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Id start by moving more jobs out of the southeast where housing is an issue only due to population concentration due to certain jobs being concentrated there.

And I would stop selling houses and introduce council housing and rent control, removing right to buy so the public renting stock isn't depleted.

If houses outside the SE aren't achieving asking price then that would indicate there IS sufficient capacity no?

It has laid the foundation of the sort of risk taking and entrepreneurial spirt that has made this back water island into a global player

I think we were invading other places, pillaging their resources and forcing them to buy the resulting produce back from us some time before that.

Lloyds Banking Group and Barratt have formed a new venture with the government housing agency Homes England to plan large-scale projects to build thousands of homes.

Well that's worrying. Barratt are, or were, being investigated by the Markets and Competition Authority because of their buyout of Redrow. The housebuilding industry in this country is already stupidly concentrated, financialised, and run as an oligopoly. Having a government-backed private finance venture is a step in the completely wrong direction if we want a functioning housing system.

From the FT (https://archive.ph/mhksg):

The trickier debate is whether consolidation will lead to more houses being built in the UK’s chronically undersupplied market. In theory it might. Housebuilders build only when they can sell homes and make a decent profit. Hence, Barratt completions were down 29 per cent in the six months to December, as rising rates curbed demand.
[...]
A bigger group should be better able to navigate the headwinds of regulation, planning and building cost inflation. Once demand returns it could, perhaps, produce more houses. Indeed, cost savings estimated at £90mn, in line with industry averages from previous deals, should be worth in the region of £700mn once taxed and capitalised.

The more cynical view is that, given that the biggest cost of a new building is land, greater concentration of the stuff may mean more scope to control local housing supply and prices.

This is worth a read too — "How big UK housebuilders have remained profitable without meeting housing supply targets": https://theconversation.com/how-big-uk-housebuilders-have-remained-profitable-without-meeting-housing-supply-targets-215757

And on a separate but related note, I'm constantly surprised in debates about the housing crisis that it's always framed purely as a supply problem. What's always left unsaid is that we've got more houses and bedrooms per person than we've ever had in aggregate, yet prices still rise uncontrollably.

There are of course shortages in major cities, but dealing with housing primarily as a financial asset is crucial to bringing prices down. When seen as an asset the fixes are obvious. Providing non-market alternatives in the form of social housing and housing co-operatives, strengthening tenants rights, implementing reasonable rent controls, rebalancing the distribution of ownership through land taxation, or more interesting policies like a right of first refusal, are all more important than the number of units built.

It has laid the foundation of the sort of risk taking and entrepreneurial spirt that has made this back water island into a global player

Business types love to pretend they deserve the rewards because of the outsized risks they take. If the foundation of our corporate structure is based on removing that risk as much as possible, the only story left to tell is one more of privilege, not 'entrepreneurial spirit'.

I live in a cul-de-sac however ours is centred on an open green space.

Its because of that space that people do meet each other. The kids go out and play on it. We had the jubilee party on it. Before COVID (and before 1 neighbour complained) one of the neighbours used to hang up a sheet and set up a projector to have movie nights on it (I moved here during COVID so missed that). It's mainly 3/4 semis here, but there is also a block of flats on the cul-de-sac.

It is correct that it isn't linked by footpaths, there's only one way in and out which is a pain. People from surrounding roads do come here to take their dogs for a pee/poo.

My wife works in housing in the civil service. Apparently there are plenty of bedrooms for the population (e.g. old people still living in the family home and not downsized, or relatively wealthy people with more bedrooms than they strictly need), so there's a train of thought on adding incentives to encourage downsizing.

However, according to her there is still a big shortage in housing, both private and state owned.

According to her, right to buy is counter intuitively a good policy. First it helps break the cycle of poverty within a family who now have an asset. Second, it relieved the local authority of a usually ageing property needing a decent amount of maintenance. The money the local authority gains from the sale is then ringfenced and can only be used to build new social housing.

I think supply and demand is only part of the problem. Again, I'm not the expert myself, but many experts feel like successive governments have followed economic policies that jack up house prices in order to gain popularity. However, for anyone other than an investor or someone downsizing or moving to a cheaper location, house prices growth isn't actually a good thing. If you sell a 4 bed home in my part of Derbyshire for 500k and want to move to a similar property in a similar location, you still need 500k. It doesn't matter what you bought it for and how long ago.

Finally, movement of people is emotionally difficult for many. I have moved away from where I grew up because it's unaffordable to own the type of house I would like, I happen to love riding bikes up hills, and I can work remotely. As such the edge of the Peak District makes sense for me. However I see many of my family and friends fairly understandably not wanting to move away from where they grew up, or working in an industry based in a specific geographic location. Rightly or wrongly, these people don't want to move somewhere else, and so you end up with the issues we see in SE England.

According to her, right to buy is counter intuitively a good policy

Totally agree. It's the same with many things in housing discourse to be honest. Another widely accepted idea is that low- or zero-deposit mortgages are bad in and of themselves.

What that really means is that there's less money floating around in the real economy, and poor people aren't allowed to own their own place. Any inflationary effect of the additional lending should be corrected for elsewhere instead.

I was about to write the same - it was wars of aggression and colonialism that made this backwater island into a rich backwater island.

What's always left unsaid is that we've got more houses and bedrooms per person than we've ever had in aggregate, yet prices still rise uncontrollably.

Do you mean homes rather than houses? Or actually houses, not flats? Bedrooms PP feels reasonable, as folks can't / won't downsize, homes and houses I'm not sure - we were importing around 5k people a week relatively recently, and all of them need to be housed somewhere.

However I see many of my family and friends fairly understandably not wanting to move away from where they grew up, or working in an industry based in a specific geographic location. Rightly or wrongly, these people don't want to move somewhere else, and so you end up with the issues we see in SE England.

I don't think is what is causing the problem in SE England. It's that lots of people move there (often for work/opportunities). London population has gone up by somethng like 25% in the past 20 years.

And people will continue to move there whilst it has such an outsized proportion of jobs, wealth and investment compared to the rest of the country.

London properties are along the lines of 6x more expensive per sqft than where I grew up which really illustrates the problem.

The real way to solve the housing crisis is to actually level up the country. The tories seem to have been actively working against this, it will be interesting to see whether labour do anything about it.

Yeah sorry, dwellings per person. I'd imagine that crosses over to houses per person too since a lot of modern development is detached or semi-detached suburban homes on the outskirts of towns and cities, but I haven't seen the data on that.

The last year or so has seen high immigration, yeah, but I'm reluctant to use that as a framing for a longstanding housing inflation. I'll see if I can dig out some numbers for housing starts vs population increase in the last couple of years though.

For my money, seeing large immigration numbers and flat or slightly reducing sale prices at the same time is a good argument for the causes being more financial than simplistic measures of people-to-dwellings.

Gotta sell that opium. Gotta fight wars to force people to buy that opium, then demonise them as drug addicts and dealers who use opium to kidnap white girls.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgwkwxr4eqo

" Apple has been ordered to pay Ireland €13bn (£11bn; $14bn) in unpaid taxes by Europe's top court, putting an end to an eight-year row.
The European Commission accused Ireland of giving Apple illegal tax advantages in 2016, but Ireland has consistently argued against the need for the tax to be paid.

The Irish government said it would respect the ruling. "

ireland decides to accept the EUR 13bn ... that's good of them !

For England, the latest data is only available up to mid-2023, and the period is shifted between the studies, but a quick division of the numbers results in 2.47 people per dwelling. That's consistent with the average household size (for all households, not just new ones), which has been at a similar level for about a decade, and before that a little larger.

Population increase 2022–2023 (ONS)

Between mid-2022 and mid-2023, the population of England grew by 1.0% (578,000)[...].

Housing supply: net additional dwellings, England: 2022 to 2023 (gov.uk)

Annual housing supply in England amounted to 234,400 net additional dwellings in 2022-23

These are all obviously aggregate figures, so it doesn't factor in local disparities or the distribution which are clearly factors (lonely pensioners and flat-sharing)

As long as the rich keep getting richer, that's the main thing; that's worth any amount of unnecessary misery.

The real way to solve the housing crisis is to actually level up the country. The tories seem to have been actively working against this, it will be interesting to see whether labour do anything about it.

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The money the local authority gains from the sale is then ringfenced and can only be used to build new social housing

hahahaaaaa, good one.

One more:

https://x.com/ianmulheirn/status/1788105965188849667

Housing item on R4, @amolrajan compared 700k immigration (for 1 yr) to ~230k new housing - but average household size for migrants is around 3. Not an ideal comparison

Also lots of 'housing supply not keeping up' but homes per population is at its at its highest level ever...

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Just about every country has a property problem somewhere.
Canada and New Zealand are places you think have lots of space but they still have high property costs in certain locations.
Poland and places like Warsaw, Wroclaw and Gdansk have seen property go nuts in the last few years partly fuelled by policy but also by demand from a growing economy.

Does any major city not have high property costs?

Maybe there is no housing crisis?

causes being more financial than simplistic measures of people-to-dwellings.

Mmm. Stop printing money.

Traditionally places like Rio and Delhi had fairly well located slum areas which allowed low paid workers to live close to jobs.

Idk if it is still the case. But it's one of those concepts I remember from a while back that people were looking at to implement in a safer/less shit way.

Aren't there bougie apartments in Vienna or somewhere like that that you pay a % of income rather than rent so theoretically you have a range of people living there. Or have I imagined it? Anyway, I always wondered about that for cities.

The money the local authority gains from the sale is then ringfenced and can only be used to build new social housing.

That's not my recollection and Wikipedia seems to agree with me.

Half the proceeds of the sales were paid to the local authorities, but the government restricted authorities' use of most of the money to reducing their debt until it was cleared rather than spending it on building more homes. The effect was to reduce the council housing stock, especially in areas where property prices were high, such as London and the south-east of England.

Ha, that's definitely not what I'm saying. There absolutely is a crisis of affordability and an obvious shortage in major cities. The heavy focus on market supply, though, means many are currently overlooking other factors that have a greater effect on affordability.

The best YIMBY studies I've looked at tend to celebrate reductions in price from new supply of between 1–3%. That's positive, but even using their numbers we couldn't physically build enough to reduce prices back to 1990s levels. When looking at the historical average of 7% increases per year for 30 years, or roughly 800% since the 90s, 3% isn't going to touch the sides.

Building needs to happen, it just won't fix affordability.

Quite. Add to this that turning arbitrary selections of council housing into private property didn't simplify or reduce the cost-per-home of maintaining the rest; did the reverse, in fact.

Yup that was what I thought too.

A different spin might be "right to buy could be" a good policy if combined with a building drive and funding to cover the shortfall between receipts from sales and cost of new builds. But it has never been designed as that