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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.
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aggi
Kimmo
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.