Over the last 50-70 years the UK made the choice to stop building social housing and to sell off the existing stock with aggressive government subsidies.
Complaining now is a bit like complaining there's no milk after you sold the dairy farm to build a casino.
I read TFA but I'm not seeing anything but useless outrage that would have been better placed 20-30 years ago
I became a first time property owner at 36 and it took a top 2-3% percentile income + my partners more median salary to do it on the outskirts of London
My mortgage runs until I'm 70 and I, like most owners now, are entirely dependent on the housing casino game continuing. If houses ever return to good affordability I'm screwed.
I have to refinance every 5 years, because that's the game in the UK, so if rates spike I'm also screwed.
Everyone in UK housing, owner or rented, is screwed and it's been this way for decades.
So, I'm really into municipal finance and fixing the housing crisis, which got me into Strong Towns. There is a solution, but it's not one that is going to make everyone happy (obviously), it is the state facilitating or even gently subsidizing incremental development.
If everyone is, by right, allowed to build the next larger "unit" of housing (for simplicity's sake, suppose 2x sqft[m2], height, and housing units of the median residential building within a half-mile radius), but not allow to massively build piles of housing on one site, then we effectively solve both problems.
Firstly, this allows for a massive amount of housing construction, with market incentives driving it. Out of the gate, you have the potential to easily double the housing supply. Secondly, the profits from the housing must be more-or-less distributed to the existing homeowners, and the potential to lower property values by building non-like for like housing doesn't exist. Neighborhoods slowly evolve, they don't rapidly change. Third, it incentivizes homeowners to build-to-last with the next stage of growth built in, because it's much cheaper in the long run to build a structure with the capacity to stack another unit on top than it is to tear down a building and rebuild the unit at double the capacity. Finally... and this is the thing that most people miss. It's fast. Smaller-scale developments need a much smaller planning phase, and there are many, many more of them to be constructed. This supports economies of scale, instead of the existing system, with all it's red tape that only allows a few actors to wade through the legal system for large developments. This should create a wide construction industry instead of a narrow one.
I really think the housing crisis is solvable with the top level government insisting that incremental development be allow by right, and that larger scale developments be put up for local review. This allows a city to grow organically, instead of all at once, but only at specific sites.
The government might also be pushed into actions that reduce house prices for other reasons.
The biggest reason for nigh house prices (particularly relative to incomes) is the affordability of mortgage payments as a result of low interest rates. Interest rates may have to be raised to control inflation.
It is a mistake to think of supply vs demand as "how many people want a house" vs "how many houses are there". Both supply and demand are curves against price. Interest rates shift the demand curve. As the supply curve is inelastic it has an even greater impact in the short term
And this discussion is hard because to just maintain current pension levels young people will need to be a LOT more productive (ie. work more, and keep less of the fruits of their labour) ... and if we're going to assign blame, the reason is that the pensioners refused to have enough kids. It's not really the kids' fault.
We all know what's going to happen too, in general. Some economic upheaval, some drastic event will create enormous disruption and then, finally, it will be politically acceptable to make the hard choice.
> the reason is that the pensioners refused to have enough kids
I thought they did have enough kids but that the next generation(s) need to breed faster.
In New Zealand and Australia ~30% of population were born in another country. I suspect our government will try and fix the working-age population hole by more immigration? New Zealand is building houses (necessary when increasing population by 50% through immigration). You can see both higher density and new suburban growth (replacing farmland) in my city of Christchurch.
It is silly to plan your retirement by looking at the situation right now. The economics of demographics will require grim changes. I'm sceptical of retirement funding, superannuation, and house sales. Even preppers seem like they have some sense. There's little information on potential solutions - everything is based on the presumption that decades away will be just like it is today.
Politicians are not going to provide a solution, nor are private developers. The solution is a crash that can't be avoided. As hinted at, this could be caused by a sustained increase in interest rates. It has happened before and it will happen again. I would even go so far as to say it is already happening in some property markets (>30% down in real terms in my city already, with no end in sight).
Well, the renters will reward any government that pushes down house prices i.e. builds more houses. And I assume there are more renters than home owners.
I would assume home owners are more likely to vote. But even with a lower voter turn out, there could still be more voting renters.
A sibling post has stats from 15 years ago but a lot has changed since then. My gut feeling is that more people are struggling to buy than to pay back mortgages but I have no stats to back that up.
> The 2011 Census tells us … around 64% of UK households owned their home
That’s not the same as the number of voters, obviously, but I’m not sure it’s a safe assumption, even before it gets into the actual voting dynamics from FPTP… there’s also presumably a lot of renters with their eyes on Mom and Dad’s home as an inheritance.
If they inherit the house they would be out of the mortgage casino and lower housing prices won't affect them so much.
Of course it won't be as valuable as an asset, but assuming they are primarily using it as a house rather then an asset then lower housing prices may not significantly affect their voting behaviour.
^^^ this
I don't think people consider the fact that a very good portion of these landowners were once renters that worked their way up and don't want to make it easier for the ones who have to do the same after themselves. It's easy to point fingers from the bottom until suddenly you're looking down from the top and the view ain't that bad
This is the thing I never see addressed. Wouldn't fixing the housing crisis necessarily involve slashing down property values? Which are for a lot of people their only form of savings?
Genuine question by the way, I would like an answer.
> Which are for a lot of people their only form of savings?
It's fake savings unless you are speculating on properties.
Most people only own the place they actually live in and only resell to buy another place. A general property market crash doesn't affect the value of your house compared to other house so it's mostly neutral in this regard.
Of course people who borrowed before the crash will be in debt for longer than people who bought after but that doesn't actually change their debt situation. You might say it's unfair but well, not wanting other to be better of doesn't seem like a good reason to not solve the housing crisis.
In the end the only people who trully stand to lose are multi-owners but they are a significant part of the problem in the first place so that doesn't make me sad.
A case where it isn't fake savings is where people who work and live an a very expensive urban area, like london, may use the home as a retirement investment. So when they retire they move to a less expensive area and can use the difference in housing costs in the two areas as a retirement nest egg.
It's an interesting way to try to save, and assumes anyone will want and be able to buy it.
And that you will be able to keep the expensive property with expensive costs. Plus compare if living in the expensive vs cheap place gets you more savings...
No, it does not make sense. I can see holding a property for a child, but not as retirement.
You misunderstand I think. When you retire you sell the expensive property and then buy a less expensive property in a cheaper area. If retired, then potentially have fewer restrictions on where you live because you don't have to commute to work any more. The difference in property costs between the old and new areas is your nest egg.
You will still earn the difference between the expensive property and the less expensive one. It will just be a lot less and that’s a good thing.
Using properties as store of value or betting on them becoming more expensive have too many externalities.
Your case for exemple is directly leading to people actually living and working in the less expensive places being displaced by retirees from the city which is very much undesirable for local life.
It's not neutral if you've borrowed to buy the home...
If you're in negative or reduced equity your mortgage costs can increase dramatically when you refinance. This alone can easily cripple a large % of the population and tank the consumer economy
Why would you refinance if you're underwater? Wouldn't you walk away from the property in most cases?
Of course that doesn't eliminate the economic impact. It just shifts it elsewhere.
An decent case can probably be made for the government to take on such loans and offer some scheme to forgive the difference if certain criteria are met.
A sharp fall in house prices might hurt some people, although the number who would be in negative equity is probably smaller than you'd think. A quick Google says only 28% of homes are owner occupied with a mortgage, and the vast majority of those will have paid off substantial capital.
I think the premise is worth questioning though:
It's true that many people have most of their wealth tied up in their house. But unless they want to substantially downsize, they can't access these savings.
In general it seems bad that it's common for people to have most of their wealth in an illiquid, undiversified investment that they also live in.
The best answer I've seen is gradually increasing land value tax (yes, Georgist style). Would slowly deflate the market - but much more at the top end than the low end. Would also encourage efficient use of land. And be a new source of revenue that can replace other taxes.
Yes and no.. Slashing the problem completely is no worse than not fixing it since a climb into the stratosphere also has to burst.. I.e. with a new generation rejecting traditional lifestyles.
I think the solution is to artificially build new cities with ideal logistics. Distant cities inevitably draw away housing consumers but by least influential first and are outside each others influence for NIMBYs.
A nominal increase in value, while becoming more affordable in real terms might be feasible.
However to do this would require inflation of other goods, matched by wage rises, which would require actions that the British political establishment is not willing to take.
Making prices stagnant over 10-20 years would allow wages to catch up. This hurts speculators and finance way more than individual families and allows for a more gradual transition.
It's probably only something you can fix across generations.
You're totally right. It would be better for home owners since high houses prices make everything about buying and selling houses more expensive. You can't realise your housing gains except by dying. Or downsizing, but many old people rattle around in 3+ bedroom houses until they die or are forced to go into a retirement home.
It would also involve building more houses, which is bitterly and loudly opposed by a subset of home owners. Home owners are also richer, older, and vote much more than the (generally) poorer, younger renters.
If you're not planning on selling your house it's future value is irrelevant. All I care about is the purchase price of my "forever home".
The only difference it makes it that if your lender gives more favourable interest rates when your loan to value ratio improves. So if you purchase a house and the price doubles, your LTV is already 50%. Conversely if it drops after you paid off half the mortgage, your LTV might be shit
I'm not sure if the thing about LTV is true considering the whole picture, since the loan is larger. A larger loan at a lower interest rate still has large monthly payments. (I'd have to do the maths to be sure ...)
Yes, but that doesn't mean the people who had houses that lost value are screwed. It just means that they didn't pocket as much profit as they could have. They bought a value and a rate they could afford. They're no more or less screwed if the value of the house goes down. They're screwed if they can't pay the mortgage. Lots of people are screwed by high housing costs. The only rational conclusion is to lower housing costs. I say this as someone paying a mortgage.
Exactly. At some point a lot of people are going to discover that they are the bag-holders.
It's unfortunate, and at an individual level you can't blame people that felt compelled to purchase a home (only one!). However, if people are honest with themselves, they would admit that the only reason they were willing to pay such a high price is because they expected the price to increase. In other words they were speculating. After a certain point, nobody was buying for the actual ROI (i.e. income potential or substituted rental value). Not only was this mistake made, but it was made using massive leverage in most cases.
TLDR; Nobody was willing to admit that they were making a risky investment. A risk that it may turn out that they couldn't afford to make.
Yes. But that's just like any fake token being used by olds as a retirement plan.
Seeing as the olds control almost all of the wealth of industrialized nations, they should as a group be held entirely responsible for paying for entitlements and benefits for other elderly. The young should not be burdened with this. They have more burdens than they can handle already and are soon genetically extinct unless the olds take the boot from their neck.
Please stop spreading generational divide. Those olds were burdened with this just like today's young. Somehow some people think olds had it easy. Housing issues are not us(young) vs them(old).
I have more things in common with any young person from the other side of the world than I have with the olds from my own nation, city or street. It is what it is.
The olds have been waging a vicious economic war of extermination against the young for the entire 21st century. And now the cycle has to stop, because there are almost no more youth to exploit, and will be even less in the future.
No previous generation behaved like the current olds. We have to be much better than them, and let their twisted ways be forgotten.
"Now", it is 2025, not 2021, and there are one billion empty apartments in China, and the local government selling land to developers magic money tree ponzi scheme is running out of road.
A prior condition for building houses is having permission to build them. We have
found that the planning system is exerting a significant downward pressure on the
overall number of planning permissions being granted across Great Britain. Over
the long-term, the number of permissions being given has been insufficient to
support housebuilding at the level required to meet government targets and
measures of assessed need.
In particular, we have seen evidence of three key concerns with the planning
systems which we consider are limiting its ability to support the level of
housebuilding that policymakers believe is needed:
(a) Lack of predictability;
(b) Length, cost, and complexity of the planning process; and
(c) Insufficient clarity, consistency and strength of LPA targets, objectives, and
incentives to meet housing need.
We have also seen evidence that problems in the planning systems may be
having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders.
1) Green belt policies prevent the expansion of cities outwards. Compare the footprint of London to other major European cities and you'll see it's barely moved at all for decades.
2) Discretionary planning policies that mean local councils can turn down development, even when it adheres to stated rules. See for example this brownfield development in Brighton, a city that has one of the worst housing delivery records in the country: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwygkz57k1vo
The professional planning board recommended it for approval, but it was turned down by the political committee because of local complaints. A well specified zoning system would avoid this. Reduced uncertainty would make it possible for smaller builders to enter the market
3) affordable housing mandates (known as Inclusionary Zoning elsewhere). These specify that some amount of the new building must be offered at below market rates. Although there's a strong moral case for capturing some of the value produced by giving planning permission, this effectively acts as a tax on building homes in places with shortages. Ideally, people would be most incentivised to build where prices are highest, but this policy removes that incentive.
I can answer part of that. Very few areas are even opened up to allow building private housing, all kinds of "neighbours" can veto anything, just to name two problems
I much prefer the system the US, where you know your rate for longer. Some other countries, I think the Netherlands is one, also let you fix for longer than 5 years.
But why are you, and other people in your position, screwed if the prices return to affordability? High Loan-To-Value ratio so if the prices fall, the bank would force a sale?
I fully take your point, but I would point out, if housing prices drop 90% across the board, that would cause such an immense deflationary shock to the entire economy that $50k would go further than one would think.
Fixed rate for the full duration is also standard in France. People only refinance if the new rates are advantageous (and they find a bank which accepts).
Variable rates for mortgage are virtually unheard of.
I would assume it would be because the poster would find themselves in negative equity (depending on how much was left to repay on the mortgage) with all the potential pitfalls that come with it, such as if you want to borrow further money against the value of the property or if you want to sell up and move.
Let's say you buy a house at 500K with a 400K mortgage. House prices fall 50%, you owe 400K on a 250K house. Banks would repossess as the loan value can't be guaranteed by the asset. Separately, you could default on the loan if laws allow it, losing much of your wealth and making it impossible for you to get a loan for the 150K to move to another house. You could keep paying the loan, spending many years of income for exactly nothing in return. People tend to buy another house immediately, so there isn't that much "freed" money. So either banks lose a huge lot of money, or people do. Either way, massive financial crisis. That's an extreme case, adjust for lower fluctuations. I can be, and probably am, completely wrong about this.
In which country can Banks reposess if market value falls? In Germany that risk is 100% on the bank. No reprocessing without you failing to pay anyway.
I misspoke - you would not be able to remortgage and would need to repay the loan when the term expires, or be repossessed. In the UK, most people are on a 2 or 5 years fixed-rate mortgage, after which you don't need to remortgage but really want to, because the variable rate is typically a lot more expensive - so you're throwing even more money into the hole.
Did you buy a home > 10 years ago? Given inflation, isn't your mortgage not easy to pay off at this point (even if you did pay the minimum?). I can imagine one of two scenarios: (a) at the start, you really stretched and got a nice place to live (bravo!! in hindsight that was a genius move as you enjoyed many years of good quality living) or (b) your income has been stagnant (sorry :( )
I got a place 5 years back and did not overstretch at all ... now, the biggest challenge is our place is too small and has other inconveniences (lack of commute) that is painful. Selling and rebuying is trauma I don't want to inflict again.
> I have to refinance every 5 years, because that's the game in the UK, so if rates spike I'm also screwed.
Could anyone explain why is that the case? If the mortgage is till 70 then why are you forced to remake the agreement every 5 years? Can't you stick to original one?
No idea how it works in other countries but in the UK there are fixed-rate mortgages and variable-rate mortgages. Fixed rate ones are where the interest rate is locked in at the time the mortgage is taken out so any changes to the national base rate (positive or negative) do not change how much you have to repay, variable-rate mortgages are when the interest rate will fluctuate as the national base rate rises and falls.
Fixed-rate mortgages are time-limited (typically between 2-5 years) and after that you either switch to a variable rate mortgage or you take out a new fixed-rate mortgage based on the interest rates at the time.
People that bought properties just before COVID got dirt-cheap fixed-rate mortgages as the Bank of England base rate was 0.5%. Anyone sensible locked it in for 5 years which is typically the maximum available. After those 5 years were up, the base rate was about 5% which is a huge jump. I think most people have locked theirs in for 2 years now in the hopes that in a couple of years the base rate will be much lower.
Most(?) UK loans are fixed for a 5 years or so and then revert to the standard variable rate of the bank. Variable rates can make financial planning uncertain. But the bigger issue is often just the standard variable rate you get put on isn't the best rate, so you are generally advantaged to review and move.
US loans on the other hand are government backed to allow for longer fixed terms (30 years etc.)
You can keep the loan without refinancing it, but you move to what's known as the "standard variable rate" which is generally unfavourable. Most people therefore remortgage to a new "introductory" offer which will be fixed for 2, 3 or 5 years. This is expensive, time-consuming and inconvenient, like much of the UK housing system. A few years ago interest rates shot up, and some people had to stay on the SVR as fewer banks were offering new fixes.
Fixed rates are possible, but often the margins are pretty significant especially when rates are very low. Say rate is 0.25%, margin is 0.5-1%, fixed rate might be 1.5%+0.5-1%... When leveraged to max this could be big chunk...
> If houses ever return to good affordability I'm screwed.
Uhh, why? Unless you were planning on selling up and spending it all on a cruise or something house prices are immaterial to home owners.
> I have to refinance every 5 years, because that's the game in the UK, so if rates spike I'm also screwed.
This is the real problem. It's partly our fault, of course, for agreeing to a mortgage which we couldn't afford if the interest rates doubled. You know exactly what you're signing up to, but you still do it.
The trouble is there's no choice. The finance industry has us by the balls. I don't even think of it as a housing crisis, I think of it as finance crisis. The real problem is banks control far too much of our lives. The entire money supply is essentially just mortgages. This abstraction we call money has been taken way too far.
Housing is a huge cut of your salary. If housing were affordable, that money could be saved for retirement. Instead, it's paid toward a mortgage by necessity. So there is little room for savings other than hoping the house sells when you retire.
It doesn't have to be. You could live in a small place in a shit area miles from anything. But most people choose to allocate a large amount of their income to housing. This is what sets the pricing for housing in the good areas.
In other words, housing will always be a huge chunk of your income because it's hugely important. The only way it could be less is if it stopped mattering where you live. Then housing would be essentially a commodity and priced accordingly.
It's important to realise that money is an abstraction that we use to do trade, but it's not trade itself. Pricing is a reflection of market forces. You can't just magically change the price of housing and suddenly have more of everything else with no compromises. You have to change the market.
People always say "more housing*, but that's incredibly naive. More housing in the UK means tiny plots of land crammed in next to a dual carriageway in the middle of nowhere. People don't want to live there, but there's no choice. As long as there's inequality there will be high house prices. Turning housing into a commodity such that you can allocate only a small part of your income to it would take a lot more fundamental changes towards equality like vastly improved public transport, decentralisation of business, turning the most beautiful areas into national parks instead of estates owned by the rich etc.
> Uhh, why? Unless you were planning on selling up and spending it all on a cruise or something house prices are immaterial to home owners.
I don't know how it is in the UK, but in Paris, I hear from a lot of people that their retirement plan is to sell their Parisian apartment and move to a lower cost area with what they've gained. Doesn't work out if your "investment" is underwater.
Interest rates for individuals buying homes should be near zero. This needs to be subsidized by higher interest rates or taxes-on-businesses elsewhere.
> Uhh, why? Unless you were planning on selling up and spending it all on a cruise or something house prices are immaterial to home owners.
No, it's not immaterial. If you paid $1M for something and next year that something is worth $500K, it's a problem, regardless of whether you own it or it's mortgaged, regardless of whether you plan to sell it or live in it. You lost $500K, it's as simple as that.
IMO... one of the most important benchmarks for judging the effectiveness of a government is the cost of housing. Cheap and basic housing is so key for economic well-being. I would love to see very basic, small, apartments created by governments on a mass level to try to overcome the current situation. Like persistently have a department of government just building to meet needed demands in economic centers.
What other benchmarks would you throw out there if you were going to grade gov effectiveness?
Singapore's HDB system is world class in this regard.
Key items being first time owners are highly prioritized (effectively no one else). Must be owner occupied for first 5 years before allowing rental or resale. Government sets initial sale pricing to be quite affordable with special loans being cheap for the BTO. Average 2 year wait from lottery to build. Was 5 during covid.
A lot of the cheap blocks of government made apartments in the UK are now being torn down. Without regular maintenance and updating, cheap housing can quickly become ugly ghettos. It isn't enough to just build houses. They need to be initially desirable and continually maintained to remain desirable.
Ya I don't want it to be cheap, rather super solid and built for 100 years, but run on that type of time frame. I have some friends who build for universities and that is how they think when they build a project versus a cheap throw up that is barely expected to last 20 years.
Even if they are built, the entire insurance system post-Grenfell is causing absolutely insane service charges for residents.
Mine are up >50% since 2018, that’s despite gaining no new services and work on the building being put on hold due to it not being essential. The fact that it’s a relatively new build (about 12 years old) is almost irrelevant as construction is shoddy.
Putting new buildings up is only part of the problem, the entire system is fucked.
> Even if they are built, the entire insurance system post-Grenfell is causing absolutely insane service charges for residents.
If it's building insurance hikes, for fucks sake it should not be allowed to roll these over to the renters - they have had zero say in shoddy construction, the developers should be the ones held liable.
They should, but they’re not and the government appears unwilling to do anything about it.
Hell, my building recently lost it’s fire safety certificate because one guy decided to scam the system which has caused a ton of knock-on impact for owners looking to move out.
>I would love to see very basic, small, apartments created by governments on a mass level
As someone living in a country where it can take five or more years to get approval to build a new house and 10+ for commercial buildings due to the government bureaucracy, I'm scared by the idea of getting the government more involved. The key issue is that the government makes it very hard to build -> less housing -> expensive housing.
Czechia. Also, it's very inconsistent depending on local governance. Even Microsoft bailed out their data center project near Prague for this (and other) reasons...
I’d add fertility rate as another powerful metric: when people feel safe, supported, and optimistic, they have kids. So if housing, income stability, healthcare, and trust in the future are in place, you’ll usually see that reflected in birth rates.
All this only makes sense in the context of large groups; at the individual level, many factors determine whether someone has children.
What the puppet masters will tell you though that a country’s fertility rate are declining, because women want careers, the men are incels, and fertility drops due to climate change and microplastics.
Most people I know around my age, either limit the number of children or delay having them because they don’t feel safe bringing a child into this world.
> people in more precarious circumstances have more kids. I don't know why.
Did you consider that the judgement of precariousness of the people's situation is in your value system, and does not necessarily transfer to their value system? Especially this could be due to you having access to more information than them
Actually I do not see the similarity. However it appears that you see disrespect where only respect was intended - could you propose how should I have conveyed the message in a way that would appear more respectful in your eyes?
Women who are educated about birth control and able to make those decisions have less kids. That is why - when women specifically have options they choose to have less kids and pursue own happiness.
My understanding of human geography and population pyramids is that it's the opposite - when a nation is developing but not developed, birth rates are the highest. Developed nations have lower birth rate.
Nordic countries have the lowest birth rates outside east asia and they rank among the top on surveys of happiness, optimism and the like. I think you need to revisit your thesis. Some cultures just dont prioritize having kids.
I often think that for a government to convince me that they are serious about addressing a housing crisis, the first thing they need to do is determine what proportion of residential properties are not being used as a primary residence. It seems to me (looking at changes in the number of households to number of dwellings in my property obsessed country) that that proportion has been declining and policies should be introduced to encourage people not to remove residences from the permanent housing stock (e.g. higher taxes on short term rentals, second homes, empty homes, etc).
I’ve been told in China they have dirt cheap small units available for people who would otherwise be homeless. They aren’t flashy, but they are absolutely better than letting people be homeless.
Not sure why this kind of housing just doesn’t really exist elsewhere.
Ya good point, I see those all the time in Serbia. We need some kinda of base building for supply, and the rest of the bit where they can override local zoning, speed up permits, override reviews, etc.
Par of Khrushchev's legacy was switching away from the earlier focus on higher quality housing that largely favoured the elite in favour of throwing up cheap housing fast to alleviate the severe housing crisis.
But as a result, a more enduring part of his legacy became that due to economic stagnation, a large proportion of this really poor quality housing that was indeded as a stopgap to meet desperate short-term housing need, survived not just Khrushchev, but the Soviet Union...
> But as a result, a more enduring part of his legacy became that due to economic stagnation, a large proportion of this really poor quality housing that was indeded as a stopgap to meet desperate short-term housing need, survived not just Khrushchev, but the Soviet Union...
The alternative was people living in sheds and 19th-century timber huts that were falling apart.
The Khrushchev apartment blocks, despite their many disadvantages, were a godsend to the ballooning (at the time) population and necessary to support the rapid urbanization without homelessness.
The HN bubble will never understand that you can't solve the housing problem with only high-quality desirable housing while still making it cheap enough for the bottom quartile to afford it.
That's not even getting into the regulation side of it and local council/town NIMBYs
Sure. I think for all of Khruschev's faults, his housing policy was a significant positive.
It is just also a cautionary tale of how easily a temporary fix becomes semi-permanent, but that was on his successors and the failure of the longer term Soviet economy.
And that's kind of the dream TBH. Every private dollar that goes into housing is a dollar taken away from people who could be building businesses themselves or investing. Having cheap, plentiful housing provides a base that people can build from. There's other benefits too, say your relationships explodes and you need a new place, the last thing you want to do is be living with your ex, or couch surfing with friends.
Careful about cheap. Housebuilders were happy to just use plasterboard to separate dwellings in a flat complex for example (or it at least sounds like it. There is zero soundproofing - every sniff, tap, movement etc can be heard)
Governments caused this problem by fighting tooth and nail to keep immigration levels high. Without that, house prices in most developed countries would be falling now, like they are in Japan, because a decreasing population means less demand for housing.
It's not obvious to me that comparing GDP per capita is a fair comparison when talking about one country with immigration vs one without. A lot of the immigration I believe to be not so skilled. But we needed lower-skill jobs filled too.
good lord the unsubstantiated zenophobia. please share some data to support this claim.
here is counterpoint: i live in a place where housing prices rose higher than the national average during a time period when the state experienced out migration.
Immigration is not to blame. Gulf states have massive immigration and expat populations - multiple times that of the locals and yet they manage to manage and house them just fine.
This is a bit like saying that high nobility can afford to house its extended family : what about everyone else that did not inherit vast sums of money (hydrocarbons) ?
It is not about having money or not. It is about how the question of immigration is treated. If poor people without UK citizenship were not allowed to live or own property in the big cities, the rents there would have been substantially lower.
Housing prices are falling in Japan because they have the most YIMBY zoning laws in the developed world so they actually expand their housing stock. Also because their economy is shit since they dont allow any immigration.
We had a chance to defuse the housing crisis with remote work and we blew it.
Opportunities are concentrated and building in concentrated areas is inherently hard. We still don’t know how to scale mega cities fast while still operating them at capacity.
Just medium-to-high density by UK standards around existing larger train stations would do an immense amount to alleviate the UK housing crisis.
I used to live on a road with ~660 houses. The road, the houses, and the yards combined took up ca. 40,000 m^2. Near the local well-connected train station, a few new-builds in the 20~ floor range added more homes than that entire road took up in ~2,000 m^2.
On top of that, because of its location, the strain added on transport was far less - most people would be a short walking distance from both shops and commuter trains to the centre.
There are hundreds of major transit hubs like that in the UK where you could easily add do relatively modest hubs of higher-density housing and add a massive amount of capacity.
What's lacking is the political will to solve the massive problem of house owners who have been trained to see rising house prices as financially beneficial to them.
When most of those house owners are in an older demographic more likely to vote, it's a huge challenge to fix.
Why is it supposed to be good? Having lived in a (relatively small) city and in the countryside, I vastly prefer the countryside and actually find it more convenient in a lot of ways. An example would be the shops are a lot bigger as the land is cheap, so a 20m drive in the country gets me to a massive shop, but in the city half an hour on a bus or a 15m drive gets me to a much smaller one.
Density itself is good for infrastructure, but empirically it seems that we cannot exceed some level. Singapore or Hong Kong for example desperately need more density but it seems impossible to do so.
Then there is the question of wasted resources. We spent all of these resources to build up Detroit. Now what?
It's probably because Paris, officially, is the very small hypercenter of the Parisian metropolitan area. Whereas Tokyo is the actual total metropolis. Just look up the population of both. Paris is 2 millions whereas Tokyo is 14 millions. If you were to consider the whole Paris metropolitan area then the population is 11 millions.
Yes but the average size of a flat in Paris would be shocking to an American.
500 square feet for a couple is standard (that would be seen as a small appartment in the USA) and living in 300 square feet or less is fairly common for someone single.
> And density of European cities is still nowhere near what people have in East Asia
And thankfully, because of that our suicide rates are lower than in East Asia.
People aren't chicken and hell even poultry will show signs of aggression, depression and other mental health conditions when cramped in too tight conditions.
Preface: I'm a yimby who wants to see far more building, especially building upwards in London, but also more general building elsewhere.
That said, a 100 year wait for social housing in Westminster is not surprising, and not as bad as it sounds. A typical professional couple in London could not afford a family home in Westminster, and it's extremely common for people in their 30s to move out of the centre when they have kids. I don't think this should be any different for social tenants: they should certainly not have to wait 100 years, but it seems reasonable for them to be offered housing outside of Westminster. The Guardian article I read about the 100 year wait specifically mentioned 3 and 4 bed family homes, and my immediate reaction was that no one else can get them either!
I think the bigger problem is the lack of affordable housing particularly for young families (social or otherwise) outside of London
Yep. The shortage is overblown. Just look at past crashes (e.g. Ireland, Spain, etc). The crashes weren't caused by oversupply of housing, but a credit shortage. After the crash the so-called 'shortage' magically disappeared and people stopped talking about it (until the next boom).
Near my old house there were large areas of land that have sat empty for 20 years through successive rounds of planning permission. The reason is very simple:
You can buy land for X. You can spend Y to construct housing on it, and sell it now for Z, or you can sit on the land, safe in the knowledge that housing policy means prices will keep rising, and then you can spend Y+inflation, and sell it for Z times a factor far higher than than inflation.
If you finance X via investors or loans, this is effectively leverage. You finance Y the same way, but short term during construction, so you get a leveraged return on the growth of house prices in return for investing to buy only the land.
Couple this with constraining supply by sitting on underutilized land.
Another of the developers in the same area has still only built about one third or half of the buildings they're meant to build on another set of parcels that were first also available 20 years ago. They have no incentive to rush until investors want to exit.
I don’t know your particular area, but I have experience buying and selling raw land and it’s a much more unique and niche area of real estate that fewer people are competing in. Are you sure it’s actually zoned correctly and doesn’t have latent disputes?
I can give you plenty of stories of people who bought an empty chunk of land for $350k and then 20 years later sold it for around $350k. They would’ve done better investing in Pokémon cards (or anything).
Add on the flip side developers usually want to move fast and cash in now, in my experience, not do what you’re describing.
And, yes, one of the plots has had planning permission for years, and had the owners re-apply regularly for buildings in the 40-75 floor range, and the council has fallen over itself to approve it each time. The other involved a lengthy planning process with a plan agreed around 20 years ago for developments that are still not complete.
What you're describing makes sense in a market where there's plenty of options. In London land is scarce, and developers hoarding it makes it scarcer, and so both land values and housing prices have skyrocketed.
Where I live the ratio of dwellings to households has increased during the three decade long property price boom.
The most significant cause in my opinion is the financialisation of housing, fueled by three decades of ever decreasing interest rates allowing those with capital to use leverage to accumulate more (often removing them from the stock of permanent housing).
Higher interest rates are the catalyst that solves this problem.
> It always comes down to we don’t build houses fast enough. Why?
because we can't say that real estate is basically a cartel [1] and that big cities (where everyone is supposed to move because all the jobs are there + RTO) have staggering levels of empty houses (e.g. 19% in Paris [2]), and god forbid to apply any type of policy to adjust the situation.
The situation is significantly more complicated for Paris and Berlin which are touristic hot spots on top of being big cities.
For exemple, the 19% you quote in Paris include occasional occupation which is partially driven up by the insane price of hotel for which people who need to spend time in Paris regularly have to compete with tourists.
But I disagree with you on the absence of policy to adjust the situation. Paris has been doing a lot in the past few years.
The city severely limited the ability of owners to turn their property into short term rentals to try to increase the long term rental offering.
Then there was the rent cap but its impact is more difficult to estimate. On the one hand, it made renting properties less interesting and probably incitated some owners to keep their appartments empty. On the other hand, it severely limited the possibility of borrowing money for buy to rent project as it doesn't make much sense financially and therefore lowered the market pressure for people buying to live.
Last year, they significantly increased the vacant property tax. It's calculated on the rental value and quickly raise to 34% of it so it rapidely doesn't make sense to keep an appartment empty if you are not going to be in Paris very frequently.
Humans aren't rabbits. Humans tend to have children in inverse proportion to the amount of grass, poorer people having more children than richer ones. Of course it's not a direct correlation, or a simple one, but the effect is there.
More houses in locations people want to live in, yes. In the end, even leaving house prices aside, a larger population needs more housing, and the UK has been underbuilding several tens of thousands of units a year for decades.
In the UK we never really got medium rise apartment blocks right. Instead we have terraces, which don't give the same housing density. The neighborhood I now live in in Portugal is mostly 7-10 storey apartment buildings, which is enough density for plenty of shops, cafes, restaurants, schools, playgrounds, public transit etc. It houses an astonishing amount of people in reasonably generous conditions (e.g. balconies are the norm), quite the modern miracle in my UK eyes.
Remember that market rents are higher than they need to be due to the artificial scarcity imposed by a NIMBY-friendly planning system and the inaction of successive Governments who have chosen to look the other way.
And who would do the cleaning and serve you coffee if social housing didn't exist? It might cost you a lot more.
Decommodify owning a home. You’re gonna be fretting about why housing is getting more expensive while fighting a ghost battle against homeowners until you do.[1]
Do-gooder liberals are gonna worry about what policy mistake was made in the last 50 years. No. You have competing interests and the people who own something have the leverage as well as something to lose if too many people get what they already have. What’s difficult to understand?
Don’t try to “grow the middle class”, this selfish NIMBY sociological construction (it’s just gonna compact anyway, and it is). Decommodify having a dang roof over your head.
Over the last 50-70 years the UK made the choice to stop building social housing and to sell off the existing stock with aggressive government subsidies.
Complaining now is a bit like complaining there's no milk after you sold the dairy farm to build a casino.
I read TFA but I'm not seeing anything but useless outrage that would have been better placed 20-30 years ago
I became a first time property owner at 36 and it took a top 2-3% percentile income + my partners more median salary to do it on the outskirts of London
My mortgage runs until I'm 70 and I, like most owners now, are entirely dependent on the housing casino game continuing. If houses ever return to good affordability I'm screwed.
I have to refinance every 5 years, because that's the game in the UK, so if rates spike I'm also screwed.
Everyone in UK housing, owner or rented, is screwed and it's been this way for decades.
> If houses ever return to good affordability I'm screwed.
Which creates a huge pool of people who are opposed to making houses more affordable.
The key here is incremental development.
So, I'm really into municipal finance and fixing the housing crisis, which got me into Strong Towns. There is a solution, but it's not one that is going to make everyone happy (obviously), it is the state facilitating or even gently subsidizing incremental development.
If everyone is, by right, allowed to build the next larger "unit" of housing (for simplicity's sake, suppose 2x sqft[m2], height, and housing units of the median residential building within a half-mile radius), but not allow to massively build piles of housing on one site, then we effectively solve both problems.
Firstly, this allows for a massive amount of housing construction, with market incentives driving it. Out of the gate, you have the potential to easily double the housing supply. Secondly, the profits from the housing must be more-or-less distributed to the existing homeowners, and the potential to lower property values by building non-like for like housing doesn't exist. Neighborhoods slowly evolve, they don't rapidly change. Third, it incentivizes homeowners to build-to-last with the next stage of growth built in, because it's much cheaper in the long run to build a structure with the capacity to stack another unit on top than it is to tear down a building and rebuild the unit at double the capacity. Finally... and this is the thing that most people miss. It's fast. Smaller-scale developments need a much smaller planning phase, and there are many, many more of them to be constructed. This supports economies of scale, instead of the existing system, with all it's red tape that only allows a few actors to wade through the legal system for large developments. This should create a wide construction industry instead of a narrow one.
I really think the housing crisis is solvable with the top level government insisting that incremental development be allow by right, and that larger scale developments be put up for local review. This allows a city to grow organically, instead of all at once, but only at specific sites.
This is the problem with housing in general. Everywhere housing becomes an investment we see rampant NIMBY-ism and self-destructive local legislation.
100%, and it’s not clear there’s any solution to that, because voters will punish anyone who tries to fix it.
The government might also be pushed into actions that reduce house prices for other reasons.
The biggest reason for nigh house prices (particularly relative to incomes) is the affordability of mortgage payments as a result of low interest rates. Interest rates may have to be raised to control inflation.
It is a mistake to think of supply vs demand as "how many people want a house" vs "how many houses are there". Both supply and demand are curves against price. Interest rates shift the demand curve. As the supply curve is inelastic it has an even greater impact in the short term
... and that's exactly what people want to keep (the shortage) because that's their pension. That is why they won't end up on the street in 20 years.
Any attempt to fix the housing situation will need to provide owners, not just with housing, but with a passable income for 40+ years.
So, the actual discussion is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=747X0M7Keyw
And this discussion is hard because to just maintain current pension levels young people will need to be a LOT more productive (ie. work more, and keep less of the fruits of their labour) ... and if we're going to assign blame, the reason is that the pensioners refused to have enough kids. It's not really the kids' fault.
We all know what's going to happen too, in general. Some economic upheaval, some drastic event will create enormous disruption and then, finally, it will be politically acceptable to make the hard choice.
> the reason is that the pensioners refused to have enough kids
I thought they did have enough kids but that the next generation(s) need to breed faster.
In New Zealand and Australia ~30% of population were born in another country. I suspect our government will try and fix the working-age population hole by more immigration? New Zealand is building houses (necessary when increasing population by 50% through immigration). You can see both higher density and new suburban growth (replacing farmland) in my city of Christchurch.
It is silly to plan your retirement by looking at the situation right now. The economics of demographics will require grim changes. I'm sceptical of retirement funding, superannuation, and house sales. Even preppers seem like they have some sense. There's little information on potential solutions - everything is based on the presumption that decades away will be just like it is today.
New Zealand property market is weird: https://www.imf.org/external/research/housing/
Politicians are not going to provide a solution, nor are private developers. The solution is a crash that can't be avoided. As hinted at, this could be caused by a sustained increase in interest rates. It has happened before and it will happen again. I would even go so far as to say it is already happening in some property markets (>30% down in real terms in my city already, with no end in sight).
Well, the renters will reward any government that pushes down house prices i.e. builds more houses. And I assume there are more renters than home owners.
but which group is more active in voting and politics?
I would assume home owners are more likely to vote. But even with a lower voter turn out, there could still be more voting renters.
A sibling post has stats from 15 years ago but a lot has changed since then. My gut feeling is that more people are struggling to buy than to pay back mortgages but I have no stats to back that up.
> But even with a lower voter turn out, there could still be more voting renters.
Almost every country has more home owners than renters, so no. In USA its 65%.
Which group lives in cities where their vote counts far less than a vote in the countryside
It depends on the country or area unfortunately
> The 2011 Census tells us … around 64% of UK households owned their home
That’s not the same as the number of voters, obviously, but I’m not sure it’s a safe assumption, even before it gets into the actual voting dynamics from FPTP… there’s also presumably a lot of renters with their eyes on Mom and Dad’s home as an inheritance.
If they inherit the house they would be out of the mortgage casino and lower housing prices won't affect them so much.
Of course it won't be as valuable as an asset, but assuming they are primarily using it as a house rather then an asset then lower housing prices may not significantly affect their voting behaviour.
> but assuming they are primarily using it as a house
Unlikely unless they’re an only child
Renters do not want justice or fairness. They want to one day become landlords and themselves suck the blood of the young and healthy.
"A slave dreams not of freedom, but of his own slaves."
^^^ this I don't think people consider the fact that a very good portion of these landowners were once renters that worked their way up and don't want to make it easier for the ones who have to do the same after themselves. It's easy to point fingers from the bottom until suddenly you're looking down from the top and the view ain't that bad
This is the thing I never see addressed. Wouldn't fixing the housing crisis necessarily involve slashing down property values? Which are for a lot of people their only form of savings?
Genuine question by the way, I would like an answer.
> Which are for a lot of people their only form of savings?
It's fake savings unless you are speculating on properties.
Most people only own the place they actually live in and only resell to buy another place. A general property market crash doesn't affect the value of your house compared to other house so it's mostly neutral in this regard.
Of course people who borrowed before the crash will be in debt for longer than people who bought after but that doesn't actually change their debt situation. You might say it's unfair but well, not wanting other to be better of doesn't seem like a good reason to not solve the housing crisis.
In the end the only people who trully stand to lose are multi-owners but they are a significant part of the problem in the first place so that doesn't make me sad.
A case where it isn't fake savings is where people who work and live an a very expensive urban area, like london, may use the home as a retirement investment. So when they retire they move to a less expensive area and can use the difference in housing costs in the two areas as a retirement nest egg.
It's an interesting way to try to save, and assumes anyone will want and be able to buy it.
And that you will be able to keep the expensive property with expensive costs. Plus compare if living in the expensive vs cheap place gets you more savings...
No, it does not make sense. I can see holding a property for a child, but not as retirement.
You misunderstand I think. When you retire you sell the expensive property and then buy a less expensive property in a cheaper area. If retired, then potentially have fewer restrictions on where you live because you don't have to commute to work any more. The difference in property costs between the old and new areas is your nest egg.
You will still earn the difference between the expensive property and the less expensive one. It will just be a lot less and that’s a good thing.
Using properties as store of value or betting on them becoming more expensive have too many externalities.
Your case for exemple is directly leading to people actually living and working in the less expensive places being displaced by retirees from the city which is very much undesirable for local life.
It's not neutral if you've borrowed to buy the home...
If you're in negative or reduced equity your mortgage costs can increase dramatically when you refinance. This alone can easily cripple a large % of the population and tank the consumer economy
Depends of where you live. Fixed rates for full duration are standard in a lot of Europe. You never refinance unless it’s winning for you.
Forced variable rates are a scam.
Why would you refinance if you're underwater? Wouldn't you walk away from the property in most cases?
Of course that doesn't eliminate the economic impact. It just shifts it elsewhere.
An decent case can probably be made for the government to take on such loans and offer some scheme to forgive the difference if certain criteria are met.
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense.
A sharp fall in house prices might hurt some people, although the number who would be in negative equity is probably smaller than you'd think. A quick Google says only 28% of homes are owner occupied with a mortgage, and the vast majority of those will have paid off substantial capital.
I think the premise is worth questioning though: It's true that many people have most of their wealth tied up in their house. But unless they want to substantially downsize, they can't access these savings.
In general it seems bad that it's common for people to have most of their wealth in an illiquid, undiversified investment that they also live in.
Yes, but people feel secure and better off if their house is worth more, even if they never access those savings.
The best answer I've seen is gradually increasing land value tax (yes, Georgist style). Would slowly deflate the market - but much more at the top end than the low end. Would also encourage efficient use of land. And be a new source of revenue that can replace other taxes.
Yes and no.. Slashing the problem completely is no worse than not fixing it since a climb into the stratosphere also has to burst.. I.e. with a new generation rejecting traditional lifestyles.
I think the solution is to artificially build new cities with ideal logistics. Distant cities inevitably draw away housing consumers but by least influential first and are outside each others influence for NIMBYs.
A nominal increase in value, while becoming more affordable in real terms might be feasible.
However to do this would require inflation of other goods, matched by wage rises, which would require actions that the British political establishment is not willing to take.
Making prices stagnant over 10-20 years would allow wages to catch up. This hurts speculators and finance way more than individual families and allows for a more gradual transition.
It's probably only something you can fix across generations.
You're totally right. It would be better for home owners since high houses prices make everything about buying and selling houses more expensive. You can't realise your housing gains except by dying. Or downsizing, but many old people rattle around in 3+ bedroom houses until they die or are forced to go into a retirement home.
It would also involve building more houses, which is bitterly and loudly opposed by a subset of home owners. Home owners are also richer, older, and vote much more than the (generally) poorer, younger renters.
If you're not planning on selling your house it's future value is irrelevant. All I care about is the purchase price of my "forever home".
The only difference it makes it that if your lender gives more favourable interest rates when your loan to value ratio improves. So if you purchase a house and the price doubles, your LTV is already 50%. Conversely if it drops after you paid off half the mortgage, your LTV might be shit
I'm not sure if the thing about LTV is true considering the whole picture, since the loan is larger. A larger loan at a lower interest rate still has large monthly payments. (I'd have to do the maths to be sure ...)
Yes, but that doesn't mean the people who had houses that lost value are screwed. It just means that they didn't pocket as much profit as they could have. They bought a value and a rate they could afford. They're no more or less screwed if the value of the house goes down. They're screwed if they can't pay the mortgage. Lots of people are screwed by high housing costs. The only rational conclusion is to lower housing costs. I say this as someone paying a mortgage.
they certainly will consider themselves screwed.
Real estate as savings or an investment only works if prices only go up forever.
This is the core issue with all modern capitalist economies. They rely on infinite unbounded growth.
Obviously real estate prices cannot trend to infinity or the system collapses. You are here.
Exactly. At some point a lot of people are going to discover that they are the bag-holders.
It's unfortunate, and at an individual level you can't blame people that felt compelled to purchase a home (only one!). However, if people are honest with themselves, they would admit that the only reason they were willing to pay such a high price is because they expected the price to increase. In other words they were speculating. After a certain point, nobody was buying for the actual ROI (i.e. income potential or substituted rental value). Not only was this mistake made, but it was made using massive leverage in most cases.
TLDR; Nobody was willing to admit that they were making a risky investment. A risk that it may turn out that they couldn't afford to make.
Yes. But that's just like any fake token being used by olds as a retirement plan.
Seeing as the olds control almost all of the wealth of industrialized nations, they should as a group be held entirely responsible for paying for entitlements and benefits for other elderly. The young should not be burdened with this. They have more burdens than they can handle already and are soon genetically extinct unless the olds take the boot from their neck.
Please stop spreading generational divide. Those olds were burdened with this just like today's young. Somehow some people think olds had it easy. Housing issues are not us(young) vs them(old).
> Please stop spreading generational divide.
I have more things in common with any young person from the other side of the world than I have with the olds from my own nation, city or street. It is what it is.
The olds have been waging a vicious economic war of extermination against the young for the entire 21st century. And now the cycle has to stop, because there are almost no more youth to exploit, and will be even less in the future.
No previous generation behaved like the current olds. We have to be much better than them, and let their twisted ways be forgotten.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Mainstream media made fun of China for building “ghost cities” in the middle of nowhere.
Now, those cities are full of people.
“Chinese ghost cities are finally stirring to life”
https://norcalapa.org/2021/09/chinese-ghost-cities-are-final...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/chinese-g...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_in_...
First Edit: removed unnecessary snark.
Second Edit: Added sources.
"Now", it is 2025, not 2021, and there are one billion empty apartments in China, and the local government selling land to developers magic money tree ponzi scheme is running out of road.
> there are one billion empty apartments in China
I don't believe that, a billion is a lot.
Its not even that, the restrictions on new homes in the UK make it impossible to build any significant amount of housing, social or not.
Not fully, but a sizeable part of this problem is due to NIMBY-ism and power that local councillors have
If you'd spent 8-10x income on a home you'd be a NIMBY about some dick building directly overlooking your garden too
Be specific - what restrictions are these and how do they affect building?
Page 8 of the recent CMA study into housebuilding in the UK: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65d8badb6efa8...
A prior condition for building houses is having permission to build them. We have found that the planning system is exerting a significant downward pressure on the overall number of planning permissions being granted across Great Britain. Over the long-term, the number of permissions being given has been insufficient to support housebuilding at the level required to meet government targets and measures of assessed need.
In particular, we have seen evidence of three key concerns with the planning systems which we consider are limiting its ability to support the level of housebuilding that policymakers believe is needed: (a) Lack of predictability; (b) Length, cost, and complexity of the planning process; and (c) Insufficient clarity, consistency and strength of LPA targets, objectives, and incentives to meet housing need.
We have also seen evidence that problems in the planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders.
The three main important ones:
1) Green belt policies prevent the expansion of cities outwards. Compare the footprint of London to other major European cities and you'll see it's barely moved at all for decades.
2) Discretionary planning policies that mean local councils can turn down development, even when it adheres to stated rules. See for example this brownfield development in Brighton, a city that has one of the worst housing delivery records in the country: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwygkz57k1vo
The professional planning board recommended it for approval, but it was turned down by the political committee because of local complaints. A well specified zoning system would avoid this. Reduced uncertainty would make it possible for smaller builders to enter the market
3) affordable housing mandates (known as Inclusionary Zoning elsewhere). These specify that some amount of the new building must be offered at below market rates. Although there's a strong moral case for capturing some of the value produced by giving planning permission, this effectively acts as a tax on building homes in places with shortages. Ideally, people would be most incentivised to build where prices are highest, but this policy removes that incentive.
I can answer part of that. Very few areas are even opened up to allow building private housing, all kinds of "neighbours" can veto anything, just to name two problems
In short, the Town and Country Planning Act
I much prefer the system the US, where you know your rate for longer. Some other countries, I think the Netherlands is one, also let you fix for longer than 5 years. But why are you, and other people in your position, screwed if the prices return to affordability? High Loan-To-Value ratio so if the prices fall, the bank would force a sale?
If they put 1M into a house, then sell it and buy a 500k bungalow at retirement age, that unlocks 500k living/care money.
If they put 1M into a house, prices fall, they sell it for 100k and buy a bungalow for 50k, that unlocks only 50k to live on.
They lose decades of saving/investment money even though they can still sidestep one house to another.
I fully take your point, but I would point out, if housing prices drop 90% across the board, that would cause such an immense deflationary shock to the entire economy that $50k would go further than one would think.
So who will be buying all the potatoes that nobody can afford any more?
Money is made up numbers. Food is real, energy is real, houses are real. The numbers are literally just numbers.
Germany here, I have a fixed rate for 30 years.
Fixed rate for the full duration is also standard in France. People only refinance if the new rates are advantageous (and they find a bank which accepts). Variable rates for mortgage are virtually unheard of.
I would assume it would be because the poster would find themselves in negative equity (depending on how much was left to repay on the mortgage) with all the potential pitfalls that come with it, such as if you want to borrow further money against the value of the property or if you want to sell up and move.
Let's say you buy a house at 500K with a 400K mortgage. House prices fall 50%, you owe 400K on a 250K house. Banks would repossess as the loan value can't be guaranteed by the asset. Separately, you could default on the loan if laws allow it, losing much of your wealth and making it impossible for you to get a loan for the 150K to move to another house. You could keep paying the loan, spending many years of income for exactly nothing in return. People tend to buy another house immediately, so there isn't that much "freed" money. So either banks lose a huge lot of money, or people do. Either way, massive financial crisis. That's an extreme case, adjust for lower fluctuations. I can be, and probably am, completely wrong about this.
In which country can Banks reposess if market value falls? In Germany that risk is 100% on the bank. No reprocessing without you failing to pay anyway.
I misspoke - you would not be able to remortgage and would need to repay the loan when the term expires, or be repossessed. In the UK, most people are on a 2 or 5 years fixed-rate mortgage, after which you don't need to remortgage but really want to, because the variable rate is typically a lot more expensive - so you're throwing even more money into the hole.
Ah, you are right. That would be hard if you couldn't remortgage.
Did you buy a home > 10 years ago? Given inflation, isn't your mortgage not easy to pay off at this point (even if you did pay the minimum?). I can imagine one of two scenarios: (a) at the start, you really stretched and got a nice place to live (bravo!! in hindsight that was a genius move as you enjoyed many years of good quality living) or (b) your income has been stagnant (sorry :( )
I got a place 5 years back and did not overstretch at all ... now, the biggest challenge is our place is too small and has other inconveniences (lack of commute) that is painful. Selling and rebuying is trauma I don't want to inflict again.
10 year mortgages are available too from Nationwide et al
> I have to refinance every 5 years, because that's the game in the UK, so if rates spike I'm also screwed.
Could anyone explain why is that the case? If the mortgage is till 70 then why are you forced to remake the agreement every 5 years? Can't you stick to original one?
No idea how it works in other countries but in the UK there are fixed-rate mortgages and variable-rate mortgages. Fixed rate ones are where the interest rate is locked in at the time the mortgage is taken out so any changes to the national base rate (positive or negative) do not change how much you have to repay, variable-rate mortgages are when the interest rate will fluctuate as the national base rate rises and falls.
Fixed-rate mortgages are time-limited (typically between 2-5 years) and after that you either switch to a variable rate mortgage or you take out a new fixed-rate mortgage based on the interest rates at the time.
People that bought properties just before COVID got dirt-cheap fixed-rate mortgages as the Bank of England base rate was 0.5%. Anyone sensible locked it in for 5 years which is typically the maximum available. After those 5 years were up, the base rate was about 5% which is a huge jump. I think most people have locked theirs in for 2 years now in the hopes that in a couple of years the base rate will be much lower.
Most(?) UK loans are fixed for a 5 years or so and then revert to the standard variable rate of the bank. Variable rates can make financial planning uncertain. But the bigger issue is often just the standard variable rate you get put on isn't the best rate, so you are generally advantaged to review and move.
US loans on the other hand are government backed to allow for longer fixed terms (30 years etc.)
You can keep the loan without refinancing it, but you move to what's known as the "standard variable rate" which is generally unfavourable. Most people therefore remortgage to a new "introductory" offer which will be fixed for 2, 3 or 5 years. This is expensive, time-consuming and inconvenient, like much of the UK housing system. A few years ago interest rates shot up, and some people had to stay on the SVR as fewer banks were offering new fixes.
A bank would be mental to commit to a fixed interest rate on a mortgage for 30 years. Economic conditions change.
In a lot of countries banks have to do that.
Fixed rates are possible, but often the margins are pretty significant especially when rates are very low. Say rate is 0.25%, margin is 0.5-1%, fixed rate might be 1.5%+0.5-1%... When leveraged to max this could be big chunk...
> If houses ever return to good affordability I'm screwed.
Uhh, why? Unless you were planning on selling up and spending it all on a cruise or something house prices are immaterial to home owners.
> I have to refinance every 5 years, because that's the game in the UK, so if rates spike I'm also screwed.
This is the real problem. It's partly our fault, of course, for agreeing to a mortgage which we couldn't afford if the interest rates doubled. You know exactly what you're signing up to, but you still do it.
The trouble is there's no choice. The finance industry has us by the balls. I don't even think of it as a housing crisis, I think of it as finance crisis. The real problem is banks control far too much of our lives. The entire money supply is essentially just mortgages. This abstraction we call money has been taken way too far.
Housing is a huge cut of your salary. If housing were affordable, that money could be saved for retirement. Instead, it's paid toward a mortgage by necessity. So there is little room for savings other than hoping the house sells when you retire.
It doesn't have to be. You could live in a small place in a shit area miles from anything. But most people choose to allocate a large amount of their income to housing. This is what sets the pricing for housing in the good areas.
In other words, housing will always be a huge chunk of your income because it's hugely important. The only way it could be less is if it stopped mattering where you live. Then housing would be essentially a commodity and priced accordingly.
It's important to realise that money is an abstraction that we use to do trade, but it's not trade itself. Pricing is a reflection of market forces. You can't just magically change the price of housing and suddenly have more of everything else with no compromises. You have to change the market.
People always say "more housing*, but that's incredibly naive. More housing in the UK means tiny plots of land crammed in next to a dual carriageway in the middle of nowhere. People don't want to live there, but there's no choice. As long as there's inequality there will be high house prices. Turning housing into a commodity such that you can allocate only a small part of your income to it would take a lot more fundamental changes towards equality like vastly improved public transport, decentralisation of business, turning the most beautiful areas into national parks instead of estates owned by the rich etc.
> Uhh, why? Unless you were planning on selling up and spending it all on a cruise or something house prices are immaterial to home owners.
I don't know how it is in the UK, but in Paris, I hear from a lot of people that their retirement plan is to sell their Parisian apartment and move to a lower cost area with what they've gained. Doesn't work out if your "investment" is underwater.
> Doesn't work out if your "investment" is underwater.
With climate change it will be literally what will happen to many homeowners in low lying coastal areas some decades from now.
Interest rates for individuals buying homes should be near zero. This needs to be subsidized by higher interest rates or taxes-on-businesses elsewhere.
> Uhh, why? Unless you were planning on selling up and spending it all on a cruise or something house prices are immaterial to home owners.
No, it's not immaterial. If you paid $1M for something and next year that something is worth $500K, it's a problem, regardless of whether you own it or it's mortgaged, regardless of whether you plan to sell it or live in it. You lost $500K, it's as simple as that.
my mortgage doesn't decrease if my house loses half its value.
IMO... one of the most important benchmarks for judging the effectiveness of a government is the cost of housing. Cheap and basic housing is so key for economic well-being. I would love to see very basic, small, apartments created by governments on a mass level to try to overcome the current situation. Like persistently have a department of government just building to meet needed demands in economic centers.
What other benchmarks would you throw out there if you were going to grade gov effectiveness?
Singapore's HDB system is world class in this regard.
Key items being first time owners are highly prioritized (effectively no one else). Must be owner occupied for first 5 years before allowing rental or resale. Government sets initial sale pricing to be quite affordable with special loans being cheap for the BTO. Average 2 year wait from lottery to build. Was 5 during covid.
Austria too - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-08/the-desig...
A lot of the cheap blocks of government made apartments in the UK are now being torn down. Without regular maintenance and updating, cheap housing can quickly become ugly ghettos. It isn't enough to just build houses. They need to be initially desirable and continually maintained to remain desirable.
Ya I don't want it to be cheap, rather super solid and built for 100 years, but run on that type of time frame. I have some friends who build for universities and that is how they think when they build a project versus a cheap throw up that is barely expected to last 20 years.
Even if they are built, the entire insurance system post-Grenfell is causing absolutely insane service charges for residents.
Mine are up >50% since 2018, that’s despite gaining no new services and work on the building being put on hold due to it not being essential. The fact that it’s a relatively new build (about 12 years old) is almost irrelevant as construction is shoddy.
Putting new buildings up is only part of the problem, the entire system is fucked.
Double whammy: spray foam attic insulation (aided by goverment grants!) causing sale & mortgage problems.
https://hoa.org.uk/advice/guides-for-homeowners/i-am-improvi...
We had our cladding replaced but now our fire safety certificate is invalid.
The replacement was done so poorly that panels come loose and we have to request the building management company sort it out.
> Even if they are built, the entire insurance system post-Grenfell is causing absolutely insane service charges for residents.
If it's building insurance hikes, for fucks sake it should not be allowed to roll these over to the renters - they have had zero say in shoddy construction, the developers should be the ones held liable.
They should, but they’re not and the government appears unwilling to do anything about it.
Hell, my building recently lost it’s fire safety certificate because one guy decided to scam the system which has caused a ton of knock-on impact for owners looking to move out.
Not allowed to roll over to renters? What does that mean? How would it work? Money is fungible.
Why should the owner of a unit be expected to absorb the cost? It isn't like they chose the cladding.
People obviously do go after the developers but it isn't like they are picking and choosing from materials lists during construction either.
Renters in this case probably means leaseholders. Under leasehold, the owner of the unit is effectively a renter.
>I would love to see very basic, small, apartments created by governments on a mass level
As someone living in a country where it can take five or more years to get approval to build a new house and 10+ for commercial buildings due to the government bureaucracy, I'm scared by the idea of getting the government more involved. The key issue is that the government makes it very hard to build -> less housing -> expensive housing.
if that is SF then that sounds like the discretionary review process for entitlements, are you familiar with any of those words?
what country is that?
Czechia. Also, it's very inconsistent depending on local governance. Even Microsoft bailed out their data center project near Prague for this (and other) reasons...
I’d add fertility rate as another powerful metric: when people feel safe, supported, and optimistic, they have kids. So if housing, income stability, healthcare, and trust in the future are in place, you’ll usually see that reflected in birth rates.
All this only makes sense in the context of large groups; at the individual level, many factors determine whether someone has children.
What the puppet masters will tell you though that a country’s fertility rate are declining, because women want careers, the men are incels, and fertility drops due to climate change and microplastics.
Most people I know around my age, either limit the number of children or delay having them because they don’t feel safe bringing a child into this world.
> when people feel safe, supported, and optimistic, they have kids.
I actually thought that wasn't the case. Across the entire world, people in more precarious circumstances have more kids. I don't know why.
> people in more precarious circumstances have more kids. I don't know why.
Did you consider that the judgement of precariousness of the people's situation is in your value system, and does not necessarily transfer to their value system? Especially this could be due to you having access to more information than them
isn’t your comment doing literally the same thing?
Actually I do not see the similarity. However it appears that you see disrespect where only respect was intended - could you propose how should I have conveyed the message in a way that would appear more respectful in your eyes?
Huh?
Across the world, yes, but in the context of reasonably well of people, no. There are other differences too.
The consequences of having more kids is very different for a subsistence farmer vs an affluent urban person.
less educated -> less money -> less to lose + welfare benefits don't look too bad
Women who are educated about birth control and able to make those decisions have less kids. That is why - when women specifically have options they choose to have less kids and pursue own happiness.
My understanding of human geography and population pyramids is that it's the opposite - when a nation is developing but not developed, birth rates are the highest. Developed nations have lower birth rate.
Nordic countries have the lowest birth rates outside east asia and they rank among the top on surveys of happiness, optimism and the like. I think you need to revisit your thesis. Some cultures just dont prioritize having kids.
I often think that for a government to convince me that they are serious about addressing a housing crisis, the first thing they need to do is determine what proportion of residential properties are not being used as a primary residence. It seems to me (looking at changes in the number of households to number of dwellings in my property obsessed country) that that proportion has been declining and policies should be introduced to encourage people not to remove residences from the permanent housing stock (e.g. higher taxes on short term rentals, second homes, empty homes, etc).
I’ve been told in China they have dirt cheap small units available for people who would otherwise be homeless. They aren’t flashy, but they are absolutely better than letting people be homeless.
Not sure why this kind of housing just doesn’t really exist elsewhere.
Life expectancy, starvation rates, literacy rates
Ugh, that made me look at literacy rates in the USA at the 6th grade or below.
Its kinda funny you mention this because a lot of communist countries did pretty much this with high rise apartments. They're still there too.
Ya good point, I see those all the time in Serbia. We need some kinda of base building for supply, and the rest of the bit where they can override local zoning, speed up permits, override reviews, etc.
Par of Khrushchev's legacy was switching away from the earlier focus on higher quality housing that largely favoured the elite in favour of throwing up cheap housing fast to alleviate the severe housing crisis.
But as a result, a more enduring part of his legacy became that due to economic stagnation, a large proportion of this really poor quality housing that was indeded as a stopgap to meet desperate short-term housing need, survived not just Khrushchev, but the Soviet Union...
> But as a result, a more enduring part of his legacy became that due to economic stagnation, a large proportion of this really poor quality housing that was indeded as a stopgap to meet desperate short-term housing need, survived not just Khrushchev, but the Soviet Union...
The alternative was people living in sheds and 19th-century timber huts that were falling apart.
The Khrushchev apartment blocks, despite their many disadvantages, were a godsend to the ballooning (at the time) population and necessary to support the rapid urbanization without homelessness.
The HN bubble will never understand that you can't solve the housing problem with only high-quality desirable housing while still making it cheap enough for the bottom quartile to afford it.
That's not even getting into the regulation side of it and local council/town NIMBYs
Sure. I think for all of Khruschev's faults, his housing policy was a significant positive.
It is just also a cautionary tale of how easily a temporary fix becomes semi-permanent, but that was on his successors and the failure of the longer term Soviet economy.
And that's kind of the dream TBH. Every private dollar that goes into housing is a dollar taken away from people who could be building businesses themselves or investing. Having cheap, plentiful housing provides a base that people can build from. There's other benefits too, say your relationships explodes and you need a new place, the last thing you want to do is be living with your ex, or couch surfing with friends.
And the best way to do this imo is to have the right incentives for investors to build affordable homes.
Careful about cheap. Housebuilders were happy to just use plasterboard to separate dwellings in a flat complex for example (or it at least sounds like it. There is zero soundproofing - every sniff, tap, movement etc can be heard)
Maternal mortality rate.
Also infant mortality rate.
Governments caused this problem by fighting tooth and nail to keep immigration levels high. Without that, house prices in most developed countries would be falling now, like they are in Japan, because a decreasing population means less demand for housing.
Cure worse than the disease. A aging population is economically ruinous.
Compare the growth in GDP per capita in Japan Vs the UK, the UK isn't doing particularly better in spite of all that immigration.
It looks to me that the Uk has done a lot better:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
It's not obvious to me that comparing GDP per capita is a fair comparison when talking about one country with immigration vs one without. A lot of the immigration I believe to be not so skilled. But we needed lower-skill jobs filled too.
its quite complicated and changes over time.
Post Brexit changes make it easier for high skilled workers and harder for low skilled. I have not idea how big the actual change has been.
There have been other events and rule changes that have had an impact - covid and Ukrainian visas.
Some interesting data here: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/mi...
good lord the unsubstantiated zenophobia. please share some data to support this claim.
here is counterpoint: i live in a place where housing prices rose higher than the national average during a time period when the state experienced out migration.
Immigration is not to blame. Gulf states have massive immigration and expat populations - multiple times that of the locals and yet they manage to manage and house them just fine.
This is a bit like saying that high nobility can afford to house its extended family : what about everyone else that did not inherit vast sums of money (hydrocarbons) ?
It is not about having money or not. It is about how the question of immigration is treated. If poor people without UK citizenship were not allowed to live or own property in the big cities, the rents there would have been substantially lower.
Housing prices are falling in Japan because they have the most YIMBY zoning laws in the developed world so they actually expand their housing stock. Also because their economy is shit since they dont allow any immigration.
We had a chance to defuse the housing crisis with remote work and we blew it.
Opportunities are concentrated and building in concentrated areas is inherently hard. We still don’t know how to scale mega cities fast while still operating them at capacity.
So the problem will not go away anytime soon.
High density is supposed to be good isn't it? And density of European cities is still nowhere near what people have in East Asia
Just medium-to-high density by UK standards around existing larger train stations would do an immense amount to alleviate the UK housing crisis.
I used to live on a road with ~660 houses. The road, the houses, and the yards combined took up ca. 40,000 m^2. Near the local well-connected train station, a few new-builds in the 20~ floor range added more homes than that entire road took up in ~2,000 m^2.
On top of that, because of its location, the strain added on transport was far less - most people would be a short walking distance from both shops and commuter trains to the centre.
There are hundreds of major transit hubs like that in the UK where you could easily add do relatively modest hubs of higher-density housing and add a massive amount of capacity.
What's lacking is the political will to solve the massive problem of house owners who have been trained to see rising house prices as financially beneficial to them.
When most of those house owners are in an older demographic more likely to vote, it's a huge challenge to fix.
I interpreted that comment as not meaning density but instead geographical concentration.
WFH was an opportunity to escape from geographical concentration which is the main cause of the high cost of housing.
Why is it supposed to be good? Having lived in a (relatively small) city and in the countryside, I vastly prefer the countryside and actually find it more convenient in a lot of ways. An example would be the shops are a lot bigger as the land is cheap, so a 20m drive in the country gets me to a massive shop, but in the city half an hour on a bus or a 15m drive gets me to a much smaller one.
If by 'drive' you do not mean bike (or maybe moped), then that way of life does not have a future (or even present, for most people).
Density itself is good for infrastructure, but empirically it seems that we cannot exceed some level. Singapore or Hong Kong for example desperately need more density but it seems impossible to do so.
Then there is the question of wasted resources. We spent all of these resources to build up Detroit. Now what?
Paris, where I live, is three times as dense as Tokyo... The entire city is mixed-used 6 storey buildings.
It's probably because Paris, officially, is the very small hypercenter of the Parisian metropolitan area. Whereas Tokyo is the actual total metropolis. Just look up the population of both. Paris is 2 millions whereas Tokyo is 14 millions. If you were to consider the whole Paris metropolitan area then the population is 11 millions.
Yes but the average size of a flat in Paris would be shocking to an American.
500 square feet for a couple is standard (that would be seen as a small appartment in the USA) and living in 300 square feet or less is fairly common for someone single.
To be fair, the average size of a flat in Paris is shocking to Frenchmen living outside the city.
Same thing with New York I guess. I had a cousin move from Paris to Manhattan, and it didn't really feel like an upgrade.
tokyo has 20x as much land as tokyo. If you just counted tokyos densest 40 sq miles it would be denser than paris
> And density of European cities is still nowhere near what people have in East Asia
And thankfully, because of that our suicide rates are lower than in East Asia.
People aren't chicken and hell even poultry will show signs of aggression, depression and other mental health conditions when cramped in too tight conditions.
> We still don’t know how to scale mega cities fast while still operating them at capacity.
I think Dubai is a counter-example to that.
Near-slave labor from Bangladesh has downsides too (moral ones, at the very least)
Preface: I'm a yimby who wants to see far more building, especially building upwards in London, but also more general building elsewhere.
That said, a 100 year wait for social housing in Westminster is not surprising, and not as bad as it sounds. A typical professional couple in London could not afford a family home in Westminster, and it's extremely common for people in their 30s to move out of the centre when they have kids. I don't think this should be any different for social tenants: they should certainly not have to wait 100 years, but it seems reasonable for them to be offered housing outside of Westminster. The Guardian article I read about the 100 year wait specifically mentioned 3 and 4 bed family homes, and my immediate reaction was that no one else can get them either!
I think the bigger problem is the lack of affordable housing particularly for young families (social or otherwise) outside of London
It always comes down to we don’t build houses fast enough. Why?
Because it's the explanation that doesn't require the rich and powerful to change their behaviour.
Yep. The shortage is overblown. Just look at past crashes (e.g. Ireland, Spain, etc). The crashes weren't caused by oversupply of housing, but a credit shortage. After the crash the so-called 'shortage' magically disappeared and people stopped talking about it (until the next boom).
Near my old house there were large areas of land that have sat empty for 20 years through successive rounds of planning permission. The reason is very simple:
You can buy land for X. You can spend Y to construct housing on it, and sell it now for Z, or you can sit on the land, safe in the knowledge that housing policy means prices will keep rising, and then you can spend Y+inflation, and sell it for Z times a factor far higher than than inflation.
If you finance X via investors or loans, this is effectively leverage. You finance Y the same way, but short term during construction, so you get a leveraged return on the growth of house prices in return for investing to buy only the land.
Couple this with constraining supply by sitting on underutilized land.
Another of the developers in the same area has still only built about one third or half of the buildings they're meant to build on another set of parcels that were first also available 20 years ago. They have no incentive to rush until investors want to exit.
I don’t know your particular area, but I have experience buying and selling raw land and it’s a much more unique and niche area of real estate that fewer people are competing in. Are you sure it’s actually zoned correctly and doesn’t have latent disputes?
I can give you plenty of stories of people who bought an empty chunk of land for $350k and then 20 years later sold it for around $350k. They would’ve done better investing in Pokémon cards (or anything).
Add on the flip side developers usually want to move fast and cash in now, in my experience, not do what you’re describing.
In this case it's outer London.
And, yes, one of the plots has had planning permission for years, and had the owners re-apply regularly for buildings in the 40-75 floor range, and the council has fallen over itself to approve it each time. The other involved a lengthy planning process with a plan agreed around 20 years ago for developments that are still not complete.
What you're describing makes sense in a market where there's plenty of options. In London land is scarce, and developers hoarding it makes it scarcer, and so both land values and housing prices have skyrocketed.
It's not so simple in my opinion.
Where I live the ratio of dwellings to households has increased during the three decade long property price boom.
The most significant cause in my opinion is the financialisation of housing, fueled by three decades of ever decreasing interest rates allowing those with capital to use leverage to accumulate more (often removing them from the stock of permanent housing).
Higher interest rates are the catalyst that solves this problem.
> It always comes down to we don’t build houses fast enough. Why?
because we can't say that real estate is basically a cartel [1] and that big cities (where everyone is supposed to move because all the jobs are there + RTO) have staggering levels of empty houses (e.g. 19% in Paris [2]), and god forbid to apply any type of policy to adjust the situation.
[1]: e.g., Berlin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Wohnen_%26_Co._enteig...
[2]: https://www.ouest-france.fr/societe/logement/a-paris-pres-de...
The situation is significantly more complicated for Paris and Berlin which are touristic hot spots on top of being big cities.
For exemple, the 19% you quote in Paris include occasional occupation which is partially driven up by the insane price of hotel for which people who need to spend time in Paris regularly have to compete with tourists.
But I disagree with you on the absence of policy to adjust the situation. Paris has been doing a lot in the past few years.
The city severely limited the ability of owners to turn their property into short term rentals to try to increase the long term rental offering.
Then there was the rent cap but its impact is more difficult to estimate. On the one hand, it made renting properties less interesting and probably incitated some owners to keep their appartments empty. On the other hand, it severely limited the possibility of borrowing money for buy to rent project as it doesn't make much sense financially and therefore lowered the market pressure for people buying to live.
Last year, they significantly increased the vacant property tax. It's calculated on the rental value and quickly raise to 34% of it so it rapidely doesn't make sense to keep an appartment empty if you are not going to be in Paris very frequently.
who could have guessed that regulations banning new housing and restricting density lead to a housing crisis.
Because making even more people to nowhere to live is a popular no-brainer.
Politicians are landlords and home owners
Because no matter how many times it is said, nothing serious is done to change it and the problem remains the same.
The population simply doesn't grow once and stop.
Actually it does. UK population growth is due to immigration.
More grass -> more rabbits -> less grass -> less rabbits -> (loop). You can mix different rabbits in, but the cycle is fundamental.
Humans aren't rabbits. Humans tend to have children in inverse proportion to the amount of grass, poorer people having more children than richer ones. Of course it's not a direct correlation, or a simple one, but the effect is there.
Agreed. What does this tell us in the context of this discussion?
Returning to the initial point, should people just build more houses?
More houses in locations people want to live in, yes. In the end, even leaving house prices aside, a larger population needs more housing, and the UK has been underbuilding several tens of thousands of units a year for decades.
I think you just proved my point.
What happened to IKEA houses: https://www.boklok.com/global/
Has anyone in the comments read the article?
The page has been down for ages.
Seems ok for me now
Hug of death?
Other content works though: https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/
I need a house
In the UK we never really got medium rise apartment blocks right. Instead we have terraces, which don't give the same housing density. The neighborhood I now live in in Portugal is mostly 7-10 storey apartment buildings, which is enough density for plenty of shops, cafes, restaurants, schools, playgrounds, public transit etc. It houses an astonishing amount of people in reasonably generous conditions (e.g. balconies are the norm), quite the modern miracle in my UK eyes.
I got sick of hearing my neighbours through the walls. It sucks.
You don't have to wait 100 years for a home, though. You might need to wait 100 years for a free home. You can buy one straight away or rent one.
Free home? What are you on about? You still have to pay rent in social housing.
Heavily subsidised rent
Not necessarily, it depends where you live.
Remember that market rents are higher than they need to be due to the artificial scarcity imposed by a NIMBY-friendly planning system and the inaction of successive Governments who have chosen to look the other way.
And who would do the cleaning and serve you coffee if social housing didn't exist? It might cost you a lot more.
Decommodify owning a home. You’re gonna be fretting about why housing is getting more expensive while fighting a ghost battle against homeowners until you do.[1]
Do-gooder liberals are gonna worry about what policy mistake was made in the last 50 years. No. You have competing interests and the people who own something have the leverage as well as something to lose if too many people get what they already have. What’s difficult to understand?
Don’t try to “grow the middle class”, this selfish NIMBY sociological construction (it’s just gonna compact anyway, and it is). Decommodify having a dang roof over your head.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43726760