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.
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.
"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.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
Which creates a huge pool of people who are opposed to making houses more affordable.
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.
Genuine question by the way, I would like an answer.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
US loans on the other hand are government backed to allow for longer fixed terms (30 years etc.)
What other benchmarks would you throw out there if you were going to grade gov effectiveness?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure why this kind of housing just doesn’t really exist elsewhere.
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...
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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.
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.
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.
WFH was an opportunity to escape from geographical concentration which is the main cause of the high cost of housing.
Then there is the question of wasted resources. We spent all of these resources to build up Detroit. Now what?
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.
I think Dubai is a counter-example to that.
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
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
The page has been down for ages.