[HN Gopher] Why Britain doesn't build
___________________________________________________________________
Why Britain doesn't build
Author : Twixes
Score : 107 points
Date : 2023-06-26 09:15 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worksinprogress.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (worksinprogress.co)
| DrBazza wrote:
| That article has one chart in it that isn't emphasized enough -
| home _ownership_ in the UK is a new thing, and historically not
| typical. Perhaps it 's going to become the 'new normal'.
|
| Britain isn't flat, especially compared to Belgium and Holland,
| or even France, which is twice the size. And everyone wants to
| live in the South East because London is the economic centre, for
| better or worse.
|
| The situation in the south east where we can either grow crops on
| flat land, or build houses, on the same flat land. And then house
| builders have the bare faced cheek to name the streets of the new
| estates after things they've destroyed or you'll never see again.
|
| Which brings us to the spoke (and no wheel) arrangement of
| railway lines into London. HS1, and soon HS2 allowing more
| dormitory towns further out from London where the land is
| cheaper.
|
| London also had a historic height restrictions on buildings, and
| even now, has restrictions if they block the view of St Paul's
| Cathedral.
|
| When the 'new tallest building', the NatWest tower was built to a
| colossal... 600ft (183m), it was controversial [1] in the 1970s.
|
| At least now there are tower blocks getting built in London that
| are tall. Except they're expensive, get bought out by foreign
| investors. And then left empty. So they're not much help to
| anyone other than speculators and developers.
|
| It feels like something is going to break in the UK, but it's
| been like this for at least 30 years. It seems like far too much
| of the UK economy is based on this Ponzi scheme of property. You
| get better returns on property than any other kind of investment.
|
| There's whole industries based off of the back of it too
| (personal investment, and corporate investment, and pension
| investment funds, estate agents, legal, builders, development,
| architects, etc.) and the vast amount of _tax_ the govt. takes
| from all of that.
|
| If the UK somehow gets the property market under control
| (whatever that means), it would have serious implications for the
| economy as a whole.
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_42#Design_and_developmen...
| tsukikage wrote:
| TLDR: once people own a house, it is no longer in their interest
| to let anyone else build one, and in Britain this tail wags the
| dog.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| There are 100 ways we could solve this. And 100 groups, one to
| veto each way. So nothing will be done, it's the bystander
| effect.
|
| The same basic thing prevents action on climate change.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| The West has moved to a Vetocracy. It prevents things from
| becoming significantly worse, but also things from becoming
| much better.
| leg100 wrote:
| The housing crisis is universal. There's been growing inability
| to build in many countries, as the article readily admits. People
| can't afford homes across the world: USA, Canada, Australia, even
| China, where supply isn't a problem per se.
|
| The article should then address this global phenomenon rather
| than conclude it is a "political problem", suggesting it is some
| kind of peculiar ideology exported out of Britain.
| mandmandam wrote:
| That's neoliberalism, baby.
|
| You'll see the same pattern with healthcare, water, waste,
| media, energy, etc; every common good is being scooped up as
| much as possible by private interests.
|
| The ultra-wealthy have a sophisticated playbook for doing this
| which maximises profit at the expense of the vast majority of
| the population. It's international.
|
| A complicit media owned by the same private interests acts like
| this is all a big mystery, and any individual or group that
| gets too effective at making this plain is systematically
| irrelevanced.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| So China has an overbuilding problem, right? To the point of
| demolishing apartment blocks, etc.
|
| How does this marry up? Is it the age old problem of building
| too much in suburbs people don't want to actually live in? Or
| the old problem of new build apartments being too expensive for
| most people, so require a bubble?
| moffkalast wrote:
| China's problem is two fold afaik: They allowed apartment
| buildings to be built that aren't up to code or even
| structurally sound enough to live in and must be demolished
| because they're completely unsafe, and all of the ones that
| were up to code were immediately bought up as investments and
| left empty by real estate speculators. Letting people have
| homes would kill demand and lower prices of course, can't
| have that.
| Joeri wrote:
| So the article claims that the housing construction boom that
| ended at the second WW led to a massive stock of housing, which
| has since declined due to planning issues, leading to a shortage
| of housing and therefore a rise in prices.
|
| This does not hold up statistically.
|
| 1939: 11.3 million dwellings in the UK, population 47.9 million
| people = 4.2 people per dwelling
|
| today: 27 million dwellings in the UK, population 67.7 million
| people = 2.5 people per dwelling
|
| A thought occurred: maybe there are now fewer people per
| household. This however does not hold up to scrutiny either. The
| number of UK households rose 19% in 27 years, a rate comparable
| to the increase in housing stock.
|
| If anything there is more housing than ever in the UK relative to
| population size. If prices have risen, it's not because of a lack
| of housing.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| My understanding is it's because of lack of house in the places
| with highest demand. The article gives the following example:
|
| "The economist Paul Cheshire notes that between 1980 and 2018
| the declining industrial areas of Burnley and Doncaster built
| 56,340 houses while adding 22,796 new residents. By comparison,
| the high-wage university towns of Cambridge and Oxford built
| just 29,340 houses for a combined population growth of 95,079"
| rcxdude wrote:
| > A thought occurred: maybe there are now fewer people per
| household. This however does not hold up to scrutiny either
|
| what do you mean? it makes perfect sense given the definition
| of household that it'll be extremely similar to the number of
| houses. The ratio you're talking about is exactly a reduction
| in the average number of people per household.
| thesaintlives wrote:
| One word - corruption. Britain builds plenty but not on a social
| basis. Profit is king. To get planning permission costs money.
| Appeal committees must be bought. Britain is the most corrupt
| country not in Europe..
| easytiger wrote:
| > Appeal committees must be bought. Britain is the most corrupt
| country not in Europe..
|
| Local authorities refusing planning isn't corruption. And if
| you think Britain is corrupt I assume you have no familiarity
| with other countries.
| blitzar wrote:
| Local authorities refusing planning, then granting it when
| you write a cheque for 10k for the planning officer is
| corruption.
|
| It wasnt a cheque, but a pair of first class tickets to the
| bahamas for the planning officer and their wife, totally
| worth it thought.
|
| Its not even an open secret, its a known fact.
| https://www.theplanner.co.uk/2020/08/03/local-authorities-
| ar...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > councils should ensure all meetings between councillors,
| developers and their agents in major planning decisions are
| attended by at least one council official
|
| Unfortunately many councils (including my own) are now run
| by an executive consisting of officials. People have known
| for decades that the planning committee is crooked; but I
| guess that's what you get in a university town where the
| uni owns most of the best land in the town, is the largest
| employer, and even used to have it's own parliamentary
| seat.
| blitzar wrote:
| > councils should ensure all meetings between
| councillors, developers and their agents in major
| planning decisions are attended by at least one council
| official
|
| Of course council officials want to be in the room ...
| They want a piece of the action.
|
| The planning officers were kicking back only a small
| portion of the bribes to the councilors and pocketing the
| bulk for themselves.
| thesaintlives wrote:
| It is even worse than that. You just pay the correct people
| cash.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > And if you think Britain is corrupt I assume you have no
| familiarity with other countries.
|
| Why would what happens in any other country change whether
| Britain is (and it demonstrably is) corrupt?
| thesaintlives wrote:
| Indeed. It works like this: Planning is submitted and
| refused. Planning then goes to appeal. The appeal happens in
| another city with another committee. Members on that
| committee are paid to make the 'correct' decision and
| planning is granted. That is how city councils work. Nothing
| happens without someone being paid. From top to bottom. If
| you have the right connections and are happy to pay the job
| gets done.
|
| I am very familiar with other countries. Britain is up there
| with the worst. Why do you think nothing works? By chance?
| Incompetence?
| black_13 wrote:
| [dead]
| danjac wrote:
| This is an interesting political trap for the ruling
| Conservatives that they have made for themselves.
|
| The traditional Conservative voter is a home-owner. So you might
| be a rabid socialist in your youth, but once you get a job, save
| up for a deposit, and buy your own home, you eventually
| transition to become yet another middle-aged Tory voter.
|
| That pipeline is now broken - young people are unable to save up
| for their own home or get a mortgage, unless they have
| generational wealth. House rises have risen sharply and wages
| have remained stagnant, and now we have inflation - for
| necessities like food and bills - eating into what little people
| had to begin with.
|
| The solution of course is damn the torpedoes and embark on a
| massive house-building programme like in the post-war period, but
| a) the post-Thatcher Conservatives consider that against
| everything they believe in, and b) current home owners - their
| ageing voting base - are NIMBYs who don't want the wrong sort of
| people living near them and any reduction in demand that would
| reduce their value of their homes (and they're going to need to
| sell their homes soon, to pay for social and health care in an
| increasingly threadbare welfare state).
|
| The British press of course likes to blame "woke millenials" or
| whatever to keep their geriatric readership happy but this is the
| real reason for the collapse in the Tory vote in the under 50s.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > but once you get a job, save up for a deposit, and buy your
| own home, you eventually transition to become yet another
| middle-aged Tory voter. [...] That pipeline is now broken
|
| Not unsurprisingly, I've seen the same theory/sentiment in the
| US as well: The conventional wisdom (whether true or not) was
| that aging voters would increase their support of the status-
| quo, but that doesn't seem to be happening, and the theory is
| that they aren't getting the same wealth/status that would
| cause them to be protective of it.
|
| That said, we should also ask whether our story of "how it used
| to be" was actually (statistically, scientifically) true, as
| opposed to just being a common belief. There's evidence that
| one's political/party-leaning is actually consistent after
| being established earlier in life. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/07/09/the-
| polit...
| nerdawson wrote:
| > current home owners - their ageing voting base - are NIMBYs
| who don't want the wrong sort of people living near them and
| any reduction in demand that would reduce their value of their
| homes
|
| New housing is directly against the interests of existing
| homeowners. Any plan that relies on people seriously
| disadvantaging themselves in order to benefit other people they
| don't know is doomed to failure.
| danjac wrote:
| Only if those people who are going to be disadvantaged have
| political power. If the majority stand to gain by new
| housing, and they can elect a majority of MPs under the UK
| system, then the NIMBY voice is moot (although there will be
| no doubt resistance at local level where much of the planning
| will take place).
| theironhammer wrote:
| Don't get forget a lot of MPs are landlords. And not just
| Tory MPs.
| asdff wrote:
| New housing means the area is worthy of investment.
| Homeowners should want that for their communities, it makes
| their homes more valuable than those in communities that
| developers pass over. Plus the more people living in an area,
| the more pressure on housing, the more your single family
| home would fetch compared to a less dense area. Ask yourself
| if as an investor you'd rather own a single family home in
| some New Jersey farm town, or a lot in Manhattan?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The British Army were fought to a standstill by communist
| rebels in Malaya. The war only turned when the puppet
| government was persuaded to give the peasants land and homes.
| alibarber wrote:
| > and they're going to need to sell their homes soon, to pay
| for social and health care in an increasingly threadbare
| welfare state
|
| Is this a bug or a feature? If the young (the workers) cannot
| afford to buy their own houses, because the old want to hold on
| to the value, how can we expect them to be able afford to pay
| for the welfare state and to take care of the old?
| sefrost wrote:
| Another trap they have created:
|
| I am one of the millennials that managed to get on to the
| housing ladder by buying a one bedroom flat in London. Then the
| government significantly changed the fire safety and building
| safety laws and now the building requires significant sums of
| money spending on it until the flat will become sellable again.
| The person that owns the building is not required to pay for
| that - only the leaseholders.
|
| There are hundreds of thousands of us trapped in this situation
| and it's not good for the Conservative Party. Many, like me,
| are now renting out their flats and have become so called
| "accidental landlords".
|
| So - even many of the younger people who DID manage to acquire
| property have been screwed!
| rcarr wrote:
| The thing is, I think a lot of millennials are that pissed off
| now that even if they got homes, I don't think they'd make the
| switch. We've literally had our fucking lives stolen from us.
| Most people I've spoken to don't want anyone to go through the
| same thing. Contrast with the boomers who got free education,
| cheap housing, stable employment etc and seem hell bent on
| denying everything to the next generation.
| rcxdude wrote:
| There's a decent amount of evidence this isn't quite true
| anymore. It does seem like Thatcher's Right-to-buy made for a
| lot of conservative new homeowners, but the conservatives
| appear to get less popular with modern homeowners over
| time(though they seem to split equally toward labour and
| further right parties like UKIP):
| https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/blog/2022/02/22/does-...
| hsjqllzlfkf wrote:
| Sounds like a problem that will fix itself? According to you,
| do nothing and the Tories will be out.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Eventually they'll be out, but it'll take a lot of political
| willpower and capital to clean up the mess they've made in
| the meantime.
| bluescrn wrote:
| A change of government won't fix any fundamental problems
| with housing/infrastructure. These are long-term problems and
| government thinking is inherently short-term.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| So on this theory, will millennials turn to Tories, just a
| little later than their parents? Since they will be inheriting
| the properties their parents own soon enough.
| jen20 wrote:
| Put more simply: to be a conservative, one must have something
| to conserve.
| bloqs wrote:
| Something cannot both be a good investment and accessible to all.
| The decision was made to make them a good investment, and thus
| our lazy, entitled economy that is addicted to foreign goods and
| services became what it is today.
| zamfi wrote:
| This is an easy explanation, but not the whole story -- single-
| family homes can be a good investment even while allowing the
| construction of apartment buildings.
|
| Without the limitations of zoning, a single-family home could
| be worth the same as several apartments in a 4-plex minus
| construction costs. As density increases, low-density housing
| becomes more valuable, and high-density housing remains
| accessible, a process that then resets for the next generation.
| asdff wrote:
| Whats tricky is getting the investment to continue to be good
| once you are in the condo stage. So many condo owners hate
| owning condos because of how hamstringing it is. It seems
| like a natural march that one day a low density apartment
| will grow to a high density one, but how does that happen
| with condos? A few might not want to sell or go along with
| whatever change to the building and could hold up the entire
| process. Its like the situation where your nimby neighbors
| won't let you turn your home into an apartment, but now these
| people live in your damn building with you too. Its part of
| the reason why a lot of buildings in nyc are so old, turnover
| is tough when you have a building full of people already.
| [deleted]
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Sure it can be. You can have some bare minimum of housing
| available in the boondocks which is cheap and accessible to
| all, and then have much more desirable housing which may be a
| good investment if the region is up and coming.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| > Something cannot both be a good investment and accessible to
| all.
|
| Roads are a perfect example of a good investment that is
| accessible to all. It's called a "common good", and it exists.
| 8bp wrote:
| Who's out here speculating on roads?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Nobody, and it should be the damn same with housing.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| ASTM, sovereign wealth funds, etc. Toll roads can be a
| pretty good investment.
| beisner wrote:
| OP means something more like "a security which appreciates on
| average faster than inflation", AKA an asset I can purchase
| and hold and sell later for more than I paid for
| it+improvements in real terms.
| lukas099 wrote:
| I think we should shoot for house prices increasing at
| exactly the inflation level (after a correction for current
| high prices of course). To me, this would be good enough to
| be considered a 'good investment', and wouldn't be unfair
| to future generations.
| scythe wrote:
| I think the parent commenter meant "investment" in the narrow
| sense of "financial security" and not in the broader sense of
| any activity that generates a figurative return for the
| effort applied -- in the case of roads, turning government
| action into economic activity.
| breakingrules wrote:
| [dead]
| isaacremuant wrote:
| I don't know about Britain but London builds and keeps tearing
| down homes and low quality repurposing them into 3/4 units and
| creating a perpetual construction state instead of
| descentralizing.
|
| Planning permits are questionable in their legality and you feel
| things just get rubber stamped and there's a pretense of process
| in the same vein of the first chapter of hitchhikers guide to the
| galaxy.
| bluescrn wrote:
| There's loads of houses being built in the UK (often of
| questionable quality, built for maximum profit, packed into
| minimal amounts of space).
|
| It may still not be enough to match the demand, but the real
| problem is we don't seem to be building any infrastructure to
| support these homes.
|
| More people and more homes requires more roads, railways,
| hospitals, police stations, power stations, sewer capacity, even
| reservoirs, and lots more. And this rarely seems mentioned in
| discussions of the housing crisis or rising immigration. And as a
| nation we're incapable of building infrastructure without cost
| and/or timescale spiralling completely out of control. See HS2.
| jamespo wrote:
| The graphs in the article indicate there aren't loads of houses
| being built.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Depends on the definition of 'loads'.
|
| For residents of small to medium sized towns and villages
| (where there's plenty of land available), the rapid sprawl
| and worstening traffic is incredibly visible.
| [deleted]
| dan-robertson wrote:
| You can look up the numbers here:
| https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
|
| About 120-200k per year, about 0.2% of the population. Though
| those numbers don't include houses being destroyed or eg
| conversions from a large house to flats.
| ideamotor wrote:
| In the US, but I find that to be a great point. I only see this
| mentioned in the context of environmentalism (city dwellers use
| less resources). But yes! They use less city resources too.
| tsukikage wrote:
| We need to build houses at least as fast as the population
| grows. Because this has not happened for decades, we need to
| build houses even faster than that, to clear the backlog. This
| is not happening.
|
| Meanwhile, no-one will build infrastructure for settlements
| that do not yet exist, and we consistently elect a party that
| believes in less, rather than more, infrastructure in general.
| Rather than an investment, Tories fundamentally see
| infrastructure spending as an unrecoverable loss.
|
| At least if more housing gets built there will be more people
| in the area pestering their MPs for solutions to infrastructure
| problems - perhaps even enough to outnumber the NIMBYs. One can
| hope.
| vidarh wrote:
| The irony is that historically, a lot of rail _was_ built for
| settlements that, while they may have existed, did not
| support the cost of rail, and this has driven a lot of
| development.
|
| And this is both how it ought to work and means that the UK
| has a lot of _existing_ rail that could help solve this
| problem if the government would just commit to streamline
| planning processes _and_ to increasing routes and frequency
| to stations where there is a potential for density increases
| at lower cost.
| mhotchen wrote:
| I think this is a really interesting perspective. This
| could decentralise the population and solve many problems
| that way, and also reduce the costs and risks associated
| with utilising fully modernised technology; no need for
| compromise
| vidarh wrote:
| I think about this more than I should, because it drives
| me crazy how many rail routes in the UK are there but
| ridiculously underutilised because few people live there
| _now_ , but so many of those stretches of rail also have
| immediate surroundings of rail station with no historic
| value, yet built on, that could provide extra density
| very cheaply if only people felt they could rely on
| faster commutes.
| blitzar wrote:
| > We need to build houses at least as fast as the population
| grows. Because this has not happened for decades.
|
| Over those decades UK population growth [1] is _lower_ than
| the new house building rate [see chart in article].
|
| [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-
| kingdom/pop...
| tsukikage wrote:
| The graph shows building rate as a proportion of the size
| of existing stock. But the existing stock is grossly
| insufficient to our needs.
|
| We've been building around 200k houses a year for decades,
| much less than that during most years of Conservative rule:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-
| new...
|
| This is around 0.3% of the population. The population
| increase year on year is consistently larger than this.
|
| We need to be building new houses much faster than we are.
| We need to build at 1960s rates or faster at least until it
| is possible for people on median wages to have somewhere
| sane to live again.
| vidarh wrote:
| Couple of things to this:
|
| You're right it's growing faster than that. E.g. Mid 2018
| to mid 2019, it rose by 361k people. But the UK average
| household size is 2.4, so 200k new houses should in
| theory accommodate a population growth of 866k.
|
| If those were the only numbers that mattered, it wouldn't
| be a problem. We'd catch up fast.
|
| But all houses are not the same. A large part of the
| problem is people following jobs, and so a significantly
| higher rate of construction may be needed because people
| move, and needed types of properties change. Unless you
| can make the places people are moving away from to be
| more attractive, e.g. by infrastructure improvement to
| tie areas together in ways that make them attractive
| regions for businesses.
|
| The bigger issues, however, I think are two structural
| problems:
|
| 1. As long as house prices go up at a sufficient rate,
| the soundest strategy for a developer may be to raise
| capital to buy land and then sit on it until house prices
| go up. Your cost of capital to finance it will be
| financing costs for the cost of the land for however many
| years you sit on it, and the financing costs for the
| construction itself only from you start construction
| until sold. Doubly so because if you're a _large_
| developer, holding a large parcel of land while you 're,
| say, developing something else nearby, and releasing only
| limited numbers of properties onto the market contributes
| to keeping the prices up. Near me, one of the best
| properties in the area, a huge tract right next to one of
| the best connected train stations in the UK (East
| Croydon) remained undeveloped for over a decade because
| developers had no urgency to do anything. It's now slowly
| being developed, but they're taking their good time about
| it, because why wouldn't they?
|
| You could address that by progressively harsher taxes by
| duration of under-utilisation, or strengthen ability for
| local government to take over land, to make it necessary
| for developers to either move at speed or unload the land
| on others, but if you fix the house price increases by
| other means, this problem will also go away by itself.
|
| 2. There is no political will to cause house prices to
| drop, because that would mean a lot of people who have
| seen this as a pension investment, and plan to downsize,
| will vote against you.
|
| To fix this you probably need a combination of starting
| slow - reforms that gradually cause the market to
| stagnate so people stop seeing it as surefire way to make
| money - coupled perhaps with tax and pension adjustment
| structured to make it feel like your reforms are
| relatively neutral. E.g "package" it with substantial
| state pension increases, or allow for some degree of
| writeoffs for paper losses on declining property prices,
| perhaps limited to pensioners only, etc. Some of it you
| could sunset, and some might well end up being very
| unfair and effectively bribing people who shouldn't have
| gambled on their home as their main investment asset, but
| if that's what it takes to get support for crashing house
| prices, it'd be worth it.
| blitzar wrote:
| > The current population of U.K. in 2023 is 67,736,802, a
| 0.34% increase from 2022. > The population of U.K. in
| 2022 was 67,508,936, a 0.34% increase from 2021. > The
| population of U.K. in 2021 was 67,281,039, a 0.33%
| increase from 2020. > The population of U.K. in 2020 was
| 67,059,474, a 0.42% increase from 2019.
|
| 1 year old babies dont 4 bedroom houses of their own.
| notahacker wrote:
| Infrastructure isn't perfect, but we talk about housing
| shortages because people earning double the national average
| wage rent rooms with other professionals in houses designed for
| a single family whilst trying to save up double their annual
| wage for a _deposit_ on a >25 year mortgage on a flat. Whereas
| for all the UK's infrastructure problems, power brownouts due
| to lack of generation capability or lack of a local police
| station aren't really things people suffer from.
|
| Hard to pretend the real problem is the rail network when we
| have more miles of rail network and fewer houses per person
| than most of the rest of the world. And the UK talks about its
| healthcare issues non-stop, but not in the context of housing
| because it isn't the same problem.
| bluescrn wrote:
| This comment shows up the other issue, the London-centric
| nature of UK politics.
|
| If you think the UK transport network is OK, but pick the
| most extreme examples of housing costs, you're probably a
| Londoner. The housing situation is awful elsewhere, but still
| a long way from London's extremes.
|
| But if you live elsewhere, try getting anywhere by road or by
| rail, and it's usually a grim experience.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| These two issues are related everywhere outside London.
|
| The reason why transport infrastructure is "so bad" is
| because in every city apart from London, you cannot build
| outside the city so developers often have to get planning
| permission on sites in rural areas and they can't connect
| transport to nearby cities.
|
| It is quite maddening because building is often actually
| blocked in some of these cities because of infrastructure
| concerns too...even though, the problem would be solved at
| a higher level by building closer to cities.
|
| The whole thing is bad intention arguments the whole way
| down.
| notahacker wrote:
| I don't live in London any more. Probably won't again, for
| reasons of housing cost.
|
| But I also live in a real world where most developed
| countries have significantly cheaper housing but nowhere
| near as many rail lines as the UK as a whole, and where
| it's a lot easier to build more affordable homes than to
| ensure there are enough roads for nobody to ever experience
| a traffic queue.
| vidarh wrote:
| One of my pet peeves is that UK infrastructure focus seems to
| be about getting people to the centre of London faster, and
| that just makes the pressure on London greater at excessive
| costs, and then you start the cycle all over.
|
| You see that even with HS1 and HS2, where instead of focusing
| on lines towards London it'd have been better to strengthen the
| triangle of Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and pour money into
| effectively creating a bigger "third city". Then maybe link
| Birmingham, and _purposefully_ delay any links to London.
|
| The problem with linking everything to London is that while it
| makes it easier to work from further out, it also makes London
| ever more attractive.
|
| But even on a more local level, I wish instead of spending in
| the centre of London, focus shifted to bypassing the centre.
| E.g. I live in Croydon. Croydon _has rail_ towards multiple
| towns around London, but anything not on the main lines in
| towards London doesn 't have commuter level rail services
| running on them, or in some cases have no passenger trains at
| all.
|
| Which means that many towns are easier reached by taking a
| detour in towards the centre and out again, which again means
| there's an incentive for businesses etc. to be closer to the
| centre. Even when in towards the centre and out again would be
| the shortest route, it might be beneficial to encourage
| avoiding the busy routes towards the centre.
|
| Which again means that a whole lot of towns where there are
| town centres that have huge potential for large increases in
| density, _and_ potential for lower cost upgrades of other
| infrastructure, without affecting the green belt, but where the
| demand is not there for that density increase because of the
| lack of efficient transport.
|
| Addressing the infrastructure problem by upgrading and
| committing to commuter level services to connect more of these
| towns together so they form more viable counter-weights to the
| city centres they are around would make it a lot easier to
| address the issues you're mentioning at far lower costs than
| yet another big infra upgrade like HS2 or another line in
| London.
|
| Successive UK governments seem to have been more focused on
| retrospectively managing demand surges than planning ahead, and
| as a result seems to be inducing demand that drives more surges
| to be managed and ever higher costs.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The New York City region is like this too. Forget connecting
| the NJ and CT suburbs, even Queens to Brooklyn to Bronx is
| inconvenient.
| asdff wrote:
| Part of why I think cities around the world went all in on
| highways is that its so much simpler and therefore cheaper
| to serve people with highways than to plan effective
| transit routes and schedules. With a transit route you have
| to consider that people will be walking to the station so
| its fundamentally a compromise: where one person has a 5
| minute walk to the platform on the subway line inevitably
| means there are people not even very far away who now have
| a 15 minutes walk, and people farther out who might not
| even use the local subway because that means they add an
| hours walk to their day. To serve those people you now need
| to start planning bus or bike networks on top of the
| subway. All of these vehicles need operators who need
| benefits. You also need maintenance yards for rail and bus.
| Electrical substations. The actual subway line is just a
| part of it all.
|
| With a highway on the other hand, it seems a lot easier to
| serve more people with less complicated infrastructure.
| When you run a highway to a town instead of the subway line
| example above, pretty much everyone in town is close enough
| to the local highway ramp with a car on the existing road
| network. You don't have to consider schedules or hire train
| operators, people drive themselves when it works for their
| commute. This highway also serves freight, so now you don't
| need to sell right of way to a freight rail company with
| the expectation they maintain the line to your town forever
| (they probably wont). A truck bay is cheaper to build for a
| business than a freight rail loading dock and maintenance
| of a rail spur.
|
| A lot of cities in the US that are I'd say less than 1
| million people without any geographic bottlenecks are a
| dream to get around with a car. You pretty much never hit
| traffic on the highway, so 20 miles is 20 mins away always.
| The highway network serves the entire region, so you can go
| just about everywhere in the area in 20 miles in those 20
| minutes, not just a handful of places.
|
| To offer that sort of convenience, turnkey scheduling with
| basically 25 minute door to door commutes, in transit form
| across lets say a 20x20 mile area would be enormously
| expensive, in the low trillions I'd guess given current
| american prices on subway tunnels per mile. Whatever we can
| afford to build won't nearly be so useful, and people are
| already so addicted to this sort of high speed car based
| transit that the cat is entirely out of the bag and now
| this is the expectation, this simply unachievable level of
| personal convenience using transit.
| lmm wrote:
| > You see that even with HS1 and HS2, where instead of
| focusing on lines towards London it'd have been better to
| strengthen the triangle of Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and
| pour money into effectively creating a bigger "third city".
| Then maybe link Birmingham, and purposefully delay any links
| to London.
|
| Sabotaging London won't make the rest of the UK better - it
| will just mean less tax money available to subsidise the rest
| of the country. If you stop companies from expanding in
| London they won't go to Sheffield or Birmingham - they'll go
| to Amsterdam or Frankfurt or Paris.
|
| > But even on a more local level, I wish instead of spending
| in the centre of London, focus shifted to bypassing the
| centre. E.g. I live in Croydon. Croydon has rail towards
| multiple towns around London, but anything not on the main
| lines in towards London doesn't have commuter level rail
| services running on them, or in some cases have no passenger
| trains at all.
|
| They're trying that up to a point. Stratford has worked
| pretty well, and they're going to apply the same playbook at
| Old Oak Common. Croydon might be next on the list. But of
| course at the rate the UK builds anything that wil be what,
| 2060 before anything is done.
| dairylee wrote:
| The infrastructure is often insufficient for existing homes
| nevermind for any expansion.
|
| I've recently moved house but I'm having to stay registered to
| my Dentist & Doctors 30 miles away because the wait list to get
| registered in my new town is months.
| muteor wrote:
| They just built over 1000 homes near me, but not one dentist
| or doctors. Now the small local surgeries are expected to
| take these new households on. Again government policy not
| holding up to community needs.
| desas wrote:
| There's a shortage of GPs. Two of the small local surgeries
| near me have reduced opening times because they don't have
| the staff to staff them. The need is still there - the
| villages are growing, but the villagers have to travel to
| the next village if they're lucky enough to be able to get
| an appointment.
| 88 wrote:
| The average fully-qualified GP has something like 2,300
| patients registered to them.
|
| If you assume 2.5 people per household for those new homes,
| their needs would be met by the addition of a single GP to
| an existing surgery.
|
| Then consider that the typical buyers of new builds will be
| younger and healthier than average.
|
| And that of those ~2,500 new residents, some are likely to
| be doctors themselves who would otherwise be unable to live
| in the area.
|
| And that GP surgeries are private for-profit businesses.
|
| And you realise the issues are more complex than they might
| at first seem.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor like
| you can a home. First the homes come, then the residents
| move in. Those residents will have demands, such as health
| and dental care. Once those demands are heard, the doctors
| and dentists will finally build their offices.
| jwestbury wrote:
| Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world. But
| this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't
| functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable
| by government intervention.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| > Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world.
|
| The world we live in, yes.
|
| > But this is also why a purely free-market approach
| doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is
| solvable by government intervention.
|
| Sure, or we might end up growing the wrong crops per
| government order and experience massive starvation all
| across the country. I hope you like potatoes!
| blitzar wrote:
| > To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor
| like you can a home.
|
| Sure you can. When you build an office block or a
| shopping mall do you put in toilets or do you wait till
| the shoppers start shopping then see if their demands
| include going to the bathroom?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The problem with dentists isn't the shortage of
| accomodation for clinics; it's the dentists trades union
| restricting entry to the profession.
|
| All the talk of NHS treatment being "free at the point of
| delivery" is bollocks when you're talking about
| dentistry; NHS dentistry isn't free, unless you're a
| child or a pensioner. And if you need something like a
| crown, you probably can't get that on the NHS at all.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| You can build toilets just like you can homes. Toilets
| are standard in all homes and office buildings. You still
| can't build a doctor or a dentist. That takes a lot of
| hard work from someone who isn't you.
| blitzar wrote:
| As disgusting as the toilets in the shops may be, they
| dont clean themselves. That takes a lot of hard work from
| someone who isn't you.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Agreed.
| nindalf wrote:
| Doctor only 30 miles away? Luxury!
|
| It's unrealistic for me to get treatment from a GP in my area
| so I simply travel thousands of miles away to another country
| once a year for treatment.
|
| Thousands more homes being built as well, so this isn't
| changing any time soon.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Travelling to another country for treatment sounds like the
| luxury to be honest. The unluxury would be no health care,
| or travelling 100 miles within the UK by train/bus.
| nindalf wrote:
| Having to wait 6 months for treatment isn't luxury, what
| are you talking about. That's effectively no health care.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I am contesting the "having" part of that sentence. The
| UK has problems, but it is not a country in dire straits.
|
| To be clear: We are talking about GP right? To say get
| your blood pressure checked, or some mild antibiotics, or
| a rash cream, or referral to specialist? Not a specific
| treatment or surgery.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| GPs gatekeep a most referrals, it's often virtually
| impossible to get any substantial treatment or surgery
| unless referred by a GP. Furthermore, for NHS treatments,
| it has to be a referral from an NHS GP, so you can't
| simply pay for a private GP to check something out.
|
| Or, you can just wait for it to become bad enough that
| you go directly from A&E to inpatient care.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Having to wait 6 months is not as bad as having no other
| option. Although, I do empathize for your inability to go
| somewhere local and need of another option.
| ggm wrote:
| I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really
| irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it
| is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights
| declarations.
|
| What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix
| housing when states can do precisely that?
|
| Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of
| counterfactual outcomes. It made individual householders
| deliriously happy, enshrined them as Tory voters for decades and
| from shelter statistics left 1.5 million families functionally
| homeless. Millions live in penury, in squalid hotels because
| councils are disincentivised from fixing things, penalised even.
|
| Australia's housing crisis is just as bad. Truly sordid tropes
| about rent caps and freezes are trotted out again and again, as
| if simply reciting them makes them axioms: they're not. All
| statements about effects on housing stocks are contextual and
| depend on other social policy, including (surprise surprise)
| building more rental homes by the state.
|
| I'm a home-owner at the end of my working life. If I was a young
| person, this above all other things would radicalise me. Our
| elected leadership are captive to stupid market force arguments.
| I'd rather they tried and failed than sat on their hands.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| _Note: I originally said Britain built 30k houses last year,
| which commenters have corrected. Thank you!_
|
| I don't really understand all this. Surely the main reason for
| a lack of housing is the difference between house demand (e.g.
| Britain took in 606k people in net immigration last year)
| compared to house supply (Britain built I think around 200k
| houses last year).
|
| The state shouldn't need to build houses (in fact it doesn't;
| it just uses your tax money to pay private companies to build
| houses). It should just make the building and zoning rules
| simple enough that it's possible to make money from building
| houses and selling them, and let people get on with it.
| Arnt wrote:
| I don't live in Britain and I don't know why too few houses
| are built there.
|
| I know something about the place where I live, which I'll not
| name because I don't think it's that special. Specifically,
| that houses are built if that seems profitable, or at the
| very least if the bank thinks the builder can earn enough to
| pay back the loan.
|
| The organisation that build/rebuilt/renovated the buildings
| across the street from me expected to earn that investment
| back in very roughly half a century. They considered it
| possible that they'd earn their investment back in 30 years,
| but unlikely. They managed to secure financing, though, and
| did the building. Not sure how they plan to pay the bank on
| time.
|
| You'll not be surprised to hear that this place too suffers
| from a lack of newly built housing.
| Jochim wrote:
| There's a limited amount of space and a non-negligible
| portion of society are unable to afford market rates. When
| the state doesn't build accommodation, citizens end up
| transferring ludicrous amounts to private landlords to house
| foster children, asylum seekers, the poor, or the disabled.
|
| The UK experimented with selling off it's social housing in
| the 70s. It was a colossal failure that has lead to the
| country having some of the worst housing stock in Europe,
| with renters paying more for less. Private landlords have
| been enriched at the expense of the wider society.
|
| Without state intervention in housing regulation/supply we'd
| see shanty towns spring up fairly quickly, followed by
| violence. Refer to Champlain Towers, Grenfell Tower, or the
| collapsed luxury apartments in the Turkey earthquake to see
| what happens when the state does not do enough to ensure
| builders aren't building death traps.
| rcarr wrote:
| > Private landlords have been enriched at the expense of
| the wider society.
|
| We are literally subsidising the least productive
| "profession" in society, to the tune of billions. It's an
| absolute joke.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > There's a limited amount of space and a non-negligible
| portion of society are unable to afford market rates. When
| the state doesn't build accommodation, citizens end up
| transferring ludicrous amounts to private landlords to
| house foster children, asylum seekers, the poor, or the
| disabled.
|
| Space is limited by regulation and zoning. 90% of the UK is
| rural. Market rates are high because of the supply not
| matching the demand, or being allowed to match it. Asulym
| seekers make up a small amount (3%?) of the people who we
| take in - e.g. in 2022 we took in 606k people, but under
| 20k of them were asulum seekers.
|
| > The UK experimented with selling off it's social housing
| in the 70s. It was a colossal failure that has lead to the
| country having some of the worst housing stock in Europe,
| with renters paying more for less.
|
| The same number of people would need housing, regardless of
| whether the houses were privately owned or state owned.
|
| > Without state intervention in housing regulation/supply
| we'd see shanty towns spring up fairly quickly, followed by
| violence. Refer to Champlain Towers, Grenfell Tower, or the
| collapsed luxury apartments in the Turkey earthquake to see
| what happens when the state does not do enough to ensure
| builders aren't building death traps.
|
| I don't understand this. I didn't say no regulation. But
| there's a huge gap between that and making it incredibly
| difficult to build. Citing some basic anti-zero regulation
| argument in response to what I said is disheartening.
| Jochim wrote:
| > Space is limited by regulation and zoning. 90% of the
| UK is rural. Market rates are high because of the supply
| not matching the demand, or being allowed to match it.
|
| This does not square with the fact that private builders
| are leaving nearly half of approved developments unbuilt.
| It's almost like private builders are incentivised to
| squeeze the market rather than bring prices down.
|
| > The same number of people would need housing,
| regardless of whether the houses were privately owned or
| state owned.
|
| Publicly owned housing: The state makes an initial
| capital investment which it recoups through a low monthly
| rent payment. After 30 years the state only pays
| maintenance costs for the property, covered by the
| monthly rent. Any excess rent can be reinvested towards
| the cost of another unit.
|
| Privately rented housing: The state pays market rate
| rents forever, burning the money. The private landlord
| pays off the mortgage and gets to pocket more of the
| money. There's no benefit to the state.
|
| It's the same with social care. The government could
| build social care, instead we're paying up to PS50k/week
| per child[0] towards some cunt's yacht.
|
| And it's the same with the NHS. Nurses have a hard time
| and poor pay and some quit. The government then bring in
| an agency nurse, paying the agency 2-4x the salary of the
| NHS nurse that will have to babysit them because they
| aren't familiar with their ward and refusing to raise the
| rate of pay for their own nurses. The remaining nurses
| see this and some more quit, agency work pays more and
| you get to choose when you work. This spirals into a very
| avoidable staffing crisis.
|
| > I don't understand this. I didn't say no regulation.
| But there's a huge gap between that and making it
| incredibly difficult to build. Citing some basic anti-
| zero regulation argument in response to what I said is
| disheartening.
|
| I didn't claim you were arguing for no regulation,
| arguing that regulations should be made more lax in the
| face of those events is what's disheartening. Those
| disasters occurred because existing regulations were not
| sufficiently strict/enforced.
|
| [0]
| https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/apr/18/english-
| coun...
| disruptalot wrote:
| You highlight a bunch of examples where government
| policy/implementation has failed miserably in the
| backdrop of higher and higher demand from it. I wonder
| how far this needs to stretch before we realise that the
| problem isn't that the government doesn't behave
| correctly, but that the whole idea that a government is a
| good allocator of capital and resources is flawed.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > It's almost like private builders are incentivised to
| squeeze the market rather than bring prices down.
|
| Yes - incentivised by government regulations to do so,
| and moreover too disincentivised to build. If you can't
| make money by building, it's better to wait. No builder
| wants to stop building - money now is much better than
| money in the future - but enough government and local
| intervention will cause this.
|
| The housing thing you've gone on a while, but basically
| if you remember the context, two comments up, I was
| replying to something that you're not arguing for, as far
| as I can tell, which is that if the government hadn't
| sold some houses it would have enough houses. This is not
| the case, and I don't think you've said it is.
|
| > I didn't claim you were arguing for no regulation,
| arguing that regulations should be made more lax in the
| face of those events is what's disheartening. Those
| disasters occurred because existing regulations were not
| sufficiently strict/enforced.
|
| Companies not obeying regulations in specific instances
| doesn't mean all regulations are good. Regulations are
| not a tower, with fire retardation regulations being
| piled on the stupid ones, and so removing the stupid ones
| would cause the ones you want to fall.
|
| My fundamental bewilderment with this and some other
| comments is you're complaining about government-caused
| things, and you blame the private sector for it, and want
| the government to be in charge of more things, despite
| the evidence of your own eyes of how well the government
| does with what it already has.
| tsukikage wrote:
| > There's a limited amount of space
|
| So build denser, taller housing. We sprawl massively
| compared to developments on the continent.
|
| > a non-negligible portion of society are unable to afford
| market rates
|
| If we increase supply, market rates will fall. That's how
| markets work.
|
| Therein lies the real problem, of course: real estate
| investors with existing holdings don't want the rates to
| fall, and they have influence over how much new stock gets
| built.
|
| > It was a colossal failure
|
| To be clear, the failure was not in the act of selling
| itself, but in the decision to not reinvest the proceeds
| into new housing stock. This is the part that made the
| housing problem worse instead of better.
| Jochim wrote:
| > To be clear, the failure was not in the act of selling
| itself, but in the decision to not reinvest the proceeds
| into new housing stock. This is the part that made the
| housing problem worse instead of better.
|
| The kind of mass sell-off that occurred could only be
| considered a massive failure. Selling individual
| properties at market value when the intention is to
| reinvest that money is clearly without objection. But to
| this day, the government offers discounts of up to 70% on
| social housing. It is a direct transfer of public wealth
| into private ownership and it has invariably led to worse
| outcomes where it has occurred. Social housing, royal
| mail, and water infrastructure are the obvious examples
| but less obviously there's PFIs, energy, and the nhs.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > the decision to not reinvest the proceeds into new
| housing stock
|
| This wouldn't have mattered, I think. The houses were
| sold at a massive discount, IIRC.
| blakblakarak wrote:
| The state does need to make houses to provide for lower paid
| people who do critical jobs.
| notahacker wrote:
| Yep, and people who don't do critical jobs or earn much at
| all tend to want somewhere to live too (and subsidising
| their private sector housing costs in areas with housing
| shortages usually costs more in the long run)
|
| Not really discussing the slowdown of building and mass-
| selloff of council owned housing since 1979 is a curious
| omission from an otherwise detailed description of public
| policy on housing. Private sector housebuilders have
| different incentives from public authorities, and
| maximising the profit from a site need not mean maximising
| the number of available homes (especially not given Britons
| with purchasing power were the original suburbanites). Nor
| does it mean building on all the limited supply of local
| land suitable for development at once, when it can be
| released in tranches (homebuilders have several years worth
| of plots with planning permission for every home they build
| in a year)
| Detrytus wrote:
| That doesn't make sense: if your job is indeed "critical"
| you have enough leverage to negotiate higher pay, don't
| you?
| nradov wrote:
| Which jobs are critical? What would happen if those people
| decided to take higher paid but less "critical" jobs?
| foldr wrote:
| NHS workers such as nurses and porters are the obvious
| example. Hospitals can't function without them, but they
| are paid very little.
| intelVISA wrote:
| If the UK is the same as the US then Agile shaman is
| mission critical.
| mordae wrote:
| Lower paid... critical jobs... State.
|
| Hahaha. Can't we just ditch capitalism altogether? It can't
| even pay and provide housing to people who perform critical
| jobs.
|
| Or are we discussing building barracks for slaves?
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Agree about the supply/demand difference causing the
| difference but I think your numbers are off. The UK build
| around 200k new 'dwellings' last year (financial year ending
| March 2022) according to [1] but I don't know whether that
| accounts for demolitions.
|
| [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housi
| ng/...
| blitzar wrote:
| > Britain built I think around 30k houses last year
|
| The latest house building statistics show that in the
| financial year ending March 2022 there were 204,530 dwellings
| completed in the UK.
|
| https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/.
| ..
| 88 wrote:
| When you consider there are decades of under supply to make
| up for, this is still a paltry figure.
| hsjqllzlfkf wrote:
| Still doesn't excuse quoting a wrong figure. I for one
| appreciate the correction.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Oh - fair. I can't remember where I got that figure from.
| It might've been a quarterly average.
|
| I'll amend, but noting the change.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| For comparison, Canada which has a population of 40M vs
| Britain's 86M built 286k homes in 2021. We took in 400K
| immigrants and 630K non-permanent residents in 2022. Not sure
| if those two numbers are additive, since I presume many non-
| permanent residents eventually become immigrants.
|
| The average price of a house in Canada is CAD716K vs PS285K
| (=CAD480K) in the UK.
| Detrytus wrote:
| you made a typo, Britain's population is 68M, not 86.
| mordae wrote:
| Not really. It would also have to tax hoarding them to
| prevent driving rents higher. Which would hurt landlords
| sitting in the Parliament. All 100% of them.
| pydry wrote:
| The problem is land. Land is not a normal commodity. Nobody
| makes it - all land rights are derived ultimately through
| legal fiat and violence, not labor.
|
| Somebody who consumes a lot of high value land doesnt create
| the conditions for making more like somebody who, say, buys a
| lot of cars. They just create more profits for nearby land
| owners. Hoarding drives more hoarding and higher prices in a
| positive feedback loop unless arrested via a tax.
|
| The elites can accomodate their market dysfunction by
| building public housing. They can neuter this market
| dysfunction by applying a steep land value tax (or by
| increasing property taxes).
|
| Or they can sit back and profit, parasitically extracting
| ever higher land rents from the real economy.
| dauertewigkeit wrote:
| Land is fixed, but only valuable because of the location it
| is situated in. And what happens as the location is not
| fixed. You cannot make more land, but you can alter the
| value of locations with incentives and taxes and government
| programs.
|
| Part of the solution could be governments shifting people
| and jobs around to secondary less popular cities.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Almost every company doesn't employ people in incredibly
| high price locations. They can't afford to. And some of
| the ones that can will sometimes move, but they'll do it
| for bottom up reasons, not for political, state-led ones.
|
| Also, the big contributor is Zoom. If you can work from
| anywhere, as some jobs can because of Zoom, you can live
| anywhere.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _The state shouldn 't need to build houses (in fact it
| doesn't; it just uses your tax money to pay private companies
| to build houses). It should just make the building and zoning
| rules simple enough that it's possible to make money from
| building houses and selling them, and let people get on with
| it._
|
| This is the modern wisdom in the west - it's the approach
| taken by many governments since the Reagan era (not just in
| the UK) and it's demonstrably unsuccessful in almost every
| metric except one: votes. Which is the only reason it
| continues. It panders to those who already hold assets, while
| doing very little to move the dial for those who need
| shelter.
|
| Migration is not a new phenomenon; citing it as an excuse for
| the utter failure of modern housing policy is disingenuous.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I cannot comment on other countries, but this is clearly
| not practiced in the US. The US has not simplified building
| and zoning rules or made them more permissive. The US
| follows the third option: do nothing and hope it fixes
| itself.
| danem wrote:
| I'm confused... Are you arguing that zoning, red-tape, and
| generally anti-development politicians and voters aren't
| the fundamental problem here? How exactly do you envision a
| government housing program to side-step all of the above
| issues? Do you think voters who fight relentlessly to block
| development feel differently about public housing? How do
| you expect it to get funded even, when a single unit of
| "affordable housing" costs ~$1m to build in a place like
| San Francisco?
| mavhc wrote:
| Also depends on the average number of people per house, and
| rate at which houses are destroyed.
|
| Why are we still building houses like it's 1800 though? Hand
| crafted houses built by local artisans are always going to be
| expensive
| nradov wrote:
| Construction costs are usually less then land acquisition
| costs. Housing developers are extremely efficient when they
| are allowed to build hundreds of identical units on a
| single large parcel. Most of the work can be done by
| unskilled laborers with artisans only doing the critical
| bits.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The worst part is that all of the new building projects are
| absolutely terribly built. It has gotten to the point where
| buying a house that was last worked on 20 years ago is more
| reliable than a new build, since so many new builds have
| borderline dangerous mistakes, and also huge illegal corner
| cuts that the government does nothing about. Not only is the
| construction bad, but so is the planning. Many of these new
| builds are completely car dependent with no plan made for
| access to the town centre or for building local shopping areas
| iso1631 wrote:
| I've lived in houses built in the 60s, 80, 00s, and 10s.
|
| The ones in the 10s were by far the best build quality,
| however the plots were tiny, and they come with extra taxes.
| The estates were full of cars parked over the pavements
| because of the limited parking (claiming a garage as a
| parking space for example), and the green spaces were poorly
| maintained (due to the privatised companies that own them)
| lucubratory wrote:
| I don't know if it's the same in the UK, but in Australia 63%
| of MPs are landlords, compared to only 7% of the general
| population. Almost no MPs are renters, compared to 30% of the
| general population. These people are never going to
| meaningfully help renters because doing so harms landlords, and
| they are landlords. There's no legitimacy to a system like
| this, being ruled by people who have completely different
| fundamental interests to you and with no legal way to vote for
| anyone else because every major party is a landlord party.
| Aromasin wrote:
| > If I was a young person, this above all other things would
| radicalize me. Our elected leadership are captive to stupid
| market force arguments. I'd rather they tried and failed than
| sat on their hands.
|
| I truly think it has radicalized a lot of us. My generation
| (millennials and younger) are one of the first ones not to
| slide further right politically as time goes on but remain
| staunchly left wing. That's culturally significant; a highly
| educated middle class is swinging a way they never normally do,
| outside of a revolutionary period (war/famine/etc). I see
| Socialist posters everywhere I go, and everywhere we're seeing
| strikes in almost every industry. There's inevitably going to
| be more civil unrest and eventual violence in our countries
| future.
|
| It feels like we're sliding into some sort of capitalist
| feudalism, where the rich continue to accumulate property, and
| people who don't have the means already (through family,
| inheritance, or a very high paying career) are stuck to a life
| of renting, with no wealth to pass on to their children. Right
| now, even if I could afford a 2-3 bed house somewhere (maybe
| PS300k, so a PS30k deposit), I'd be paying PS1800 a month in
| mortgage looking at a calculator from Barclays. That's nearing
| 100% of my take home after tax/student loan. It's obscene.
|
| I work in the semiconductor industry and have done for close to
| 5 years now. I worked damn hard to get here. All my older
| colleagues (50+), who's career path I've followed pretty much
| 1:1, had a house, kids, and some decent savings by the time
| they were my age. Some were even building up a portfolio of
| investments. I'm years away from being anywhere close to that.
| I end up with barely anything left after bills/groceries/other
| expenses. I've just taken up a second job working three nights
| a week in a bar just so I can actually afford to go to do
| anything fun after I've maxed out my ISA so I can maybe get a
| house in 5 years. It's cripplingly demotivating, and if I had
| the time to do else but work myself out of this hole I'd
| probably be on the picket line too.
| kansface wrote:
| There was a poll posted on HN within the last week or two
| showing the expected slide rightward for your demo. I can't
| comment on how it compares to previous generations.
| stubybubs wrote:
| Possibly the Nate Cohn thing from NYT in early June?
|
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/millennials-will-
| not...
|
| This is a pretty good analysis. Yes, some rightward shift.
| Things to change, though sometimes they change back as
| well. Millennials are still far more left-leaning than
| boomers as they age.
|
| > Critically, millennials are also much more Democratic
| than their predecessors were at the same age, as the chart
| above on the age gap in recent U.S. elections makes clear.
| And this exceptional partisan distribution is rooted in the
| generation's distinctive social values, which do not
| typically change drastically over time.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Please remember not to ask for a pay rise too, otherwise
| you'll be making inflation worse! /s
|
| Yep it sucks. Many people I know cannot afford unless there
| are two people paying the bills. You need two to tango for
| kids of course, and some might argue why do you need a 3 bed
| _house_ if you are single without kids (I am assuming here -
| you may not be). Of course that is no one 's business apart
| from your own and shouldn't factor in to this.
| rcarr wrote:
| > why do you need a 3 bed house if you are single without
| kids
|
| Because the 3 bed house is a signal to potential mates that
| you are financially capable of starting a family. Don't get
| me wrong there's a lot that goes into picking a partner and
| not everyone is going to be bothered by it, but there's a
| substantial portion out there who are going to look at
| where you live as an indicator of whether you're a
| potential long term suitor. Which is sad really because I
| think people used to meet, fall in love with the actual
| person rather than a checklist, and then took on challenges
| together and grew as a result, like moving into a small or
| rundown house, renovating it and then starting a family.
| There is an insidious streak in dating culture now where
| getting with someone who hasn't already made it is
| interpreted as "settling for less than you deserve". Don't
| get me wrong, you've got to have some standards and
| dealbreakers, but if you watch any of the matchmaking shows
| on Netflix, the potential criteria most of the dates have
| for their potential partners is wild. There's a reason Sima
| Aunty is always telling them to compromise, she knows
| exactly what's up!
| com2kid wrote:
| The developed world has one great example of functional housing
| policy: Japan.
|
| A single policy that allows for unique neighborhoods,
| affordable houses, supports small businesses, and enables
| walkable cities.
|
| Just.... do what we know already works.
|
| For anyone not familiar, here is a primer
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| It's the whole western world at the same time. The same
| policies, the same social outcomes. It makes me question
| whether there is any real democracy; did we all just happen to
| make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by
| incredible coincidence?
|
| And it's not as if the eventual negative outcomes of housing
| costs continually outstripping wage growth weren't obvious and
| growing year on year. Who is actually in _control_ here? Is it
| blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The
| Illuminati? Lizard people?
|
| Is there any _free will_ or are we just doomed to follow this
| course to who knows where? Can't we figure out what we actually
| _want_ as societies, and make policy that matches it?
| niyikiza wrote:
| EY wrote a good book about that very topic: "Inadequate
| Equilibria -- Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck"
| https://equilibriabook.com/
| asdff wrote:
| In all these systems where "the world over" we have the same
| end result, what do we have in common? Shareholders, for
| profit companies, consultancies, an entire sector of the
| economy is just consultancies. Its death by a thousand cuts
| set up by the incentives. You don't know what the hell you
| are doing, so hey lets act like you do by bringing in a
| consultancy who does know what they are doing because that's
| their job. In effect, you get to be bad at your job but be
| good at your job since you rubber stamped "bring in a
| consultant" on the project.
|
| Then what about these consultants? Well, they don't need to
| actually solve the problem either. They just make various
| plans and present a slide deck to management at the end and
| collect a check. Whether the plan works or not doesn't even
| matter here, because the consultants got paid already and are
| on to the next job, the manager looks good because they
| brought in a consultancy, and if shit fails in the next three
| years well its no ones fault, because management will act
| like they did everything right bringing in the consultancy
| and will cut other staff first.
|
| Consultancyism is everywhere these days. Its the next big
| thing in emerging markets which is even scarier and only a
| fig leaf away from imperialism with the terms of how some of
| these deals are struck, always to the benefit of capital with
| the people seen as a resource for extraction or exploitation.
| Consultancyism probably also encourages an unhealthy
| mercenary outlook on life. Never taking pride in projects
| because they are never your projects in your community, they
| are just jobs elsewhere to make some money.
| badpun wrote:
| > did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in
| lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence?
|
| It might have been a combination of circumstances and
| intellectual tides turning. The 70ties saw stagflation
| everywhere, which led to a decade of economic problems that
| couldn't be fixed with existing, socialist policies. Finally,
| voters everywhere (starting with Thatcher in UK ) decided
| it's time to try something else.
|
| Part of it might also have been a disillusionment with big
| leftist ideas in general - in the late seventies, there was
| enough reliable information coming from USSR and China to
| make it clear that anything resembling communism (a holy
| grail for much of the left back then) is an unmitigated
| disaster. People started to realise that capitalism, much
| like democracy, might be bad, but is better than all the
| alternatives.
| thriftwy wrote:
| The interesting thing is that Russia and China are
| capitalistic now, and they both manage to output a huge
| amount of high rise housing for sale.
|
| Makes one wonder whether capitalism is actually compatible
| with democracy.
| Detrytus wrote:
| If you believe Karl Marx then the answer is no:
| capitalism is incompatible with democracy, because of the
| basic human nature. If you allow people to vote, they
| will vote to take money from the rich and give it to them
| for free. Or for government to create money out of thin
| air, and give them away.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing
| us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people?
|
| less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their
| situation": the people who first paid money for a given
| square of land were also the first to try to convince someone
| else to pay them more for that same land
|
| natural resources aside, land only really has the value that
| other people are willing to pay for it, like currency. so if
| you want the "growth of your asset", the only thing you can
| really do is convince people the land is worth more than what
| you paid for it, for whatever reasons you dream up
|
| globalisation just made everyone's marketing messages go
| 'round the world
| asdff wrote:
| There's a little more to it. If it was merely about getting
| all the profit you could out of land, there's be no sense
| capping a bay area neighborhood at single family home
| densities, when you could probably build a 25 story condo
| on each single family home lot and sell each story as its
| own luxury condo for the price of that 1930s single story
| california home that sits there today.
|
| I think nimbyism just appeals to the monkey side of the
| brain we all have. If you are happy and surviving, there's
| probably millions of years of biological evolution in your
| behavior that's telling you to keep up what you are doing
| where you are. There's probably a side of your brain that
| subconsciously gets irritated at seeing more humans move
| into an area competing for resources with you, even if
| today that just means a parking spot at the grocery store
| and not an appreciable dent on game populations. Stuff like
| cities and dense living on top of many different "tribes"
| only happened within the last few thousand years, that's
| only like 50-100 generations and that's only considering
| those ancient cities that were around then, plenty of
| places have been rural for all of human history. Not nearly
| enough time to expect a significant amount of adaption, and
| that's only if there is a remarkably strong selective
| pressure favoring adaption.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their
| situation": the people who first paid money for a given
| square of land were also the first to try to convince
| someone else to pay them more for that same land
|
| It seems a bit silly to argue that increasing land prices
| is principally a result of marketing. The amount of earth
| on the planet in the last 10k years essentially hasn't
| changed but the number of humans has increased almost
| 2000%. Population growth is surely a "blind force", right?
| jareklupinski wrote:
| that's true, market forces like supply and demand affect
| everything in the economy, and while we've grown, our
| landmass has remained static.
|
| which parts of the land are worth more than others
| though, I think the article does a good job of providing
| examples too: people living closer to each central city
| had higher wages, which meant they could pay more for the
| land pieces... so they did, which meant they had to ask
| more when selling in order to 'break even' or 'realize on
| their investment'
|
| i guess the bigger question is: why did we tie our need
| for shelter into the economy? in order to achieve
| constant growth (ensure someone isnt left 'holding the
| bag'), we have to either be willfully ignorant of a
| growing population, or maintain a fantasy of there always
| being viable room for ever more people
|
| i hope we start colonizing the moon or even mars before
| we have to deal with fallout from the above...
| asdff wrote:
| The thing is, we used to respond to such growth easily in
| a way that prevented land prices from being so out of
| reach for average workers. Here is the population of Los
| Angeles over the years:
|
| 1850 1,610 --
|
| 1860 4,385 172.4%
|
| 1870 5,728 30.6%
|
| 1880 11,183 95.2%
|
| 1890 50,395 350.6%
|
| 1900 102,479 103.4%
|
| 1910 319,198 211.5%
|
| 1920 576,673 80.7%
|
| 1930 1,238,048 114.7%
|
| 1940 1,504,277 21.5%
|
| 1950 1,970,358 31.0%
|
| 1960 2,479,015 25.8%
|
| 1970 2,811,801 13.4%
|
| 1980 2,968,528 5.6%
|
| 1990 3,485,398 17.4%
|
| 2000 3,694,820 6.0%
|
| 2010 3,792,621 2.6%
|
| 2020 3,898,747 2.8%
|
| As you can see, the city used to experience massive
| decade over decade growth. It also used to be zoned for
| 10 million people in the 1960s, today though, its zoned
| for a little bit over 4 million people, creating the
| housing crisis we see today because not a lot of
| properties are even able to be built up even if they are
| available for sale and potentially a turnover. There's no
| shortage of land, its just mismanaged.
| tormeh wrote:
| There's an essay written on this:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
| panick21_ wrote:
| It not nearly as universal as you think.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Hahaha. Man wants to be fit, swears on his diet routine, sees
| a chocolate bar on the kitchen table literally 3 seconds
| later and reverses his decision. Is he under the control of
| his rational mind? Will? Does an alcoholic choose to
| _continue_ to drink alcohol after he is an addict?
|
| There is will, and there is will.
|
| Pretending that this doesn't apply to whole societies and
| that today's secular societies are not driven mostly by a
| deterministic mechanism consisting of human nature combined
| with the environment (technology + physical world) is a
| fool's act, and the ubiqiotus internet commenter attitude.
| Man yelling at the clouds, clouds of human nature and
| environment.
| hibikir wrote:
| It's not really the entire world: See Spain [1]: Until the
| financial crisis in 2007, the country liberalized building,
| often quite dense as opposed to plain sprawl. See, for
| instance, the growth in the towns surrounding Madrid around
| train stations. The crisis slowed it down massively though,
| in part because a lot of builders lost their shirts, as the
| building became massive overbuilding. But when demand goes up
| enough, it's still possible to build, and build high. In my
| home town in Spain, people can still afford homes. If there's
| an issue, it's still just jobs instead.
|
| So yes, this is all something that is politically solvable in
| the west. We just need a unified legislative recipe, and
| strong advocacy. Other lobbying groups manage to get through
| very unpopular legislation. Why not for something that would
| actually help?
|
| [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSCNDW01ESA470N
| asdff wrote:
| Some latin american cities are starting to make even nyc
| look small. I expect in 30 years that a lot of latin
| america will look like southeast asian cities while
| American cities look the same as they did 30 years ago for
| another 30 years.
| rcarr wrote:
| It definitely seems to be more of an Anglosphere problem than
| elsewhere. I've been learning other languages with the long
| term view of permanently escaping the Anglosphere in the next
| 5 years, unless I finally manage to land a job that pays
| enough to allow me some stability.
| khuey wrote:
| Yes, the homevoter mentality is much worse in the English
| speaking countries than it is in continental Europe or in
| developed East Asia.
| breakingrules wrote:
| [dead]
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > since the 70s
|
| Is part of the problem that we think the 70s was normal and
| not the outlier?
|
| https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-
| inco...
|
| Certainly there have been a couple recent bubbles, but even
| as recently as 2012 we were basically within the bounds of
| the long-term normal.
|
| I'd like to say it's a supply problem, and demographics does
| support that argument to some extent, but the fact that it
| involves most of the western world makes me think it may have
| to do with monetary policy.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I 'd like to say it's a supply problem_
|
| It is to the extent that various laws and regulations
| prevent or strongly disincentivize new construction, yes.
|
| _> the fact that it involves most of the western world
| makes me think it may have to do with monetary policy_
|
| It does. Mortgage loans have always been one of the primary
| places that governments choose to put newly printed money.
| The ostensible purpose of this is to make it _easier_ for
| people to own homes, but what it actually does is bid up
| home prices to the point where consumers are no better off
| than they were before, but financial institutions and other
| corporate interests make a nice extra profit. It 's similar
| to the way the easy availability of financial aid for
| college has not actually made it easier for people to go to
| the college of their choice (indeed, admission rates to
| many colleges have sharply _declined_ as financial aid
| becomes more available), it 's just transferred more wealth
| to the colleges from taxpayers.
| anovikov wrote:
| I can't see a problem here. It only happens because
| (slightly) more than half of voters are happy with their
| housing situation and prefer it stay the way it is (that is,
| perpetually increasing prices, so they can earn equity =>
| retire). They consciously vote for people who ensures just
| that.
|
| There is no failure of democracy here, but rather a good
| indication of it's strength.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| It seems to me much more about group incentives than some
| nefarious lockstep plan. Existing homeowners incentives are
| liking things as they are and increasing wealth on paper.
| What's more interesting is what _changed_ since the ~60s
| inflection, since before, things were built. People literally
| experienced NYC grow into a megalopolis. I'd say it's more
| likely that _more_ democracy was the problem in stifling
| things, when every environmental review and city council
| meeting blocked things and threw out city mayors that were
| pro building. China is totalitarian and they are the ones who
| manage to rapidly build cities and bullet trains out of
| nothing.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > It seems to me much more about group incentives than some
| nefarious lockstep plan.
|
| Yes, probably, but isn't this worse? Group incentives
| favour those that already have capital (material and
| political), which creates a feedback-loop increasing the
| rich-poor divide until... what exactly? What's the end-
| state? A return to feudalism? Bloody revolution?
|
| It just seems like there was a "once upon a time" where
| politics was about "this is the society we want", and they
| tried to build it. Now it seems we've all just given up.
|
| Meaningless! Meaningless! Let's deconstruct society until
| we can argue that a future of 1% home ownership is somehow
| better.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Recommend this book: https://www.versobooks.com/en-
| gb/products/164-democracy-agai...
| groestl wrote:
| > did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in
| lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence?
|
| Not US, and for reasons, the housing crisis is not _that_ bad
| where I live, but: in principle our country is exactly like
| our parent's generation imagined it. It's perfectly aligned
| with their interests. Where they'd hike to a hut in the
| mountains once, there is now a paved road, so they can still
| drive to the hut, even though they're not able to walk
| anymore. Somewhere else they built a cable car, for exactly
| the same purpose. They have houses. They have cars. They
| dominate every political institution there is. They voted to
| keep the conscription, so enough poor young people who
| alternatively chose community service would be available when
| they need care, eventually. They go on vacations three times
| a year. And heaven forbid they'd need to give up _anything_
| they once had. Political parties that suggest anything like
| that would have no chance in elections.
|
| > Who is actually in control here?
|
| I think they are.
| tormeh wrote:
| This is definitely it. It's a question of demographics. The
| developed world used to be for young people because people
| there were mostly young. Now decisions are taken by and for
| old people, and those of us who aren't are afterthoughts.
|
| A good example of this is the age at which our
| constitutions were drafted vs how old politicians are now.
| This is also the case in Norway but I think the US is a
| more relatable example on HN: Biden is twice the average
| age of the delegates in 1787.
| leoedin wrote:
| It's an interesting observation. I'm part of a few UK and
| Canadian regional subreddits, and the topics of conversation
| are often very similar. House prices are too high, we need to
| build more, the government is favouring boomers, the economy
| is stagnating, we need more manufacturing and less real
| estate speculation etc. What's particularly interesting is
| that often in the UK ones people paint Canada as being far
| better. The Canadian ones seem to idolise the US.
|
| It's clearly a global structural issue. Low interest rates
| are a pan-national commonality - and they can take a lot of
| blame for part of the situation we're in now. But they don't
| explain housing shortages.
|
| Population growth probably plays a big part - housing is
| always going to be lagging population growth. The various
| stories I've seen about Japan - with low rents, falling house
| prices and large numbers of abandoned houses - seem to map
| with the falling Japanese population. "Things were better in
| the 70s/80s/90s" probably partly just means that the ratio of
| houses to people was better. The population of most major
| western cities was falling or flat through much of the 70s
| and 80s - leading to the situation where my parent's
| generation all seem to have snapped up large, well located
| houses for not very much money.
|
| I'm fully supportive of the idea that, with all things equal,
| if we build more houses then supply and demand will drop
| prices. But if you allow unchecked population growth (which
| in the UK and Canada seems to be primarily caused by
| immigration) then the amount of building required is
| effectively infinite.
|
| I've visited the Toronto area from the UK more or less every
| year since I was a child, and the overwhelming story is one
| of huge development. The change in the suburbs of Toronto
| over the past 30 years has been vast and unlike anything I've
| seen in the UK. Yet that clearly hasn't been enough to stop
| house prices going crazy as well. The net effect, though, is
| that there's miles and miles of sprawl and 6 lane streets
| dominated by cars. The answer definitely isn't to build more
| of that. The population of Canada has grown by 40% in the
| last 30 years.
|
| Population growth combined with an ageing population and the
| kind of rights purchasing a house gives you in the west
| create increasing inequality driven by land. That seems to be
| the underlying issue that's driving city house values up
| everywhere.
|
| There are possibly some answers. In the UK in the 60s-80s we
| built entire new cities, with the land purchased by the
| government at agricultural value so that the entire uplift
| was captured by the developers rather than speculators.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Housing in Japan is affordable even in the big cities that
| are not shrinking (yet). The main reasons why are very
| liberal zoning, ubiquitous and functional public transport
| that makes continuing long distance feasible, and tolerance
| for tightly packed apartments and houses that would be
| considered far too small in most of the West.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Which Canadian subreddits idolize the U.S? Generally both
| countries have pretty similarly horrible development
| patterns with a tiny amount of exceptions. My impression is
| that the U.S just does sprawl and car-centricity to an
| extreme, like Toronto, but I can't say I've come across
| anywhere more compelling.
| sefrost wrote:
| I have noticed the same thing as the person you're
| replying to.
|
| I think the reason is there are a lot of tech / tech-
| adjacent workers on Reddit and they know people less than
| 100 miles away (in the USA) are doing the same job as
| them, possibly at the same company even, but are getting
| significantly higher compensation packages.
| asdff wrote:
| People have been saying this for years. Why do Canadian
| techies stay in canada? Tough immigration to US keeping
| them trapped? Seems like that's been the drumbeat of the
| central US tech scene for years and its resulted in all
| the engineering grads from those schools trying to flock
| to the coasts, and there basically being not much of a
| tech industry at all in the wake.
| nradov wrote:
| Sure we can. But many of the younger people most negatively
| impacted by housing policy don't bother to vote at all. Or if
| they do vote they do so based on social issues. I've never
| seen housing availability come up as the #1 issue in any
| voter survey.
| pontifier wrote:
| There's a pattern I've noticed of outsourcing code
| requirements. Most municipalities seem to adopt the
| international building code, and then because that code book
| is updated all the time, and none of the local officials
| actually understand it, they start to require that applicants
| prove that they meet the code. Planning commissions start to
| believe that they need to control everything that everybody
| does, but they shouldn't. Because everything is a shifting
| target, and proof is almost impossible, everything gets road
| blocked.
|
| For the most part, I agree with building codes. They serve a
| purpose by ensuring that unsafe buildings aren't created. But
| they've become so esoteric, that meeting them is an exercise
| in futility.
|
| I can't wait for the day that a "safe building" AI just
| watches everything, and tells people what to do. That way
| even unskilled labor can do work, and the work will be up to
| a safe standard.
|
| Code officials are the worst sort of power tripping
| bureaucrats. I can't wait for them to be eliminated.
| danaris wrote:
| It's not coincidence, and it's not conspiracy. It's
| zeitgeist, and people seeing one place do something and
| decide that's a good idea, and people following everything
| from scientific (and pseudoscientific) studies that came out
| around the time, to philosophical works published around the
| time, to all of the above that were old but re-popularized
| around the time.
|
| You can just as easily ask "why was there a rise of right-
| wing nationalist and fascist sentiment throughout the Western
| world in the mid-to-late 2010s?" There's no grand conspiracy
| to any of it, and looking for one is likely to lead you down
| exactly the road that far too many conspiracy theorists have
| gone recently.
|
| And, um, closely related, be aware that the "lizard people
| rule the world" thing isn't just a funny joke. It's deeply
| and inextricably rooted in a raft of antisemitic tropes,
| slurs, and propaganda going back...I forget exactly how long,
| but at least many decades. In fact, in general, when you
| encounter any conspiracy theory that posits a shadowy group
| of people secretly ruling the world, the chances are nearly
| 100% that you can trace it back to a version where that
| "shadowy group" is _explicitly_ Jews. This is a big part of
| _why_ conspiracy theorists have a tendency to find themselves
| in a pipeline to fascism.
| teddyh wrote:
| The _entire world_ was (and still is, to some extent)
| horribly racist. Every nation, institution and venerable
| principle you hold sacred has horrible racism lurking in
| its very bones, if you dig deep enough. You can't,
| therefore, dismiss anything on that basis alone. Argue with
| an issue _on its merits alone_ ; to attack the supposed
| secret origin of an issue is equivalent to an ad hominem
| argument.
|
| Also, alternative explanation of the lizard people thing:
| <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600>
| thriftwy wrote:
| What if the entire world is mostly rational, and it is
| the HN crowd / snowflakes from the richest US suburbs who
| are bonkers?
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments
| in real estate
|
| 2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find
| a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes
| into real estate.
|
| 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly
| tend to be homeowners.
|
| The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact
| home prices - such as an increase in supply or change in zoning
| laws. Entire countries seem to be perfectly okay with watching
| its young people be priced out of cities and areas they work in
| as long as "number go up".
|
| All the hand-wringing about political gridlock is just a cover
| for basic greed. Detestable.
| dahwolf wrote:
| "Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly
| tend to be homeowners".
|
| Sounds like democracy?
| brutusborn wrote:
| Yep, democracy in action. Although I suspect if polities
| were smaller and more independent then certain areas, with
| more poor and young people, would vote to prioritise
| policies to incentivise housing construction.
|
| Large polities result in the same policies being applied to
| regions that are fundamentally different in ways that make
| policy good for some and bad for others.
|
| I think housing issues present a good case for
| confederalism or even anarchism. States rights in the US or
| Swiss Cantons are examples where different regions have
| more control over policies and thus can suit them to their
| own specific needs. The smaller the polity the better. Also
| why special economic zones tend to produce good outcomes.
| lmm wrote:
| > "Elections are largely monopolized by older people who
| mostly tend to be homeowners".
|
| > Sounds like democracy?
|
| Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23
| - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated
| an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the
| mythical free ID. And if they manage to get off work on
| election day. Meanwhile the elderly are reliably on the
| register (because they're not being forced to move around,
| because again they own a home) and encouraged to vote even
| if they're expected to die before the results take effect.
| dahwolf wrote:
| I was referring to the idea that in an aging country,
| even if young/old people would equally show up to vote,
| the older people will have more votes.
|
| Which is democracy. It is fair in that sense, although
| surely it will not feel that way at all times.
| jezzamon wrote:
| You could imagine a system where similar to how we split
| votes into geographical regions via things like electoral
| colleges or having a locally elected representatives,
| there could be a similar splitting of votes into age
| ranges to ensure each group is sufficiently represented
|
| (Not advocating for this, just an interesting thing to
| think about)
| dahwolf wrote:
| Indeed, democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding
| what's for lunch. It's just an unusual and new idea to
| see young people as a minority as this never was the case
| to this extend.
|
| As it comes to housing though, I remain convinced that
| the issue is not as political as many make it out to be.
| See my other comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36486626
|
| Meaning, even if the young seize more political power,
| there isn't going to be a law they can pass that says
| "cut rent in half".
| RestlessMind wrote:
| California is one of the worst affected states for
| housing, and yet
|
| > they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an
| impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats
|
| Pretty much everyone starts driving around 16-18 and has
| a driver's license
|
| > manage to get off work on election day
|
| CA is an early voting state where ballots are mailed to
| you ~1 month in advance. You can drop them off at your
| convenience at one of the numerous drop-off locations.
|
| Really, CA makes it as easy to vote as possible including
| same-day registration. There is no excuse for young
| people to not vote, except for their apathy.
| ozr wrote:
| This is a wholly imaginary problem.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> Young people might get their first chance to vote at
| age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or
| navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to
| get the mythical free ID._
|
| uhh what? we're talking about britain here. I don't know
| what kind of yank(?) political dysfunction you're
| alluding to, but nobody has any trouble voting because of
| a lack of ID here. you don't need one to vote. you notify
| the electoral roll when you move into a house or flat,
| then a few weeks before election day you get a bit of
| paper in the post, you can bring it to the polling
| station to prove you live there.
| switch007 wrote:
| You're a little out of date with your info
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/about-14000-people-
| england-...
| edent wrote:
| That is not correct.
|
| During the recent elections in England about 14,000
| people were denied a vote due to lack of ID.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-65988959
| makomk wrote:
| Though since the correct ID is basically every kind of ID
| that's valid to buy age restricted goods like alcohol and
| stores have become more and more strict at checking that
| over the last few years that mostly seems to have been
| older people. (The government also permitted some other
| kinds of ID that older people are more likely to have
| access to in order to reduce this, but it didn't
| completely eliminate the problem and I'm pretty sure it
| wasn't expected to either.)
|
| The press has, as usual, not been entirely honest about
| this. In particular, there was a talking point about how
| only one non-passport and non-driving license form of ID
| that young people are likely to have compared with much
| more forms of ID that older people will have, but that
| one form of ID is a blanket scheme that providers of ID
| sign up to in order for it to be valid as proof of age.
| There is no equivalent blanket scheme for ID that older
| people are likely to have.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| The government has introduced a requirement for
| photographic ID for all UK parliament elections, as well
| as local elections in England. This has been _quite_
| heavily discussed, so I 'm surprised you haven't heard
| about it.
| jgon wrote:
| We usually have checks and balances in democracy so that a
| majority can't vote to say, take all the money from some
| minority group that has less voting power than them. What
| is happening now is that a "loophole" has been discovered
| wherein instead of just directly taking all of the money
| from some minority class the property owning class just
| instead condemns them to a lifetime of renting whereby just
| enough rent is charged to ensure that they are by and large
| never able to move out of renting, but not so much as to
| sow the seeds of a violent revolution (yet). Its democracy
| in the same way that voting to end all medical benefits for
| people over 65 would also be "democracy", which is to say
| it would be naked inter-generational and inter-class
| warfare.
| dahwolf wrote:
| I get what you're saying and I'm against inter-
| generational hate.
|
| There is no plot against young people. Remember that most
| old people have children. If today's young people would
| time travel to some decades back, they'd too make the
| most of the conditions then. I would not imagine any
| young person that owns a home to sell it at a discount
| out of solidarity, they too would self-optimize without
| any consideration for anybody else.
|
| Young people today aren't especially targeted, they are
| at the end of what was a
| demographic/economic/infra/building boom. Those
| conditions cannot be recreated.
| jgon wrote:
| I don't think that the older generation "hates" youth, I
| don't think they think about them at all really. In the
| conversations I've had with Boomers and older people,
| although there is the standard derision for youth that is
| stereotypically expected of older generations, I would
| say there is more an immense blindspot and unwillingness
| to consider even a slight sacrifice of any type, even for
| their own children. The expectation is that the youth
| will just have to work hard like they did in there day
| and a complete unwillingness to confront any sort of
| conversation about what hard work could buy in their day
| vs the present one. I've watched boomers talk to each
| other about their kids or grandkids being unable to buy a
| home amongst each and other and I would describe the
| overall vibe as being one of detached "oh well, sucks for
| them" type acceptance, and trying to console each other
| that their kids are doing fine in other ways (they buy a
| new iphone every other year!!!). Your comment actually
| mirrors a lot of their attitude, especially the part
| about how the youth of today would definitely do the same
| things, so why feel guilty about doing it, a hypothesis
| that has no way of being disproved and which exists
| largely as a balm to soothe their conscience as they try
| to deal with the cognitive dissonance of watching their
| children suffer, and then voting for parties and policies
| that will prolong that suffering.
|
| You wouldn't imagine any young person doing something to
| help another person out in some sort of solidarity and
| yet I generally see this exact mindset in terms of voting
| for left wing parties that will raise taxes, including
| theirs, voting and campaigning for increased density
| which will affect the character of their neighborhoods
| and possibly decrease their property values. Hell I have
| never voted for a party that would decrease my taxes and
| I am pretty up front about needing to be taxed more as I
| am very fortunate with my employment and income
| situation. I've had conversations at length with boomers
| advocating for tax cuts which would cut funding to
| education, arguing that it is pretty convenient that they
| want these cuts right around the time that they have no
| children in public school and asked if we should also cut
| medical funding, funding that they disproportionately
| draw on and the response has been universally "No", that
| funding is good and necessary.
|
| So I don't think that they young are "especially
| targeted" and more that anyone who is not a boomer and up
| is targeted and that happens to include the youth. We can
| tell ourselves a bunch of stories but stats around home
| ownership, lifespan, healthspan, median income, etc, etc,
| etc, a laundry list tells the actual story of what the
| current relationship is like between generations. You
| don't have to hate someone to harm them greatly...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Elections are largely monopolized by older people who
| mostly tend to be homeowners...the entire system is rigged_
|
| Homeowners, irrespective of age, vote more. This is in part
| enabled by material comforts. But there may be other layers
| of causation.
|
| The first two are problematic _per se_ (though I 'm uncertain
| of the effect size). But the last is fundamental--if someone
| can vote but can't care to, they're not going to have their
| interests represented.
| umeshunni wrote:
| > But there may be other layers of causation.
|
| Having a permanent, of sorts, attachment to a location
| incentivizes people to vote to protect their interests in
| that location.
| atoav wrote:
| The real question is, if you are profiting from this
| system: How can you stop people from caring, or
| alternatively how can you make them vote against their
| interest?
|
| This is ofc a rhetorical question as you can see the
| answers play out very clearly in nearly every conservative
| party in the world (and much more subtle and convoluted in
| the parties left of them).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How can you stop people from caring, or alternatively
| how can you make them vote against their interest?_
|
| Voting against their interests: nothing. That said, I've
| often found folks deemed to be voting against their
| interests to be doing nothing of the sort.
|
| Those who don't care are, for me, also fine. They're self
| selecting out of having a voice. If they want to have one
| in the future, they can engage. The tragedy is those who
| want to engage but can't. Due to registration
| requirements, ersatz poll taxes, difficulty of getting to
| and from poll sites or keeping tabs on the election
| calendar.
|
| (Apathy is unlikely to be solved with reforms versus
| education. I've never met an apathetic voter who cast a
| blank ballot in protest. If they show up, they tend to
| find _something_ to vote on.)
| prottog wrote:
| > The tragedy is those who want to engage but can't. Due
| to registration requirements, ersatz poll taxes,
| difficulty of getting to and from poll sites or keeping
| tabs on the election calendar.
|
| I hear about this every now and then, but is it an issue
| in any real number? Maybe the problem of the "difficulty
| of getting to and from poll sites", which I can see
| arising due to the nature of this country being large,
| spread out, and automobile-centric.
|
| Even Georgia, which was recently under fire for so-called
| voter restriction laws, hands out voter ID cards for free
| or a non-driver state ID card for under $40 that lasts
| nearly a decade. I can only imagine that anyone who is
| unable to obtain one of those has much bigger problems
| than voting every few years.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| So things depend on the state, but IIRC some states have
| been way more brazen about others.
|
| For example, at one point a proposal was floated to force
| changes in Texas polling center distribution, but only in
| counties with over a million people, which was pretty
| nakedly partisan.
| https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/23/texas-voting-
| polling...
| segamegazord wrote:
| Countries like Australia have compulsory voting and are
| still suffering the same issues. You are right - there are
| other layers of causation.
| vogon_laureate wrote:
| It's even worse because there's an adult social care crisis,
| a pension crisis, and in some areas a rundown NHS and school
| system. So all the incentives are towards not just home
| ownership but also additional buy-to-let ownership so that
| those with the means can afford private health care,
| dentistry, school fees for their kids/grandkids, inheritance
| for the kids who are priced out of the market, and
| retirement.
|
| It's a gravity well of incentives towards absolute property
| gluttony and creating an overheated housing market and
| massive social inequality.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > adult social care crisis, a pension crisis, and in some
| areas a rundown NHS
|
| I remember about 10 years ago, "the idea" was that retirees
| would, as their health starts to decline, do equity-release
| in their homes to pay for their care needs (on the basis
| that the NHS would start to means-test care based on the
| value of all assets, including housing, so that if an OAP
| has PS1m locked-up in their house and they probably have
| less than 5-6 years to live it's only fair that they
| liquidate some of that wealth instead of expecting the NHS
| to pay for everything - while those who don't own their own
| houses, would still benefit from free NHS care).
|
| I left the UK just-over 10 years ago (but I still visit my
| parents a few times a year and do the WFH-thing-but-abroad)
| so I'm not as clued-in on subtler points of public policy,
| but I'm curious if that's still the case? ...or if the
| Tories reversed that decision in the 8 years they've held
| power? (after-all, it would be anathema to Daily Mail
| readers, who give me the impression that they fully expect
| to enjoy their house-prices even after they're dead).
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Elections are largely monopolized by older people who
| mostly tend to be homeowners.
|
| This doesn't explain the constant increase in property tax
| levies being passed in Washington State.
| pradn wrote:
| That's also the set castigating young people who want to live
| in expensive cities. Prudence dictates you must live far far
| away. Why are you even thinking of living in New York City,
| you fool?! Why live in a cesspool like you goof!! It's become
| a culture war, too.
| majormajor wrote:
| The purpose of real estate development is to make real estate
| more valuable.
|
| So if you have laws _restricting_ that development you need
| to look further than just "real-estate investors don't want
| development."
|
| Even ones not doing the development benefit financially -
| landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other
| people in the area built a bunch of new shit.
|
| The better off - and therefore more politically-connected -
| you are as a homeowner, the more you care about "I don't want
| the wrong people living next to me" compared to "I need to
| maximize short-term property values." (And the long-term
| property values trends clearly shows that cities with more
| development, that more people want to move to, are where you
| find ROI.)
| Chyzwar wrote:
| Migration to bigger tier one cities is partly to blame. Many
| young people want to live in NY and rent a shoebox flat for
| life. They think that they can become Friends protagonists
| when in fact they become broke and blame government.
| coliveira wrote:
| Big cities are not created because of dreams of "Friends",
| but because they have lots of jobs. That's why NYC is still
| attracting people. If it had zero jobs, it would go broke
| in less than a year, no matter how many TV shows are shot
| over there.
| goodpoint wrote:
| No, people move to cities because of jobs and because the
| countryside is dying. No need for weird theories about
| Friends.
| khuey wrote:
| > Many young people want to live in NY and rent a shoebox
| flat for life.
|
| Nobody wants to rent a shoebox apartment in NYC for the
| rest of their life. But if you're not rich your only
| choices are to rent the shoebox or to leave NYC, and people
| choose which one matters more to them.
| clpm4j wrote:
| And if not already rich in NYC then you're probably there
| because you're trying to become rich.
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| m_fayer wrote:
| I grew up in NYC, when big parts of it were still
| affordable. That was a time when people migrated there
| without assuming an impoverished lifestyle and locals
| didn't get priced out. It breaks my heart that we now
| accept that big cities are for the rich or the masochistic.
| There was a lot of magic in my childhood, that will now
| become a thing of the past, unfortunately.
|
| You should read about Vienna, which is a relatively large
| city that's bucking the trend.
| mjevans wrote:
| Or, it's where their job is, which requires them to come
| into the office on some sort of basis.
| parthdesai wrote:
| Or at least in North America, younger people don't want to
| live in soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing to
| do apart from visiting the same big box stores, chain
| restaurants and bars in exactly same looking plaza.
| nervousvarun wrote:
| Until they get married/have kids and do the same thing
| their parents and their parent's parents did...move to
| the suburbs.
|
| One difference with "younger" kids now is they're getting
| married later...but once you have kids the suburbs look
| completely different and it's been that way for as long
| as there have been suburbs.
| prottog wrote:
| Real estate isn't immune to the law of supply and demand,
| which mandate that you can only pick at most two out of
| size (or quality) of the housing unit, location (and the
| quality thereof), and price. Most places in the US are
| either affordable and boring or the other way around.
|
| > soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing
|
| This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger
| people's part. You can have just as much fun at the TGI
| Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the
| hippest restaurant no one else has ever heard of in
| Brooklyn. It's just a matter of who you spend that time
| with, and how you perceive that time, in the Stoic
| tradition.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| > You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at
| your local strip mall as you can at the hippest
| restaurant no one else has ever heard of in Brooklyn.
| It's just a matter of who you spend that time with, and
| how you perceive that time, in the Stoic tradition.
|
| It's not just about restaurants. I'm not going to be able
| to go to concerts or events. There will be no specialized
| stores. Even in the example you gave, many of these
| chains are absolutely terrible now. Going to a local
| place means better food. It's not all pretense.
|
| As the saying goes: It's hard to have fun with dogshit in
| your mouth.
| closeparen wrote:
| It's true that fun and interesting cities would still
| command some kind of premium under more liberal
| permitting regimes, but that's not an excuse to be
| amplifying it artificially with policy.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| > Our elected leadership are captive to stupid market force
| arguments
|
| Perhaps recently, but the state driven housebuilding programs
| have met similar failures. Local authorities and their
| residents seem equally hostile to housebuilding whether it's
| made by the private sector or public sector (see the backlash
| faced by Labour governments under Harold Wilson or Tony Blair).
|
| Perhaps one of the better arguments against democracy in
| general is that it makes housebuilding so difficult.
| cnity wrote:
| > Local authorities and their residents seem equally hostile
| to housebuilding whether it's made by the private sector or
| public sector
|
| In my experience (in Edinburgh) the vast majority of people I
| speak to tend to view the private developments (especially
| the insatiable appetite for student accommodation) and short
| term lets far less favourably.
|
| Granted, Edinburgh is a special case with an incredibly high
| demand for short term letting and students.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Unfortunately it's hard to observe the public reaction to
| state led housebuilding without resorting to historical
| examples because there's so little happening at the moment.
| roenxi wrote:
| Britain's energy-per-capita has collapsed since 1965 [0]. How are
| they meant to build houses and live in them without energy?
| Construction is one of the most energy-intensive activities we
| have, and maintaining a warm home is up there.
|
| Britain is one of the usual suspects who listened to
| environmentalists, fought nuclear, let fossil fuels slide and bet
| big on renewables. They're going to need to have a bit of a focus
| on finding some energy somewhere if they want to reclaim the
| "glory" of even the 1950s. Standards have to drop.
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy
| yrro wrote:
| energy- _use_ -per-capita. Not sure what switching to energy
| efficient lightbulbs and vacuum cleaners has to do with the
| collapse in housing supply.
| roenxi wrote:
| Run me through, order of magnitude, where you think this 25%
| reduction in per capita energy use is coming from. Lightbulbs
| and vacuum cleaners aren't going to cover anything
| interesting.
| dijit wrote:
| I mean, there's a few things inaccurate with this statement.
|
| The UK's targets meet the very minimum which they agreed to
| with other nations (Paris Accords: https://unfccc.int/process-
| and-meetings/the-paris-agreement) but are trotted out by the
| conservatives as if they're very forward thinking.
|
| However, it was 2008 that the UK agreed that it would build
| more nuclear energy generation plants, and EDF planned to build
| 4 of those by 2017.
|
| On 26 January 2017, the UK notified the European Atomic Energy
| Community (Euratom) of its intention to withdraw, following on
| from its decision to withdraw from the European Union. Leaving
| has wide-ranging implications for Britain's nuclear industry,
| including regulation and research, access to nuclear materials
| and impacts about twenty nuclear co-operation agreements with
| non-EU countries.
|
| The UK withdrawal raises the question of nuclear fuel
| availability in the UK, and the need for the UK to enter into
| new treaties relating to the transportation of nuclear
| materials, which haven't even begun.
|
| In 2020, nuclear power generated 46 terawatt hours (TWh) of UK
| electricity, just over 15% of gross electricity generation, and
| about half its 1998 peak of 91 TWh.
|
| The new EDF sites aren't ready and are expected to be
| commissioned by 2026, just in time for Hartlepool and Heysham 1
| to close down.
| lukeck wrote:
| Energy use per capita has dropped because people are using less
| electricity, and generation has dropped to match. Power systems
| need to be operated so that demand very closely matched supply
| from second to second. If people use more, more power can be
| generated. The grid is not at capacity.
|
| I agree with you that cheap, sustainable power sources need to
| be found but I'm not quite understanding your argument for why.
| deathgripsss wrote:
| Britain moved away from being a manufacturing to a service
| based economy which uses significantly less energy.
| Jochim wrote:
| Planning permission was granted for 2.78m homes between
| 2011-2021. Only 1.6m homes were built[0]. I find it interesting,
| given the length of the article, that this wasn't mentioned.
|
| [0]
| https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/08/over-1m-home...
| blitzar wrote:
| Housing, housebuilding, planning etc is such a divisive topic,
| where everyone has anchored in to a heavy bias that there is
| little rational conversation. The problems are so poorly
| diagnosed that the solutions (that people then double down on)
| only worsen all the problems.
| Jochim wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree. Different countries have different
| issues but in the case of the UK neo-liberal policy has
| clearly been the root cause.
|
| Social housing stock was sold off, ostensibly to occupiers,
| at significantly less than market value. This comical scheme
| is still going on today, imagine the reaction of landlords if
| private renters were offered a 70% discount[0] on the
| purchase price of a property.
|
| An interesting phenomenon occurred when the scheme was
| introduced as well, neighbourhoods were canvassed with offers
| to purchase the house they rented. Many of the people living
| in these houses wouldn't be approved for a mortgage, so on
| the same day many of these houses were sold at their insane
| discount, they would be sold on immediately to a private
| investor.
|
| At the same time councils were prevented from reinvesting
| that capital in the construction of new housing stock. The
| result is that the UK has some of the highest rents in Europe
| and also some of the poorest housing quality. Privately
| rented flats are often full of mold, with tenants are unable
| to assert their rights due to fear of retaliation.
|
| It has also contributed to the majority of the economy being
| centralised in London. Putting aside the intentional
| annihilation of the UK's productive industries for a moment.
| Private builders are incentivised to invest where demand is
| currently hottest leaving other regions to deteriorate. The
| result is that even more economic activity is now occurring
| in the region which encourages ever more economic
| concentration.
|
| State provisioned housing is concerned with wider societal
| benefit. Short term profit matters much less, meaning they
| can invest in rural or currently unproductive areas in hope
| of nurturing economic growth there. This simply doesn't occur
| otherwise.
|
| The power wielded by the kind of large enterprise encouraged
| by neo-liberal policy prevents the kind of organic growth
| that makes most communities a pleasant place to live. We can
| see that in the total dearth of parks, green space, local
| shops, doctors offices and schools in the UK's new build
| developments.
|
| I won't go into much detail about the raft of other problems
| that neo-liberalism introduces but disposable income only
| recently recovered to 1960s levels, both members of the
| household are now working and yet they're often struggling to
| afford basic necessities. All of these contribute to the
| issue of housing affordability and provision.
|
| [0] https://www.gov.uk/right-to-buy-buying-your-council-
| home/dis...
| rcxdude wrote:
| That number could do with more details on how that number was
| counted. Apart from provisional permission (which still a lot
| of further planning effort), I know from bitter experience that
| a "granted" full permission does not actually mean you can
| build there yet. It's also possible for duplicate grants where
| only one of the permitted options can actually be built. It
| would need to count the number of houses which have been
| granted full permission and for which all pre-commencement
| conditions have been discharged. (Also, if the article is right
| and the number of applications has been increasing over time,
| it could well be that the majority of the not-(yet)-built
| houses are in the more recent batch).
| dahwolf wrote:
| In the Netherlands we don't really have a big NIMBY issue and we
| still can't keep up supply with demand. Supply is complicated and
| not just restricted by zoning.
|
| One key thing to understand is that private companies build
| homes, not governments. And if it's not profitable to do so, it
| will simply stop. And if not at least 75% of the project is sold
| beforehand, the project is stopped altogether.
|
| And this is how our government's ambitious plan to build ~100K
| new homes per year got crushed. In particular due to rate hikes,
| making mortgages even more expensive than before, so potential
| buyers opt-out.
|
| This part is critically important to reflect on as it keeps
| happening. There's an economic downturn and the building of new
| homes slows down or stops. This happened over here from 2008-2014
| creating a massive backlog, in turn leading to a pricing boom in
| recent years. Ideally, you'd keep building during a downturn but
| nobody knows how as there's no buyers and it's too big to
| subsidize. Hence, at least in the Netherlands, unaffordable
| prices are not due to zoning, they are a supply deficit based on
| downturns.
|
| There's also labor shortage, material shortage/inflation, far
| more complicated construction due to the energy transition. And
| yes, higher than usual immigration is a factor. One of many
| factors.
|
| And guess what? In my area, the grid is full. A few more homes
| can get connected but not a single new company can connect for
| the coming 10 years or so and it takes billions in investments to
| fix. This in reference to new housing supply having lots of other
| dependencies.
|
| We also tried rent control on private rent. Guess what? The land
| lords simply sell the property, now you'll have even less rent
| supply. Well done.
|
| My point being: increasing supply is not easy in this perfect
| storm. Surely the entire western world would not have this
| problem if it was a simple as a policy change. It very much
| involves constraints in the physical and economical world.
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