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UK has a chronic shortage of houses, as in, if you count the people in the country and how many houses you need, that's a bigger number than what you've got. B

UK has a chronic shortage of houses, as in, if you count the people in the country and how many houses you need, that's a bigger number than what you've got. Building in the UK is also hard. England, which is like 90% of the population, is very densely inhabited. Cities are sprawling, their road and transit infrastructure barely support their current size, never mind bigger population. Plus, with the housing bubble, people who barely could afford their homes in the first place feel understandably terrified of anything that drops these prices down. What the UK did post-WWII and is proposing to do now feels quite bold, but also smart: build new cities. Milton Keynes, for example, was built from scratch. In fact Bletchley, of Bletchley Park fame and now a small suburb, used to be the train stop. It was built from scratch with adequate infrastructure, parks, high and low density zones, schools and fire stations, on land which I can only imagine was much cheaper than the equivalent in London zone 7. It hugged an existing train line so was connected to the rest of the country "for free". Is that a way forward? Bootstrapping whole towns, instead of trying to keep fighting market forces to squeeze more people into existing towns. I'm not saying you force people to live there, or displace the homeless there. No, simply provide a cheaper decent place to live, and people will come.

papa0101 1y ago
That, and reduce the immigration ffs. Importing a city-sized population (500k+) every year? - Sorry mate, you just won't be able to build a new city every year.
- nikanj 1y ago
  In the 1950s the UK was adding about 260k babies per year with a population of about 50 million, or about 0.52% per year Net migration (immigrants - emigrants) in 2024 was about 0.63%. I would hope the productivity advances in the last 75(!) years would allow the Uk to build enough homes for 0.63% growth, when our 1950s tools and technology allowed them to accommodate a 0.52% growth
  - yesfitz 1y ago
    Housing demand caused by births and immigration are different. A baby generally calls for an additional bedroom (easier away from the city), an adult migrant generally calls for their own residence near other migrants (easier in the city). In the past, the population was growing even while net migration was negative. This means people were having babies. This trend reversed in the '80s and migration has made up somewhere between 37% and 128% of annual population growth since then.[1] There'd have to be some incredible innovation to overcome increased regulation around zoning and dwelling construction generally, NIMBYism, financialization of everything, and a preference shift towards living in land-scarce cities (urban population up ~145% since 1950). 1: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...
    - jplrssn 1y ago
      Unless you plan for children to never leave the parental home, wouldn't housing demand caused by births just be identical to that caused by immigration, only phase shifted 20 years or so? Meanwhile the baby is essentially a net drain on productivity, whereas an immigrant is not.
      - yesfitz 1y ago
        My point was to illustrate that not all population growth is fungible, so comparing birth-driven growth from the '50s to migration-driven growth since the '80s will miss things. To your point about phase-shifting though, I think that's a definite possibility, but relies on preferences of each community, and how they change by generation. Urbanization is not solely driven by immigrants, but how likely are immigrants to move into lower density housing when they have kids? What about their kids? And their kids, etc? And compare that to non-immigrant (or non-recently immigrated) preferences. The relative productivity of babies and immigrants is not of interest to me in talking about housing preference, but you're correct that babies don't directly add much to GDP for the first two decades.
        1y ago
- fragmede 1y ago
  Tell that to China, who has been building so many new cities that their housing crisis is too many homes.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    That's what investor money will do; in western Europe, the same thing has happened with office buildings. At one point, 40% of all office space in the Netherlands was vacant. Investors prefer to invest in office space over housing because it's less parties to interact with, higher rent, 10 year lease contracts, and 100 year lifespan.
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
    China and the UK are not comparable in scale. Also China isn't importing permanent immigrant populations
    - UtopiaPunk 1y ago
      They are very different societies, sure. I don't think anyone would argue that point. But China has 1.4 billion people, and yet they have an overabundance of housing. If we are trying to find effective strategies for ending homelessness, that seems like a great situation to study.
- RajT88 1y ago
  I mean. Had it escaped your attention those immigrants are he ones building the cities?
  - anonym29 1y ago
    Great, immigrants build as much or more housing than they occupy, as a whole. Good news everyone - problem solved! There's no housing shortage after all!
- more_corn 1y ago
  Without population growth and without immigration your economy will collapse. Good luck with that.
goosedragons 1y ago
Building new towns is hard because you need jobs nearby and there's no guarantee they'll materialize to a large enough degree to support the town. I'm wondering if it's okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?
- toast0 1y ago
  Building new, isolated, towns is hard for that reason. But if you build a town on a train or bus line that connects to places people work you don't need to bootstrap self sufficiency. Building near a highway works too.
  - goosedragons 1y ago
    Is that a new town? Or sprawl of an existing city? There's only so far out you can reasonably go before the commute stops making sense. Many cities have already hit that limit. For example, there really isn't any space outside Toronto for a new community to have a tolerable commute with the current infrastructure.
    - swsieber 1y ago
      I think the key thing is to frame the new city as a city, and not just an extension. As part of that you'd need to keep enough space to let business pop up, etc. I think part of the problem extensions run into is that they don't want to be a city.
    - toast0 1y ago
      I mean, yes to both. Depending on local political boundary systems, it might be part of the main city or not. Reasonable commute has a different definition for different people. Some people don't commute for work, so two hours to city center is fine if they only go a few times a year. Some only commute for work a couple times a week and an hour and a half sucks, but is doable if the housing is better enough on whatever dimension. Some will be able to move their job to the new location. If the new town has appropriate zoning and desires, a handful of companies in the city center may setup offices there to reduce office costs and attract workers that are in the periphery, instead of making everyone go into the city center. This definitely happens around Toronto, just from looking at the density of roads on Google Maps. There's plenty of pockets of density in lines out from Toronto, and there's also several named places where there's no clear boundary between the names (there probably is at other levels of detail).
tim333 1y ago
A lot of the issue in the UK is getting permission to build anything. My dad had a 160 acre farm near london, you can get nordic type cabins for ~£50k (https://www.quick-garden.co.uk/log-cabins/homes/ https://www.quick-garden.co.uk/log-cabins/homes/) and you could stick loads there for little money but can you get permission? On no. I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and develop it. Also they could maybe actually make something attractive? People tend to hate new development because it's so ugly. Maybe we could build like Cambridge or Venice rather than endless boxes.
- meheleventyone 1y ago
  The cost goes beyond the mere material cost of the house itself but if you have a sizable new development how does it fit within the infrastructure where it would be built. Everything from providing services to having adequate road infrastructure. No doubt there is some wonky things in planning but it's also not a case of YOLO'ing up a bunch of cabins. Not to mention that small single homes aren't a very efficient use of new builds.
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  - tk6855 1y ago
    I built my house for materials cost. You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. My community is also all private roads with easements, so no public development costs of roads. I built mine with an axe and a shovel. As always the solution is to remove the government from the situation -- with private roads, private water, private septic, and private power there is no one to screech their deranged ramblings on why we need 1,000,000 safety regulations and $30,000 worth of paperwork and permitting to break ground because their precious public resources will be impacted. $60k for a house, near jobs, USA. Anybody with half a brain and a little brawn can do what I did, if they can come up with what would be a down-payment on a house in a coastal area. Although I admit, it would be much easier for most just to whine on the internet while watching others do what they say is impossible .

papa0101 1y ago

That, and reduce the immigration ffs. Importing a city-sized population (500k+) every year? - Sorry mate, you just won't be able to build a new city every year.

nikanj 1y ago
In the 1950s the UK was adding about 260k babies per year with a population of about 50 million, or about 0.52% per year Net migration (immigrants - emigrants) in 2024 was about 0.63%. I would hope the productivity advances in the last 75(!) years would allow the Uk to build enough homes for 0.63% growth, when our 1950s tools and technology allowed them to accommodate a 0.52% growth
- yesfitz 1y ago
  Housing demand caused by births and immigration are different. A baby generally calls for an additional bedroom (easier away from the city), an adult migrant generally calls for their own residence near other migrants (easier in the city). In the past, the population was growing even while net migration was negative. This means people were having babies. This trend reversed in the '80s and migration has made up somewhere between 37% and 128% of annual population growth since then.[1] There'd have to be some incredible innovation to overcome increased regulation around zoning and dwelling construction generally, NIMBYism, financialization of everything, and a preference shift towards living in land-scarce cities (urban population up ~145% since 1950). 1: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...
  - jplrssn 1y ago
    Unless you plan for children to never leave the parental home, wouldn't housing demand caused by births just be identical to that caused by immigration, only phase shifted 20 years or so? Meanwhile the baby is essentially a net drain on productivity, whereas an immigrant is not.
    - yesfitz 1y ago
      My point was to illustrate that not all population growth is fungible, so comparing birth-driven growth from the '50s to migration-driven growth since the '80s will miss things. To your point about phase-shifting though, I think that's a definite possibility, but relies on preferences of each community, and how they change by generation. Urbanization is not solely driven by immigrants, but how likely are immigrants to move into lower density housing when they have kids? What about their kids? And their kids, etc? And compare that to non-immigrant (or non-recently immigrated) preferences. The relative productivity of babies and immigrants is not of interest to me in talking about housing preference, but you're correct that babies don't directly add much to GDP for the first two decades.
      - 1y ago
fragmede 1y ago
Tell that to China, who has been building so many new cities that their housing crisis is too many homes.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  That's what investor money will do; in western Europe, the same thing has happened with office buildings. At one point, 40% of all office space in the Netherlands was vacant. Investors prefer to invest in office space over housing because it's less parties to interact with, higher rent, 10 year lease contracts, and 100 year lifespan.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
  China and the UK are not comparable in scale. Also China isn't importing permanent immigrant populations
  - UtopiaPunk 1y ago
    They are very different societies, sure. I don't think anyone would argue that point. But China has 1.4 billion people, and yet they have an overabundance of housing. If we are trying to find effective strategies for ending homelessness, that seems like a great situation to study.
RajT88 1y ago
I mean. Had it escaped your attention those immigrants are he ones building the cities?
- anonym29 1y ago
  Great, immigrants build as much or more housing than they occupy, as a whole. Good news everyone - problem solved! There's no housing shortage after all!
more_corn 1y ago
Without population growth and without immigration your economy will collapse. Good luck with that.

goosedragons 1y ago

Building new towns is hard because you need jobs nearby and there's no guarantee they'll materialize to a large enough degree to support the town. I'm wondering if it's okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?

toast0 1y ago
Building new, isolated, towns is hard for that reason. But if you build a town on a train or bus line that connects to places people work you don't need to bootstrap self sufficiency. Building near a highway works too.
- goosedragons 1y ago
  Is that a new town? Or sprawl of an existing city? There's only so far out you can reasonably go before the commute stops making sense. Many cities have already hit that limit. For example, there really isn't any space outside Toronto for a new community to have a tolerable commute with the current infrastructure.
  - swsieber 1y ago
    I think the key thing is to frame the new city as a city, and not just an extension. As part of that you'd need to keep enough space to let business pop up, etc. I think part of the problem extensions run into is that they don't want to be a city.
  - toast0 1y ago
    I mean, yes to both. Depending on local political boundary systems, it might be part of the main city or not. Reasonable commute has a different definition for different people. Some people don't commute for work, so two hours to city center is fine if they only go a few times a year. Some only commute for work a couple times a week and an hour and a half sucks, but is doable if the housing is better enough on whatever dimension. Some will be able to move their job to the new location. If the new town has appropriate zoning and desires, a handful of companies in the city center may setup offices there to reduce office costs and attract workers that are in the periphery, instead of making everyone go into the city center. This definitely happens around Toronto, just from looking at the density of roads on Google Maps. There's plenty of pockets of density in lines out from Toronto, and there's also several named places where there's no clear boundary between the names (there probably is at other levels of detail).

tim333 1y ago

A lot of the issue in the UK is getting permission to build anything. My dad had a 160 acre farm near london, you can get nordic type cabins for ~£50k (https://www.quick-garden.co.uk/log-cabins/homes/ https://www.quick-garden.co.uk/log-cabins/homes/) and you could stick loads there for little money but can you get permission? On no. I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and develop it. Also they could maybe actually make something attractive? People tend to hate new development because it's so ugly. Maybe we could build like Cambridge or Venice rather than endless boxes.

meheleventyone 1y ago
The cost goes beyond the mere material cost of the house itself but if you have a sizable new development how does it fit within the infrastructure where it would be built. Everything from providing services to having adequate road infrastructure. No doubt there is some wonky things in planning but it's also not a case of YOLO'ing up a bunch of cabins. Not to mention that small single homes aren't a very efficient use of new builds.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- tk6855 1y ago
  I built my house for materials cost. You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. My community is also all private roads with easements, so no public development costs of roads. I built mine with an axe and a shovel. As always the solution is to remove the government from the situation -- with private roads, private water, private septic, and private power there is no one to screech their deranged ramblings on why we need 1,000,000 safety regulations and $30,000 worth of paperwork and permitting to break ground because their precious public resources will be impacted. $60k for a house, near jobs, USA. Anybody with half a brain and a little brawn can do what I did, if they can come up with what would be a down-payment on a house in a coastal area. Although I admit, it would be much easier for most just to whine on the internet while watching others do what they say is impossible .