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The funny thing there though is that if you do obviously good things, it's good politics to shout about it.

If we get to the next election cycle and the government has been quietly tinkering while larger problems like stagnant wages and high housing costs haven't moved in a positive direction…

I'm not sure how clever a position it really is.

Ha, yeah, I suppose it is!

That sounds about right to me.
I get the feeling from them that they privately think that they’ve been very clever to get where they have, but it’s more probable that they’ve only formed a government by boring the shit out of everyone.

I'm not a big fan of compulsory land purchases tbh, unless it's for something like a new train line which has seriously important national value. I suspect you're right there though, however shit it might be, it's probably a vehicle designed to be seen to be doing stuff without risk or capital investment.

The competition and market authority just need to break these fuckers up. I wouldn't mind a european-style self-build/self-manage system like you describe, but we're so far away from it at the moment it's unreal.

Attempting a 360 flip, I managed to land on the board with one foot, and the wheel and the rest of my body weight landed on my big toe on the other foot… the toenail has been trying to leave for the last week and it’s not very nice.

Why is skating much more painful in your thirties!?

I posted the link because, in relation to the merger between Barratt and Redrow, it shows the centralisation of the UK building system on only a handful of companies.

And also, like, Lloyds Banking Group and Barratt have formed a new venture with the government housing agency Homes England, so they're not exactly separate concerns now.

The three largest housebuilders (by number of houses built) regularly produce about 25% of all new homes, while the top ten typically produce about 40-50%. This means the government relies on a small number of private businesses to deliver most new housing. But their collective supply consistently falls short of targets.

Profit over volume
In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis, the “big three” housebuilders that dominate the new-build market in Britain have been able to increase their profits without significantly increasing the number of homes they build. This has happened despite political pressure to increase UK housing supply.

[...]

The then-group operations director of Taylor Wimpey even pointed this out in May 2018, noting that “everybody in the industry has been telling you [investors] for several years how much easier the land environment is, how much, much better the returns are, how much less competition there is”.

We argue this state support via planning liberalisation has given volume housebuilders what’s called monopsonistic market power in local land markets.

[...]

As the then-group chief executive of Taylor Wimpey disclosed in July 2013: “like any oligopoly, there’s a balancing act. If you … try and push your market share … you move the whole market and that’s going to damage us all”.

That last comment shows how brazen these people are, they just couldn't give a shit

Surely quantitative easing and crazy-low interest rates for a good period of time has a lot to answer for here, though?

Oh yeah, but I think the problem is deeper than that. The money from mortgages is new money too. Then there's the rental yield component of price, when prices rise fewer people can own, meaning higher demand for rentals, meaning higher rents, meaning higher purchase prices. It's a housing inflation doom loop and we're all trapped in it.

Didn't spot your edit…

Mmm. Stop printing money.

We'll need new money for new stuff, like new buildings. And mortgages are good, actually.
Putting some sensible regulations on the banking system though? yeah, definitely.

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.

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...

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)

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.

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.

99.9% of entrepreneurs I've met (and I have actually met quite a few of differing successes) have shared the personality trait of not wanting to be led by others. So for all the common sense chat about entrepreneurs needing a financial incentive, my 2p is those people will always do their thing.

100% agree with you there. And more broadly I think a movement toward co-operatives and self-management would likely see the positive traits typically applied to 'wealth creators' expand to more people too.

It's not really the left's problem that this meaning of fiscal prudence exists — there's an entire section of the 'prudence' wiki page that talks about the economic definition, and while it's a little arcane in defining it as the third derivative of a utility function over consumption being above zero (accelerating utility/consumption), ultimately the framing is all about precautionary saving.

They're having to fix the roof while the rain is pouring in, and while the markets are still jittery as fuck about borrowing post Truss. I don't necessarily think Reeves has drawn up her response to these constraints perfectly, but imo it's dishonest to to pretend those constraints don't exist, or pretend it's reasonable for a government to simply ignore them.

I've said on this thread before that we've all seemed to learn the wrong lesson from Truss, just because it's a useful political framing to bash the Tories.

Labour absolutely have options other than market doctrine. The currency markets aren't stupid and very well understand that borrowing for investment, rather than tax cuts, is a positive and disinflationary way to grow an economy. That's not to say that there aren't real constraints, there are, but mostly it's to do with being at full employment, alongside problems with the distribution and type of labour, not debt.

Interest rates are not that high, and are basically at historical average. If the government are not able to invest at average historical interest rates then we've got much larger problems.

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'.

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.

People seem to really love rooms that echo

Episode two’s “Tonight Matthew, I’m going to be… Annatar” was, err, something.

For the rest of it, I’m constantly surprised at how the writers are able to make every scene as trivial as possible. It’s quite an accomplishment.

They’re just artisanal now and for extremely specific purposes:

https://donhoubicycles.com/products/brass-barrel-adjusters

(I have some of these and they’re lovely, so not taking the piss too much…)

How much does alcohol cost? I’m not sure a government’s financial situation is a good reasons to ban things.

Hey,

Someone’s interested in collecting those bits at the moment, so I’ll have to give them priority, if that’s okay.

If they don’t shift in the next week they’re small enough that posting won’t be too much of an issue though.

Price drop on Soma bars and SRAM levers.

Can you massage the tyre onto the rim edge a little? That plus a bit of water tends to do the trick for most tyres

Also if anyone has any need for a 32h Novatec F172SB rear hub (without cassette body), you can have one for free. I think I ended up buying a new hub just to replace the cassette body in a set of wheels for some reason.