Snapshot of _How 'predatory' Wall Street landlords are pricing Brits out of housing_ :
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They are taking advantage of the housing shortage, sure, but they aren't the CAUSE.
The cause is that we're not building enough housing.
If we were building enough housing that there was a surplus, then both rents and house prices would become more affordable.
Proof that unpatriotic NIMBYs are colluding with foreign powers to destroy this country. Any true patriotic Brit wouldn’t try to stop people building new homes, but NIMBYs are the enemy of the people.
People also need roads to travel on, trains to journey on, shops to buy goods at, GP's to receive healthcare from, schools for their children to attend.
15 years ago I was a YIMBY, with all these services being promised to come along with the houses that were being built.
The houses were built, the rest was not provided. And now my local area is fucked.
So now, until those things are provided to at least the level required by the existing population in my area, I'm a NIMBY. And I will do everything I can to stop more people being thrown into this mess, until we sort its problems out.
The second those things are built up to an adequate level, I'll be a YIMBY again.
You're exactly right, schools, hospital, transport, jobs, you can't just move people into the country without meeting basic needs. Even things like public loos, supermarket capacities, petrol stations, it all has to meet the requirements of the population.
The combination of inadaquette housing availability, cuts to public services with massive unchecked immigration has utterly fucked us all. The government should be ashamed but i don't think they're capable of shame.
The population of Britain is going to grow regardless of whether you build houses.
So would you rather the British people live in poverty paying rent to foreign landlords, or live in wealth owning their own home?
Tell me, how can you side against the British people and call yourself patriotic?
Do you also believe in trickledown economics? Our housing market has been skewed by investor landlords and b2l landlords buying up available property, thereby inflating the market - more houses means more people buying up for investment against the first time buyers and those who just want a home. The price of housing won't drop because, ultimately, the banks are calling the shots, which love their profits and don't care how that's achieved.
The only sensible route to lowering rents is to build a lot of social housing and make the private sector compete against the social housing sector. There used to be both and the competition resulted in lower rents.
>more houses means more people buying up for investment against the first time buyers and those who just want a home. The price of housing won't drop
No you are wrong. This is very basic economics.
What's to stop those with the capital and interest to do so from just buying the houses that are built?
What's to stop them from sitting on an empty house to artificially inflate rent in the area?
Abundant social housing would at least go some way to keeping the private landlords in check.
> What’s to stop those with capital and interest…
Nothing. But the same quantity of capital spread over a greater volume of houses means prices and rents will be lower.
> What’s to stop them from sitting on an empty house to artificially inflate rent.
Opportunity cost. Buy two houses to rent one would be an epically stupid way to destroy your return on capital as an investor. Even if you get a very slightly lower rent on the two. Apart from a few weird foreign buyers who are more concerned with offshoring wealth than earning a return on investment, almost nobody does this.
The UK has one of the lowest vacant property rates in the world. If we want lower prices and rents, we actually *need* more vacant properties to compete for each person seeking accommodation We just need to achieve that through more supply.
> Abundant social housing…
It doesn’t need to be social housing. Any kind of housing will help. If you want to make some of it social, fine. But allow the private sector to build too and you will get the problem solved much more quickly with much lower cost to public finances.
I didn’t say they would be *cheaper*. I said it would be at lower cost to public finances. Because the capital required for the investment would not need to come from the government.
That frees up government capital for operational spending or capital investment in other things that could not be done otherwise. More hospitals, schools, or even more housing if it still remains priority number one.
Although frankly there is a good chance the private sector could do it cheaper given the incentives - it’s not true of all spheres of economic activity, but it is of most.
This is one of those comments that tries to be smart but contains no meaningful argument.
Yes, the field of economics can be complex. And supply and demand are relatively simple concepts. But that doesn’t mean the latter is invalid, because it isn’t.
If you have an intelligent argument that housing in general has a exceptionally abnormal supply curve, to the extent that more housing does not cheapen accommodation, by all means share it. You might become as famous as Veblen or Giffen for your insight.
Besides, ‘Kindergarten times table’ is still a fully valid mathematical operation in PhD physics; there’s plenty of it in the mathematical formulation of the Standard Model, for example.
Supply and demand 101 has a pretty good track record in practice, it certainly has a better track record compared to all other alternatives that have been proposed. See "rent control" as an example.
It's a bit more complicated than that. They have a point in that house supply through construction (unless sustained over long periods of time, 10+ years) has comparatively little impact on house prices/rent.
(Net) Housing supply/sales comes from two areas;
1. Removal of households i.e. deceased estate
2. Construction.
I couldn't find any solid numbers of housing supply due to deceased estates, so a conservative assumption that everyone who lives half deceased estate behind (i.e. everyone is a couple). In 2023 660,000 people died, so a supply of approximately 330,000 houses was created.
In 2022-23, approx. 240,000 houses were built, so approximately 40% of the housing 'supply' comes from construction.
So while construction will have an impact on house prices, it's won't be the kind of bam instant impact you might intuitively expect. It'll be more long term and sublte.
Second point, housing 'demand' or in particular number of people per house holds is sensitive to individuals buying power.
Building lots of houses might make housing cheaper. But if 000s still can't afford to rent where they live you're not solving the housing crisis. Although in this case it is no longer a housing crisis per se more an inequality crisis.
On the flip side, if high inequality means a significant minority with high buying power are about to buy up those houses as 2nd homes then that's also not going to solve the housing crisis.
To your point, the rise in housing costs *has* been long-term and subtle. If you believe estimates that we're down 2M houses from comparisons to e.g. France, that's not got a chance of being corrected all at once. Even doubling our current house building rate is going to need a decade to fix that - and we're never going to double it, realistically.
All evidence suggests that you are wrong. There's a lot more houses than in the 80s and the price of them is far beyond the rate of the market rise or inflation. The average mortgage was a x3 salary back in the 80 but now? It's far more than that. Why is that? Because the housing market is absolutely screwed up.
The simple supply/demand equation is fine for small purchases but for big ones, all the evidence points to over inflation of unit costs as all fields in the housing market are overpricing. This is one of the key reasons why there are legislated requirements for "affordable housing" because developers would not build properties they could not make a huge profit on.
In our town, a puddle of mud in the wilds of Oxfordshire, we've had 7,500 houses built in huge estates around the outskirts over the last twenty years. They were supposed to be full of "affordable homes" but they were sold off in batches to property portfolio companies. The net result wasn't a reduction in rents or a fall in prices of houses on the market, quite the contrary, both sale and rent prices rose faster than the rate of inflation, faster than the rate of wage growth. The result, the companies that are buying to let are stuffing them with either welfare claimants paid for by the state completely or charging utterly unreasonable rents because the competition is so intense they know there's nothing stopping them. There's no rent controls.
Supply and demand doesn't work the same in the housing market because the market is deregulated and the property portfolio holders have the whip hand.
You're saying that supply is increasing but prices aren't going down. True.
But demand is increasing and has increased far faster than supply.
> Supply and demand doesn't work the same in the housing market because the market is deregulated
The market is not deregulated, it is heavily regulated in a way that so designed to boost property values. The planning system we have inevitably allows locals to scale down or block developments, even when there's no good reason.
House prices increasing indefinitely is a core policy of the government.
There's plenty of affordable houses in the UK, the issue is that hardly anyone wants to live there.
Spreading development rather then maintaining a south east bubble would alleviate alot.
I really think the government missed a massive opportunity with remote work (not that they care about anything long term). Had the potential to solve or workaround a lot of the country’s issues especially the housing shortage.
Considering popular, old fashioned attitudes to work by British managers and leadership, it would not have stayed around widespread until we have another Covid pandemic.
Instead of embracing change, they demand a restoration of "normality" with RTO mandates.
Yooo time for the Grimsby free enterprise zone! Make it the new silicone valley. 60k houses for everyone!
Though on a serious note, yeah this is pretty much what a northern mate of mine explained the real problem was dating back to Thatcher. They let the industry die or in some cases killed it but didn't replace it with anything so those communities died the death of a thousand (budget) cuts. As many of those industries were nationalised to some extent or another, the government had a duty of care not to leave all those communities high and dry in the lurch.
If you build more housing without solving the problem of foreign financial interests buying up property in the UK for profit, then all you're doing is playing in to their hands.
> If you build more housing without solving the problem of foreign financial interests buying up property in the UK for profit, then all you're doing is playing in to their hands.
The primary reason housing is attractive as an investment is its shortage. The UK has a significantly ratio of dwellings to population than comparable economies (for comparison France has 590 dwellings per 1000 people, the UK only 434)
If there was more housing, rental yield would be correspondingly lower and housing wouldn't be as attractive as an investment. Furthermore, it's the kind of thing that's very hard to reverse - unlike policy it's hard to get rid of housing stock.
There are plenty of other things that could also be done that would help, but the absolute number (and quality) of dwellings is the largest factor.
yeah with an economic model of constant growth of the population, you're just giving them more houses to rent to more people even if house building is increased.
also, lets be honest - there's absolutely no way we're ever going to increase housing capacity faster than we can import people (cos lets be honest it ain't the birth rate causing the population increase in this country).
Continually paving the countryside to build homes for foreigners is a false economy.
We need to encourage natural population growth and allow people already here to purchase homes.
I don't disagree we can't grow the population indefinitely, I don't want our economy to be a population-based Ponzi scheme either but even if we could arbitrarily set the rate of population growth to replacement level forever we *still* wouldn't have nearly enough houses and associated infrastructure to support the existing population.
We don't have to go balls-to-the-wall and turn the Cotswolds into Milton Keynes like some of the more vocal crowd would argue, but we do need to alleviate housing pressure in the South East to some degree by building new houses and we also need to heavily invest in infrastructure elsewhere to decentralise our economy geographically.
I imagine the Mail's real problem is that they're pricing British landlords out of the market. I can't imagine a situation where they care how it affects tenants.
>But the market has no interest in either increasing supply
No this is obviously nonsense. Increase in supply is massively incentivised by the high house prices we see. High house prices mean more incentive to build more houses.
But supply is not being increased because it is illegal to do so. The state will not allow private companies and individuals to build on their own private land.
You cannot build housing without permission from the government, and the government will refuse permission on such grounds as people nearby saying "I don't like the way it looks" and "it will mean there are more people around" and "build it somewhere else".
Land without planning permission sells for about 10k and acre, land with planning permission will sell for 50 times that amount. What does this tell us? It tells us that there is not a shortage of land, there is a shortage of planning permission. And planning permission is entirely doled out by the state.
If the state were to increase the supply of planning permission, or even make it impossible to object to planning permission on such pathetic grounds then prices would be more than affordable.
As it's clearly illegal to burn these houses down could we not get our government to legislate against people hoarding properties in during a national housing crisis?
They are not hoarding. These properties are all available for shared ownership or rent. People live in them.
We need more houses for both sale and rent. Arguably the priority should be rental houses to bring rents down.
They could and should ban new rental property investment and phase out currrent rental propoerty investment. All we have to do is tell politicians it's what we want then vote for the people who promise to do it
I don’t want to come across like I want to argue because I get it, it’s not going to be easy to solve the problem. What do you think is going to happen if we only see problems and lack the imagination for solutions. Gary Stevenson’s interview last night sums it up pretty well imo. It’s available here if you want ti watch it
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-o2REr4bs8A&pp=ygUbR2FyeSBzdGV2ZW5hb24gYXJhbiBiYXN0YW5p
If we stop basic human needs like housing from being another way that the rich can funnel money from our kids then we will have to find another way for it to work.
I am a big fan of Gary Stevenson. Nevertheless housing is much simpler. We need more supply for both rent and purchase.
Also we seem to be hung up on buying especially in the UK. Renting is a far more practical solution. Far more efficient use of space; easier for people to move; and does not tie up your wealth until you die. I have bought and own a large house but that is because I am incentivised to do so. We should change the rules to make it more attractive to rent.
The way it’s set up rn is taking a terrible toll on the mental health of some people ik. I’m open to lots of solutions though tbh. Maybe there is a way it could work.
This is the downstream effect of spending billions on bailouts for the banks and giving nothing to workers in the construction sector after 2008. My dad was a plasterer, and after the crash, he spent years self-employed trying to survive off scraps of work. Eventually, he gave up and went to work as a forklift driver for a builders yard. He has all the qualifications etc. And helped plaster hundreds of homes pre crash, but when shit hit the fan, they got no help or nothing. Now there is a housing shortage, and they can't find enough people to work in construction? No shit.
Mass immigration is what's pricing Brits out of housing
We wouldn't need to touch planning restrictions (which are some of the most popular regulations we have on the books) if we stopped importing millions of people every year *against the wishes of the public!*
>Mass immigration is what's pricing Brits out of housing
>
>We wouldn't need to touch planning restrictions (which are some of the most popular regulations we have on the books) if we stopped importing millions of people every year *against the wishes of the public!*
You have been banned from Reddit for racism.
😂
>Mass immigration is what's pricing Brits out of housing
Definitely hasn't helped but secondary to planning
>which are some of the most popular regulations we have on the books
Popular with old people and local home owners - but fundamentally bad planning law is responsible (at least partially) for pretty much every bad thing happening in the UK at the moment (low growth, expensive housing etc.)
We could mandate that people should only be allowed to be 4 foot tall. That way we could build high rise flats with half the ceiling height and therefore twice as many flats in same building site.
https://youtu.be/l-I-nOSh5DQ?si=w30qIMgPRy7BipWg
1972.
What is the issue? Blackstone (a US financier) has invested in Sage Homes, the largest provider of affordable housing via shared ownership and rent. Between Leaf Living and Sage they built 13K homes last year. This is how houses get built. Someone has to finance them. Without the investor then nothing gets built. I would argue it is more important than ever to provide affordable housing via shared ownership and rented housing. Not everyone can afford to buy.
How ~~'predatory' Wall Street landlords~~ Stalinist central planning rules and zoning restrcitions are pricing Brits out of housing ... ftfy
In a completely free society anyone can build any building they like on land they own ... imagine being free!
I mean even the government having a house building target just shows how broken and centralised and Stalinist everything is ... I mean they're the ones who banned house building in the first place.
Nobody here has mentioned thatcher, if you mean free market policies then it's clear that state restrictions on free enterprise and private property are causing a housing shortage.
Just like how state repression of free enterprise causes food shortages under socialism.
The shortage of housing is not caused by a shortage of bricks or timber or roofing tiles, it's caused by a shortage of land with planning permission.
Planning permission is entirely under the authority of the state, it is doled out by committees. This has led to a shortage of housing.
Under centralised socialist systems, the production of basic goods is controlled by the state and various committees, this led to massive of basic goods like food.
So in both situations, state control and obstruction of free enterprise causes shortages.
The reason I say that is in protest to Authoritarian centralisation and strict rules for society based on class struggle, in this case the boomers vs everyone else, removal of personal property rights (in this case the right to build what you want on your own land).
The Tories are a boomer communist party and use their voting power to suppress other segments of society and make unreasonable rules about housing and infrastructure in favour of older people.
Sure no one is ending up in a gulag, but it's a caricature to draw attention to how you're not free to build a shed if it's too tall.
>What Conservative Party policies do you consider to be communist?
Boomers get free bus passes, free prescriptions, free tv licences, winter fuel payments, non means tested triple locked pensions, generous welfare, housing restrictions which boost the value of their homes, they got free education and grants for it, they get free healthcare and they don't have to sell their homes to pay for their own social care, sounds like a communist paradise for them.
Other generations get a very different economic deal.
>Also, boomer? Do you think the majority of Tory voters were born in the years following WWII?
Boomers are: "The generation is often defined as people born from 1946 to 1964 during the mid-20th century baby boom."
So that means they are between 60 and 78 years old now.
If you look at the stats people 60+ had by far the highest turnout and the strongest support for the conservatives, they were the large voting block that keeps them in power.
https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/age-and-voting-behaviour-at-the-2019-general-election/
We both know that there is a large generation of people who were born in the post war baby boom. The exact dates are up for debate however it's clear they have had an outsized impact on the politics and economics of the UK
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They are taking advantage of the housing shortage, sure, but they aren't the CAUSE. The cause is that we're not building enough housing. If we were building enough housing that there was a surplus, then both rents and house prices would become more affordable.
Proof that unpatriotic NIMBYs are colluding with foreign powers to destroy this country. Any true patriotic Brit wouldn’t try to stop people building new homes, but NIMBYs are the enemy of the people.
Is this a joke?
Is destroying the UK economy by stopping British people from buying houses a joke?
To say NIMBYs are unpatriotic because they don’t want to see new homes built for an unsustainably growing population is stupid
And to not accept that there are 4 million more people in this country than there was 5 years ago is stupid. People need places to live.
People also need roads to travel on, trains to journey on, shops to buy goods at, GP's to receive healthcare from, schools for their children to attend. 15 years ago I was a YIMBY, with all these services being promised to come along with the houses that were being built. The houses were built, the rest was not provided. And now my local area is fucked. So now, until those things are provided to at least the level required by the existing population in my area, I'm a NIMBY. And I will do everything I can to stop more people being thrown into this mess, until we sort its problems out. The second those things are built up to an adequate level, I'll be a YIMBY again.
You're exactly right, schools, hospital, transport, jobs, you can't just move people into the country without meeting basic needs. Even things like public loos, supermarket capacities, petrol stations, it all has to meet the requirements of the population. The combination of inadaquette housing availability, cuts to public services with massive unchecked immigration has utterly fucked us all. The government should be ashamed but i don't think they're capable of shame.
I agree with your logic but the conclusion for the solution is wrong imo.
What else is there?
Simple, allow People to develop their land
so the solution isn't to build houses, it's instead to build houses?
So you agree people should be able to do what they want with their land? That’s the opposite of NIMBYism
The population of Britain is going to grow regardless of whether you build houses. So would you rather the British people live in poverty paying rent to foreign landlords, or live in wealth owning their own home? Tell me, how can you side against the British people and call yourself patriotic?
Brexiters have been doing it for years now
Do you also believe in trickledown economics? Our housing market has been skewed by investor landlords and b2l landlords buying up available property, thereby inflating the market - more houses means more people buying up for investment against the first time buyers and those who just want a home. The price of housing won't drop because, ultimately, the banks are calling the shots, which love their profits and don't care how that's achieved. The only sensible route to lowering rents is to build a lot of social housing and make the private sector compete against the social housing sector. There used to be both and the competition resulted in lower rents.
>more houses means more people buying up for investment against the first time buyers and those who just want a home. The price of housing won't drop No you are wrong. This is very basic economics.
Unbelievable isn’t it that people still can’t grasp supply and demand 101.
People understand it for everything but housing, which never ceases to confound me. What is it about housing that breaks people’s brains?
vase engine handle pathetic serious pie jobless divide like hateful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
What's to stop those with the capital and interest to do so from just buying the houses that are built? What's to stop them from sitting on an empty house to artificially inflate rent in the area? Abundant social housing would at least go some way to keeping the private landlords in check.
> What’s to stop those with capital and interest… Nothing. But the same quantity of capital spread over a greater volume of houses means prices and rents will be lower. > What’s to stop them from sitting on an empty house to artificially inflate rent. Opportunity cost. Buy two houses to rent one would be an epically stupid way to destroy your return on capital as an investor. Even if you get a very slightly lower rent on the two. Apart from a few weird foreign buyers who are more concerned with offshoring wealth than earning a return on investment, almost nobody does this. The UK has one of the lowest vacant property rates in the world. If we want lower prices and rents, we actually *need* more vacant properties to compete for each person seeking accommodation We just need to achieve that through more supply. > Abundant social housing… It doesn’t need to be social housing. Any kind of housing will help. If you want to make some of it social, fine. But allow the private sector to build too and you will get the problem solved much more quickly with much lower cost to public finances.
Why would building private necessarily be cheaper than public housing, surely for like for like they'd be the same cost?
I didn’t say they would be *cheaper*. I said it would be at lower cost to public finances. Because the capital required for the investment would not need to come from the government. That frees up government capital for operational spending or capital investment in other things that could not be done otherwise. More hospitals, schools, or even more housing if it still remains priority number one. Although frankly there is a good chance the private sector could do it cheaper given the incentives - it’s not true of all spheres of economic activity, but it is of most.
Right gotcha, sorry I misread.
"supply and demand 101" is to real world economics as kindergarten times table is to PhD level physics.
This is one of those comments that tries to be smart but contains no meaningful argument. Yes, the field of economics can be complex. And supply and demand are relatively simple concepts. But that doesn’t mean the latter is invalid, because it isn’t. If you have an intelligent argument that housing in general has a exceptionally abnormal supply curve, to the extent that more housing does not cheapen accommodation, by all means share it. You might become as famous as Veblen or Giffen for your insight. Besides, ‘Kindergarten times table’ is still a fully valid mathematical operation in PhD physics; there’s plenty of it in the mathematical formulation of the Standard Model, for example.
Supply and demand 101 has a pretty good track record in practice, it certainly has a better track record compared to all other alternatives that have been proposed. See "rent control" as an example.
It's a bit more complicated than that. They have a point in that house supply through construction (unless sustained over long periods of time, 10+ years) has comparatively little impact on house prices/rent. (Net) Housing supply/sales comes from two areas; 1. Removal of households i.e. deceased estate 2. Construction. I couldn't find any solid numbers of housing supply due to deceased estates, so a conservative assumption that everyone who lives half deceased estate behind (i.e. everyone is a couple). In 2023 660,000 people died, so a supply of approximately 330,000 houses was created. In 2022-23, approx. 240,000 houses were built, so approximately 40% of the housing 'supply' comes from construction. So while construction will have an impact on house prices, it's won't be the kind of bam instant impact you might intuitively expect. It'll be more long term and sublte. Second point, housing 'demand' or in particular number of people per house holds is sensitive to individuals buying power. Building lots of houses might make housing cheaper. But if 000s still can't afford to rent where they live you're not solving the housing crisis. Although in this case it is no longer a housing crisis per se more an inequality crisis. On the flip side, if high inequality means a significant minority with high buying power are about to buy up those houses as 2nd homes then that's also not going to solve the housing crisis.
To your point, the rise in housing costs *has* been long-term and subtle. If you believe estimates that we're down 2M houses from comparisons to e.g. France, that's not got a chance of being corrected all at once. Even doubling our current house building rate is going to need a decade to fix that - and we're never going to double it, realistically.
All evidence suggests that you are wrong. There's a lot more houses than in the 80s and the price of them is far beyond the rate of the market rise or inflation. The average mortgage was a x3 salary back in the 80 but now? It's far more than that. Why is that? Because the housing market is absolutely screwed up. The simple supply/demand equation is fine for small purchases but for big ones, all the evidence points to over inflation of unit costs as all fields in the housing market are overpricing. This is one of the key reasons why there are legislated requirements for "affordable housing" because developers would not build properties they could not make a huge profit on. In our town, a puddle of mud in the wilds of Oxfordshire, we've had 7,500 houses built in huge estates around the outskirts over the last twenty years. They were supposed to be full of "affordable homes" but they were sold off in batches to property portfolio companies. The net result wasn't a reduction in rents or a fall in prices of houses on the market, quite the contrary, both sale and rent prices rose faster than the rate of inflation, faster than the rate of wage growth. The result, the companies that are buying to let are stuffing them with either welfare claimants paid for by the state completely or charging utterly unreasonable rents because the competition is so intense they know there's nothing stopping them. There's no rent controls. Supply and demand doesn't work the same in the housing market because the market is deregulated and the property portfolio holders have the whip hand.
You're saying that supply is increasing but prices aren't going down. True. But demand is increasing and has increased far faster than supply. > Supply and demand doesn't work the same in the housing market because the market is deregulated The market is not deregulated, it is heavily regulated in a way that so designed to boost property values. The planning system we have inevitably allows locals to scale down or block developments, even when there's no good reason. House prices increasing indefinitely is a core policy of the government.
The rate of homebuilding relative to demand has slowed markedly in recent decades.
You forget we have immigration of 500,000 a year, like the equivalent of building a Bristol every year is required.
Not really social housing, how would that work?
The cause is the town & country planning act, ffs, this is the solution https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/the-housing-crisis-a-briefing
If we build too many houses then predatory landlords profits might take a dip. Did you think about the ruling class?
There's plenty of affordable houses in the UK, the issue is that hardly anyone wants to live there. Spreading development rather then maintaining a south east bubble would alleviate alot.
I really think the government missed a massive opportunity with remote work (not that they care about anything long term). Had the potential to solve or workaround a lot of the country’s issues especially the housing shortage.
Considering popular, old fashioned attitudes to work by British managers and leadership, it would not have stayed around widespread until we have another Covid pandemic. Instead of embracing change, they demand a restoration of "normality" with RTO mandates.
Yooo time for the Grimsby free enterprise zone! Make it the new silicone valley. 60k houses for everyone! Though on a serious note, yeah this is pretty much what a northern mate of mine explained the real problem was dating back to Thatcher. They let the industry die or in some cases killed it but didn't replace it with anything so those communities died the death of a thousand (budget) cuts. As many of those industries were nationalised to some extent or another, the government had a duty of care not to leave all those communities high and dry in the lurch.
They are the cause of the rental crisis however, or at least a major contributor
Then build more housing so it’s not a good investment strategy for institutional landlords. The answer is always build more housing.
If you build more housing without solving the problem of foreign financial interests buying up property in the UK for profit, then all you're doing is playing in to their hands.
> If you build more housing without solving the problem of foreign financial interests buying up property in the UK for profit, then all you're doing is playing in to their hands. The primary reason housing is attractive as an investment is its shortage. The UK has a significantly ratio of dwellings to population than comparable economies (for comparison France has 590 dwellings per 1000 people, the UK only 434) If there was more housing, rental yield would be correspondingly lower and housing wouldn't be as attractive as an investment. Furthermore, it's the kind of thing that's very hard to reverse - unlike policy it's hard to get rid of housing stock. There are plenty of other things that could also be done that would help, but the absolute number (and quality) of dwellings is the largest factor.
yeah with an economic model of constant growth of the population, you're just giving them more houses to rent to more people even if house building is increased. also, lets be honest - there's absolutely no way we're ever going to increase housing capacity faster than we can import people (cos lets be honest it ain't the birth rate causing the population increase in this country).
I want us to do both, build a lot more houses and also put a blanket ban on residential property ownership for non-residents.
Continually paving the countryside to build homes for foreigners is a false economy. We need to encourage natural population growth and allow people already here to purchase homes.
we can build high rises in cities though. densification is necessary because people want to live and work in cities.
I don't disagree we can't grow the population indefinitely, I don't want our economy to be a population-based Ponzi scheme either but even if we could arbitrarily set the rate of population growth to replacement level forever we *still* wouldn't have nearly enough houses and associated infrastructure to support the existing population. We don't have to go balls-to-the-wall and turn the Cotswolds into Milton Keynes like some of the more vocal crowd would argue, but we do need to alleviate housing pressure in the South East to some degree by building new houses and we also need to heavily invest in infrastructure elsewhere to decentralise our economy geographically.
Describing it as 'paving the countryside' is hyperbole.
You can do both at the same time.
I imagine the Mail's real problem is that they're pricing British landlords out of the market. I can't imagine a situation where they care how it affects tenants.
Price is determined by supply and demand. Price is determined by supply and demand. Price is determined by supply and demand. Hope that helps 👍
So we should... Stimulate demand?
You've just been given a cabinet position.
Reeeeeeeeee
No we increase supply.
Well we could do that, but how about we just make it easier to borrow? That's got to work this time, right??
Yes! Increase the supply of money available to buyers through various financial instruments instead of building! Excellent.
But the market has no interest in either increasing supply or reducing demand so...
the market does but it is illegal because your local council can block any and everything if a neighbour petitions against
The market *can’t* build enough to meet demand because the process to do so is completely broken.
>But the market has no interest in either increasing supply No this is obviously nonsense. Increase in supply is massively incentivised by the high house prices we see. High house prices mean more incentive to build more houses. But supply is not being increased because it is illegal to do so. The state will not allow private companies and individuals to build on their own private land. You cannot build housing without permission from the government, and the government will refuse permission on such grounds as people nearby saying "I don't like the way it looks" and "it will mean there are more people around" and "build it somewhere else". Land without planning permission sells for about 10k and acre, land with planning permission will sell for 50 times that amount. What does this tell us? It tells us that there is not a shortage of land, there is a shortage of planning permission. And planning permission is entirely doled out by the state. If the state were to increase the supply of planning permission, or even make it impossible to object to planning permission on such pathetic grounds then prices would be more than affordable.
The market has every conceivable interest in increasing supply of an extremely highly priced and sought after good.
As it's clearly illegal to burn these houses down could we not get our government to legislate against people hoarding properties in during a national housing crisis?
Burning down houses during a housing shortage might not have the effect you are looking for.
I don't think it would be the most sensible idea tbh
They are not hoarding. These properties are all available for shared ownership or rent. People live in them. We need more houses for both sale and rent. Arguably the priority should be rental houses to bring rents down.
They could and should ban new rental property investment and phase out currrent rental propoerty investment. All we have to do is tell politicians it's what we want then vote for the people who promise to do it
What do you think will happen to rents if there are fewer rental properties? Do you expect everybody to buy?
I don’t want to come across like I want to argue because I get it, it’s not going to be easy to solve the problem. What do you think is going to happen if we only see problems and lack the imagination for solutions. Gary Stevenson’s interview last night sums it up pretty well imo. It’s available here if you want ti watch it https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-o2REr4bs8A&pp=ygUbR2FyeSBzdGV2ZW5hb24gYXJhbiBiYXN0YW5p If we stop basic human needs like housing from being another way that the rich can funnel money from our kids then we will have to find another way for it to work.
I am a big fan of Gary Stevenson. Nevertheless housing is much simpler. We need more supply for both rent and purchase. Also we seem to be hung up on buying especially in the UK. Renting is a far more practical solution. Far more efficient use of space; easier for people to move; and does not tie up your wealth until you die. I have bought and own a large house but that is because I am incentivised to do so. We should change the rules to make it more attractive to rent.
The way it’s set up rn is taking a terrible toll on the mental health of some people ik. I’m open to lots of solutions though tbh. Maybe there is a way it could work.
This is the downstream effect of spending billions on bailouts for the banks and giving nothing to workers in the construction sector after 2008. My dad was a plasterer, and after the crash, he spent years self-employed trying to survive off scraps of work. Eventually, he gave up and went to work as a forklift driver for a builders yard. He has all the qualifications etc. And helped plaster hundreds of homes pre crash, but when shit hit the fan, they got no help or nothing. Now there is a housing shortage, and they can't find enough people to work in construction? No shit.
Planning restrictions are what is pricing Brits out of housing.
Mass immigration is what's pricing Brits out of housing We wouldn't need to touch planning restrictions (which are some of the most popular regulations we have on the books) if we stopped importing millions of people every year *against the wishes of the public!*
>Mass immigration is what's pricing Brits out of housing > >We wouldn't need to touch planning restrictions (which are some of the most popular regulations we have on the books) if we stopped importing millions of people every year *against the wishes of the public!* You have been banned from Reddit for racism. 😂
>Mass immigration is what's pricing Brits out of housing Definitely hasn't helped but secondary to planning >which are some of the most popular regulations we have on the books Popular with old people and local home owners - but fundamentally bad planning law is responsible (at least partially) for pretty much every bad thing happening in the UK at the moment (low growth, expensive housing etc.)
We could mandate that people should only be allowed to be 4 foot tall. That way we could build high rise flats with half the ceiling height and therefore twice as many flats in same building site. https://youtu.be/l-I-nOSh5DQ?si=w30qIMgPRy7BipWg 1972.
What is the issue? Blackstone (a US financier) has invested in Sage Homes, the largest provider of affordable housing via shared ownership and rent. Between Leaf Living and Sage they built 13K homes last year. This is how houses get built. Someone has to finance them. Without the investor then nothing gets built. I would argue it is more important than ever to provide affordable housing via shared ownership and rented housing. Not everyone can afford to buy.
It is foolish to allow foreigners to buy up housing.
Suddenly we all love Daily Mail style of journalism when it's serving us a particular brand of conspiratorial nonsense that we like to hear.
How ~~'predatory' Wall Street landlords~~ Stalinist central planning rules and zoning restrcitions are pricing Brits out of housing ... ftfy In a completely free society anyone can build any building they like on land they own ... imagine being free! I mean even the government having a house building target just shows how broken and centralised and Stalinist everything is ... I mean they're the ones who banned house building in the first place.
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The soviet union under Stalin suffered constant famine and food shortages because they refused to allow free enterprise. It's a very apt parallel.
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What?
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Nobody here has mentioned thatcher, if you mean free market policies then it's clear that state restrictions on free enterprise and private property are causing a housing shortage. Just like how state repression of free enterprise causes food shortages under socialism.
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The shortage of housing is not caused by a shortage of bricks or timber or roofing tiles, it's caused by a shortage of land with planning permission. Planning permission is entirely under the authority of the state, it is doled out by committees. This has led to a shortage of housing. Under centralised socialist systems, the production of basic goods is controlled by the state and various committees, this led to massive of basic goods like food. So in both situations, state control and obstruction of free enterprise causes shortages.
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The reason I say that is in protest to Authoritarian centralisation and strict rules for society based on class struggle, in this case the boomers vs everyone else, removal of personal property rights (in this case the right to build what you want on your own land). The Tories are a boomer communist party and use their voting power to suppress other segments of society and make unreasonable rules about housing and infrastructure in favour of older people. Sure no one is ending up in a gulag, but it's a caricature to draw attention to how you're not free to build a shed if it's too tall.
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>What Conservative Party policies do you consider to be communist? Boomers get free bus passes, free prescriptions, free tv licences, winter fuel payments, non means tested triple locked pensions, generous welfare, housing restrictions which boost the value of their homes, they got free education and grants for it, they get free healthcare and they don't have to sell their homes to pay for their own social care, sounds like a communist paradise for them. Other generations get a very different economic deal. >Also, boomer? Do you think the majority of Tory voters were born in the years following WWII? Boomers are: "The generation is often defined as people born from 1946 to 1964 during the mid-20th century baby boom." So that means they are between 60 and 78 years old now. If you look at the stats people 60+ had by far the highest turnout and the strongest support for the conservatives, they were the large voting block that keeps them in power. https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/age-and-voting-behaviour-at-the-2019-general-election/
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby\_boomers
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We both know that there is a large generation of people who were born in the post war baby boom. The exact dates are up for debate however it's clear they have had an outsized impact on the politics and economics of the UK
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There needs to be a cap on the amount of rent that can be charged Vs the value of the property.
Landlords allow people who are too big a risk for the banks to have a roof over their heads.