigrating, and all the reason to emigrate.
HPsquared 2y ago
In a normal functioning market, foreign investment would mean more houses getting built.

globular-toast 2y ago

Women had 1.9 children on average in 2017: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42110846 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42110846 More than 50% of women aged 30 were child-free in 2022: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/27/women-child-free-30-ons https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/27/women-c... Has reproduction increased a lot since then? If we build houses everywhere where do we grow food? Where do we go to get some peace and quiet? We don't all want to live in a hell hole where the only chance of quiet is in a small sealed box.

zelos 2y ago
Building houses is never going to have a significant impact on food growth in the UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england-2022/land-use-statistics-england-2022 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england...

kypro 2y ago

Obviously it's a multi-facade problem, but the other commenter was closer to the truth imo. There is no natural population growth in the UK anymore. We have below replacement rate birth rates. Immigration is the only net driver of population growth today and immigration is currently growing the population at around 2% annually. We saw similar problems with housing affordability in Canada after their mass-migration experiment. It honestly surprises me that there are still people who deny that mass-immigration policy without a comparable mass-home-building policy would increase house prices. The UK would need to build something like 500,000 homes a year just to keep up with the current rate of immigration. This isn't feasible in any near-term time frame. As it stands, if you want mass-immigration to continue you must accept increased home unaffordability. Obviously you can offset the impact of immigration by building more houses, and the UK should build more houses, but to say that you would need a sterilisation policy to fix is obviously wrong – you just need to slow the flow immigration and the growth of the population to levels which match the rate at which the UK can build homes and new infrastructure. The bidding up of property prices in the UK is also an issue and the parent commenter is right to raise it. It's not just dual-income families responsible there though, but also wealthy, foreign and corporate buyers. In the UK property is seen more as an investment than somewhere to live. So here it's quite common for people to buy and hold property simply for the return. Often properties in the UK are brought by foreign investors and left unoccupied. We've tried to make changes to stop this in recent years, but it's a problem.