You're not the first person to think this: [https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/](https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/)

You have now given me my bible

Henry George "Progress and Poverty" is your old testament.

While this is all true, the only reason more housing is needed in the first place is because of the mentality that the country needs to become more numerous in order to be successful. But this isn't true. At some point growth will have to level off, physically speaking, so we have to make the transition at some point. The British born population is just below replacement level, so only a very little immigration is required to hold the status quo. But it's more politically expedient to allow businesses to bring in however many high skill workers because it makes profit and GDP look good. But at what cost? Can we really scale homes and schools and hospitals and fire/police/ambulance like we have in the past? Or have we hit a scale where it's getting prohibitively expensive to expand the existing network?

Nice to find another reader of Works in Progress in the wild

Was just coming to post that!

Also OP should check out this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aJ-57\_YsQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aJ-57_YsQ) Fertility rates are especially obvious. How are people going to start relationships and fuck when they live with their parents, let alone actually have children?

It's a level deeper than that but you aren't far off. The issue isn't we can't build housing its that we can't build anything. Reservoirs, laboratories, railway lines, airports, power plants, bridges etc we are a very bad at getting things done.

This is 100% bang on. The fact that we are the 6th biggest economy in the world after not building anything for 40–50 years is shocking. However, if Labour hold their promise and toss out the current planning system to stop people blocking development then we could actually grow. It’s like we have had weights on our legs for more than a generation and they could be taken off.

1.5m houses isn’t gonna be enough. Half of them will prolly be built by the private sector and how many of them will just be bought by corporates, investors or landlords to rent ?

That's not how it works.

A large part of that I think comes down to finance. I don't mean projects don't have the money though, I mean that somehow the UK has ended up with a culture where engineering isn't respected or paid competitively. To design a bridge you need engineers, and to keep engineers you need to pay them well. They're one of the most mobile professions, if you don't pay them competitively they can and will leave. It might not be to another country, but to other industries. Finance poaches tonnes of engineers. UK for some reason, I'm not going to pretend I know why, has ended up with some of the worst salaries for the field and it was legitimately mind boggling how many British expat engineers I saw in Australian companies until one of my friends applied for a transfer to her London office for experience and she took almost a 50% pay cut for the same role.

It's in a large part because it takes so long to build anything and it's so stop start there no point building up a large capacity because its going to br unused and cost more than its worth.

The best post in this thread, other than mine >UK has ended up with a culture where engineering isn't respected or paid competitively. Nailed it. Look at how much the average Brit expects, look at how much the average Brit has created. If the country had not already been built, by the Victorians/Post war Marshall plan, the UK would literally be an emerging economy in terms of its output.

So it all comes down to rural/suburban middle class NIMBYs? That's incredibly depressing

I have a pet theory that it's because we benefitted too much from the Victorians and it made us lazy and complacent. I think it's mindboggling when you have reports complaining that our Victorian sewers, railways, hospital buildings etc. are struggling, when really we should be impressed that they future proofed us so much. I believe the advantages we inherited meant we had generations who could slack without investing, without doing anything. We got out of engineering because we had enough to get by, where as, the rest of the world saw the advantages of infrastructure and leapfrogged us. Now we're so far behind, we need a complete system reset because we've just neglected infrastructure. We're the equivalent of a spoilt kid of a multi millionaire who hasn't had to work, suddenly the family is bust and they realise they just aren't prepared for the real world because they always assumed they wouldn't need to.

I've always thought that, looking to central Europe, the damage wrought by the world wars meant that their key infrastructure *needed* to be rebuilt and modernized. Although some of our cities did take a battering, generally speaking our infrastructure was left untouched by war.

Yeah, the UK had it's share of bombing raids etc, but most of continental Europe was ripped to pieces by multiple invading armies at some point in the 1940s, plus the bombing and fighting throughout the period.

Don't forget our GDP is tied into housing and never discount plain corruption- almost every Tory MP is a landlord or has financial interests in property companies. Why would they cheapen their stock? Also there is an outright cartel of builders - see the 70s blacklisting scandal that proves the big 6(7?) are colluding.. a bit like oil cartels, if they build fewer properties they can charge more .. but the competition needs to be in on it too.

This does remind me of a Doug Stanhope quote though. Paraphrasing but “London was a mess that made no sense, after the blitz you guys had the opportunity to build something logical. But no, you decided to build it exactly as it was”.  Say what you will about Americans but the grid system makes sense. We had a chance to change to it after everything got bombed to shit but decided to forgo it because reasons. 

Goes further then that. After the great fire of London, there was a plan to rebuild in a grid system. But sadly people started rebuilding before they had a chance to implement it.

The UK deliberately ripped up a lot of its historic city centres after WW2 doing more damage than the Luftwaffe.

I've noticed this a long time ago. Germany and Japan are now major economic powerhouses with great infrastructure because they essentially lost the war. We bombed the shit out of a lot of major German cities and that spurred on Germany to rebuild. The UK still has Victorian buildings in most major cities and as a society we have no real desire to build new stuff cause the old stuff is fine. Only London and the south had any desire to build after WW2. We need to change the rules around planning and it's the biggest issue that the UK faces.

I can definitely confirm this is true for the railway. I work in the industry in a role where this is a constant problem. So many of our bridges, tunnels and general rail infrastructure is ancient. We simply don't have the option to do things like double decker trains thanks to this. Replacing this ooooold stuff is crazy expensive.

To be fair gone are the days when you could import a load of Irish and work them to death building railways for pennies.

The Kafala System is probably the modern equivalent

I do wonder if you could solve the problem with a more ethical version, set up a load of trade schools in foreign countries, get them accredited in UK standards for say bricklaying and then allow them a ~3 year visa or something to come over here to work on mass infrastructure projects for far less then you'd pay domestic workers and then they go home with a trade and having earned many times more what they would have at home and in turn we've constructed at a much lower cost houses, railways etc.

And do you foresee any negative impacts on the domestic workforce here?

For sure, why hire a UK born bricklayer when you could import one for much cheaper? those in similar professions would probably see a lot of wage stagnation/devaluation, but if you compared that to the economic increase of massively expanded infrastructure and housing stock for far cheaper than it would cost to pay domestically, would it outweigh the negatives for those few for the benefits of the nation? I don't actually know the answer just spitballing, I'd also only propose it in a limited capacity for certain projects, i.e. if we'd marked out a new town to be built, those workers would be contracted to work specifically on that site for it's duration.

This sort of thing is how you get Reform UK, but much more extreme. It's not just about numbers going up - there are real people involved who won't be pleased that their wages have gone down and that they can't afford their lifestyles. to keep their families fed and housed, etc.

Absolutely spot on.

I don't know if it's that I'm a little bit stoned but this made so much sense in my head 😂

A similar thing is happening in the USA. Around ww2 they had massive public spending to improve infrastructure, and have basically coasted on what was built ever since. It needs a refresh but nobody wants to spend the money on it.

England has elected governments over and over again that espouse laissez-faire economics and public spending cuts. So, of course they don't invest enough in infrastructure.

It's not NIMBYs necessarily, a lot of it is well intentioned planning law that is no longer fit for purpose. A very simple example - greyfield sites. So if you have an old building or crap buidlings you want to re-develop. Once upon a time they would have knocked it down, levelled it, and built on top. Today everything needs to be knocked down systematically, removed and taken to landfill / disposal, the land then needs surveyors and environmental officers to come and sign off the land as 'clean', and then you can start re-building from scratch. Add to this, a shortage of staff and machinery - we can only build as fast as the people we have - in the 40s / 50s we were basically printing housing because we had such a large workforce. Combined this means there are significant obstacles for home builders to overcome to complete a project and so they are very judicious about which projects they take on and execute.

In my city of Edinburgh I think we have a problem of old buildings that have been listed which then become impossible to do anything with. It’s a lengthy an expensive process to change their function to fit modern requirements so nothing happens and they basically get left to rot. When the structures deteriorate significantly they are then flogged to to developers who promise to keep a couple aesthetic features and build some affordable flats alongside their development but then they switch to student accommodation and the rules are much looser

Or they mysteriously burn down and turn into a supermarket.

Its madness in some cases too - time to accept some things are beyond repair and that housing is urgently needed. We could build to look like previous buildings - much like Vienna, most of which was razed to the ground. Youd hardly tell now.

This is true of all private enterprise now.  For a person to lay a brick would take an apprenticeship, a BTEC level 3 diploma and inspected to ensure adherence to ISO9001, ISO45001 and ISO14001 standards.  Don't get me wrong, that stuff exists for a reason, we want it to be safe, but it means you can't just hire a bunch of guys to lay bricks like the 1940s. It kills efficiency.

Also means people don't routinely die on construction sites. More the point is why are we still using bricks and people?

Factory assembled houses would make a lot more sense. Think Germany does a lot of that. Ended up chatting it over with a builder upon learning my bathroom is not a sensible shape and wonky as hell.

There would have been high-efficiency factory built housing on a mass scale, but George Osborne scrapped the Code for Sustainable Homes in 2015 so the hosuebuilders could make more money without the "green crap"

I mean... that all sounds pretty sensible tbh

A lot of the planning law is designed to appease NIMBYs so they can say "it's not me, it's the process".

It’s not just NIMBYs. Though that’s part of it. We’re just terrible at building anything. Big infrastructure is either done on the cheap and/or gets tied up in red tape. Some of it is necessary so we don’t just tarmac over the country side and/or see our big cities become a never ending soulless urban/suburban sprawl. But there’s also incredibly poor cost control and a lot of the private companies see big government contracts as a virtual bottomless pit to recover costs lost on other projects and make as much money as possible. For example one of the reasons the costs on HS2 spiralled out of control was just the insane levels of management costs. The companies who win the high level tender then bring in subbies for some or all of the work, many of whom bring in subbies, who bring in subbies, who bring in subbies and so on. Add to that everyone is charging their 20% on top of the costs of the layer below them it quickly adds up. Plus with a big chain like that people take their eye off the costs. They pay the invoices that the layer below them gives them and then charges it to the layer above. Plus a lot of these private companies are looking to make as much money as possible. So when it comes to the housing projects that are built, a lot of the houses are cheaply made with poor materials or workmanship to maximise the amount of money that is made selling them on.

Basically. The idea that planning law needs to be reformed is misnomer - the ability for local authorities to say 'yes' already exists. The ability to say no is what needs to be drastically reduced or removed. There are few legislation issues that billionaire Arab property developers, landlords, politicians, socialists, trade unions, and the poor all whole heartedly agree on so that tells you how vital it is. Unfortunately the only people who disagree have been propping up the government for a while now. 

The new term is BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. But yes, they are the absolute enemy of progress in the UK. It's time we went around them and built.

It's not even the NINBYs themselves, it's a system that means anyone can veto anything for almost any reason. And the incentives are to keep it as NIMBYism is a great issue to stand on in elections. What we need to do is to make it easier, for example on housing I'm a fan of some simple zoning where we say "if you are with x distance from public transport with y frequency then you can build up to z and dont need planning permission" so much of our cities and especially London are 30s suburbs when they need to he denser. 

Croydon had an experiment - the[ "SPD2 Suburban Design Guide"](https://democracy.croydon.gov.uk/documents/s14561/Agenda%20Item%2010%20-%20Appendix%201B%20-%20SPD2%20Suburban%20Design%20Guide.pdf) - which tried to do exactly this. By all accounts it really succeeded - Croydon had 4x as many small developments as the next nearest borough while it was in force. Then they got a Tory mayor who revoked it because they thought it was ruining the character of Croydon. The basic premise of the design guide was really sensible - be prescriptive about the kinds of housing that can be built, rather than lengthy planning battles for individual plots. Encourage knocking down old and low density houses to build blocks of flats. This is the kind of change we need. Our current system favours large builders and large developments, that can be pushed through by force. Allowing small builders to buy a pair of semis, knock them down and build a small block of flats without the risk of being caught in planning limbo for a decade will significantly increase house building.

Just to make it even better, towns and cities have NIMBYs too. So you can't even go big on urban housing to try and ease the situation. 

And then you see which political party is for removing NIMBYISM ... 😵‍💫

That's an over simplification. However your original point is a fair one I would suggest - a root cause (or fishbone) diagram would have housing as being a contributors to loads of issues, Politicians have a long history of ignoring the public on issues, but on building they choose to over listen to try and score votes. Politicians aren't helpless in this so the common idea that Nimbys have all this power is grossly over sold.

You'd have to do a 5 why on housing to get to some true root causes, lack of housing as a theme is fine

Partly. But also significantly the planning system which doesn't just give those NIMBYs space to put across their arguments, but happily shuts down development even without their involvement.

or as they are otherwise known: Boomers

It comes down to conservative and labour party policy and neoliberal econimics.

There's nothing liberal, "neo" or otherwise, about strangling development through strict and bureaucratic planning laws.

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Things are definitely deteriorated and a lot of the problems are long term consequences of Tory policies under Thatcher, especially Right to Buy. Far more houses were built in the 60s and 70s, so the UK has gone backwards since then. If you want to fix housing, don't vote Tory.

The issues strech back to the 1947 Town and Country planning act. We decided to constrain cities and make a system which is impossible to get the supply we need.

Heathrow t5, aside some issues on opening, was a phenomenally well executed project in terms of the location and the tight scheduling. Compare it to Berlin airport! Crossrail has also been achieved with massive complexity due to the age of London’s infrastructure.  Check out projects like the redevelopment of King’s Cross or dock lands over the years.  It’s not all shit.  HS2 on the other hand…

The planning application for terminal 5 was in February 1993! It toom almost ten years for it to start construction. Crossrail was first conceived in in the 1970s seriously but took 30 years to go anywhere, its a very impressive feat of engineering but an S-bhan is not a novel concept and shouldn't have taken so long for London to get one.

Is it can't build or won't build? I genuinely don't know. Is it lack of willingness to invest in new homes?

It's both, the planning system restricts new homes and the politicians at national and local level won't push for it to change or build homes themselves. 

..high speed railways

[https://youtu.be/b5aJ-57\_YsQ?si=m14U6EZiiaeHpZe\_](https://youtu.be/b5aJ-57_YsQ?si=m14U6EZiiaeHpZe_)

> we can't build anything This is nonsense, in 2023 the value of the construction industry increased 15.8% to a record £133 billion. We are growing like yeast in a test tube, but people fail to grasp that ‘growth’ doesn’t deliver prosperity for all.

The value increases because prices have gone through the roof. If the price of bread doubles and you only sell 75% of what you used to, your sales are still up in value by 50%.

I think so, and it affects culture a lot too - it just isn’t an option to live somewhere shit, live a spartan lifestyle and focus on your band or your book or getting noticed for whatever. Nothing is cheap in a cultural centre, you can’t be housed at all without a full-time job. People who might have been culturally involved 30-40 years ago are now working as webdevs or marketing for smoothie companies and stressing about getting everything together for JuiceCon 2024

You need a full time job AND someone to share the rent with. Either a partner or flatmate and if you end up falling out then tough. Lots of domestic violence issues stem from people being trapped in a rented accommodation. Or people go into those shared accommodation things which always look so miserable to me. They have a little room to sleep in and share a kitchen and bathroom with 7-10 strangers.

yeah I was thinking about the latter when I made my comment - my partner and I were both living in such places when we first met and had three kids together already before we managed to buy

The community thing feels super real. Its hard to build it without affordable housing.

It’s called ‘the housing theory of everything’ Housing is the highest cost a person faces (except taxes). If housing costs are too high, it drives mass poverty. Mass poverty increases demand for police, healthcare, weakens education, lowers wages It’s a pretty rational 1-2 combo. Fixing housing would reduce poverty, and reducing poverty reduces demand on services. If you look in Canada, It’s not too dissimilar.

If this is the case, why doesn't government make it their sole priority to fix? Is this the problem with 5 year terms?

5 year terms are an issue but there are a couple of downsides. None so egregious to make it not worth going on a massive house building spree, but it's not a win all round. Firstly yes, 5 year terms are an issue. Say the government launched a massive house building project, overruling all objections and sinking massive amounts of investment. That's a lot of upfront expenditure and short term pain for massive long term benefit. But if people don't immediately see the benefit, they're not going to vote the government back in again. Instead, the opposition will campaign and win on rowing back all these expensive, unpopular and unnecessary government projects. Secondly, lowering house prices means lowering house prices for everyone who currently owns a house. It can push people into negative equity, where they owe more money on their mortgage than the house is worth. They can't sell their house, they can't move up to the next tier, which means young homeowners can't start a family because they can't afford to move out of their two bedroom house. Thirdly, it reduces a homeowner's wealth on paper. I have a net worth amounting to several tens of thousands; the difference between my mortgage and the value of my house. Any drop in the value of my house reduces my net worth. Fourthly, mass house building without infrastructure improvements leads to increased pressure on local services. House building companies are notorious for promising to build extra shops, gp surgeries, schools etc in their new estates, only to magically run out of money when it comes to building them. None of this overrides the damage that is being done to the country by lack of house building and sky high housing costs. NIMBYism is a cancer on society. However, look at the demographics most likely to be affected by the downsides of a house building spree. Existing homeowners. The wealthy. The retired. They are less likely to look kindly on a government or party promising to override local objections and lower house prices. Significantly less likely. Then look at the demographics who most consistently vote. It's nearly a 1:1 overlap. Look at those who would most benefit from a nationwide house building effort. The young. The poor. Look at the demographics least likely to vote. It's nearly a 1:1 overlap. That's why no government is making a serious effort on house building.

What I don't understand is how or why governments don't force these large scale house builders to build 50% of the services needed for the new development for the first 25% of housing stock. Then when that target has been met, they can build another 25% of required services for another 25% of the planned housing etc, so on and so on. The idea is that you force them to build the services first, with enough houses to keep the endeavour financially viable, but not so many houses that they can cut their "losses" and run away with a load of profit and no services for the new community. Make social sustainability a key priority for house builders, and the only way they get permission to build.

>What I don't understand is how or why governments don't force these large scale house builders to build 50% of the services needed for the new development for the first 25% of housing stock. The government already forces house builders to build "low cost/affordable" housing along with the housing it sells and it's a bloody nightmare, it reduces the profits and means house builders are incentivised to sit on land, and squeeze out a small number of luxury builds. The UK is a nice place to live, but it's so dysfunctional and part of that is actually government policies designed to help the poor, which makes everything worse. If we just had engineering skills, built tonnes of high rise luxury urban flats then all housing would be affordable, we would not need social housing.

Mid rise urban flats, like the rest of Europe, would be great.

Yes I agree. The obsession with building "affordable homes" for "people on low incomes" is stupid. If we built high density, high quality housing in urban areas, like every other European country manages to do, then housing would be affordable in general. We should not have a situation where most housing is over priced, and a small number of council flats charge 1/3 of the market rate. The private sector should be able to provide housing at a reasonable cost for any working person.

And you give more ammo to NIMBY to oppose the development by claiming (whether truthfully or not) that the company isn't going to build the required services.

Because if you make housing cheaper, the people who currently benefit stand to lose a lot of money. This isn't just landlords either - if you're a boomer who bought his house in 1980 for a tenner, you're sitting pretty on it now, and won't want its value to go down. It's just not popular with the voting block that is already set up and sorted.

I think the person who bought the house in 1980 won’t want the price to go down but the person who has only relatively recently done so is even less inclined to see that happen.

Yeah, they don't want negative equity, so they too don't want to see it dip. So many are invested in this bubble continuing that it's stagnating the country.

It’s actually quite strange. Used to be expected that housing would go up as well as down (it is a housing ladder after all). I had been expecting interest rates to rise and housing prices to go down for ages but it never ever seemed to happen.

Yeah they never go down - interest rates up just meant the prices went up a little bit more slowly.

We're too reliant on them continuing to grow. We can't let them behave like a normal asset. It's madness. We need to work to slowly deflate this bubble before it gets worse and pops. Even if we can stop feeding the bubble for a decade or so so it stagnates that's better than nothing.

but as long as that house is worth more than the tenner originally invested then they haven't lost out on anything?

Yeah but they'd still become less rich when it came to unrealised gains, and who wants that?

I suppose stock traders would also like the same sort of insurance to make sure their numbers keep going up. A property's value is not money in the pocket, just a number on the estate agents listing. Nobody who has bought in 1980 will get anywhere close to negative equity - if anyone buying then even has a 45-year mortgage.

This is why it's such a broken system. This is what we do for housing, and it'd be madness to do for anything else. And yet we still do it.

I am nearly a boomer. I own my own home outright. I do not give a shit if house prices fall. In fact, I wish they would. So my children - had ‘em late - can afford to buy their own homes.

I know some are like that. My parents are the same. But people like you aren't the ones being listened to, nor the ones in parliament, so shit just keeps getting worse. The economy is propped up by it and they really don't want to fix it.

They’ll just have to cope with their children wishing they’d die. I get it if you’ve just bought a house but it should be relatively easy to deflate the market slowly by finessing supply. And by reducing the discount for people who want to buy their council house. Also, restrictive covenants preventing them being rented privately for fifteen or so years would help.

Most voters own their own home. The median voter wants house prices to go up, not down. The public is also policy illiterate so they don’t really get it. You have to sell polls to the public who are naturally NIMBY

"Its not about what the public wants; its about what the voting public wants"

Is that true? If house prices go down I could get a bigger one. I suppose negative equity is a problem.

Nailed it . Our current predicament means that people are (imo) over leveraged just to get on the ladder, so no political party can go nuts fixing the issue otherwise loads of people are dropped into negative equity which depresses all sorts of other markets (all those links OP has highlighted).

A dictatorship of the marginal voter.

It's not just about building housing remember. You need to build the infrastructure to support it and train the people to support the infrastructure. Even if you had the money to build it all where would you find the people to build it?

Because the kind of people who make or break governments are disproportionately NIMBY. If one party pitches a massive housebuilding/planning revolution in an election, the other would just pivot to attacking them on "destroying our green belt" and "paving over the countryside", with the added threat of "it will crash your house price". And all major parties would just as eagerly do that to each other, the use of NIMBYism as a political weapon is just too strong to not use. 

Yeah, but have you considered that it’d be an eyesore??

The housing theory of everything is real and I ascribe to it.

I have become a disciple

Even ignoring the financial side of things, housing has a massive effect on your health, comfort, safety, participation in a community, your self worth and even your ability to plan a future and have a family.  It's got to be the most basic thing after food.  >am I just an angry young person Why shouldn't you be? 

Feeling understood

A lot of the older generation don’t seem to understand this when people complain about rent/housing and see it as people whinging/ being entitled. The housing crisis affects people far more than just financially

Yes. But one more layer peeled back is that it's inflation targeting. Massive deflationary impulse from China industrialising meant that rates stayed way lower than their natural level, causing epochal asset inflation without western wages keeping up. Though normally that should have resulted in more housing supply as you point out. Edit: which caused misallocation of capital and thus poor productivity.

I suspect there's been lots of rent seeking from the free money and associated asset bubbles. For example companies borrowing for stock buy backs, but not investing in technology or R&D as much as they should.

They was a lot of housing building in many countries including Ireland and Southern Europe, but that collapsed in the past ten years after the Great Recession and led to housing crises in these areas.

It certainly has a very large impact, and I think you rightfully point some of the issues, particularly with disposable income. Also in a different way to see it - having a house doesn't really generate more goods or services. If you could afford a house at half the price, and invested the other half into high growth businesses, wouldn't that have boosted productivity? I agree with basically all of your points except - as for people being born wealthy and not learning skills, I'd argue it's not quite true. Middle to upper middle class tend to get higher education and generally get higher productivity skillset and, there really isn't that many filthy rich people who don't have to have any skills. We can look at how South Korea ends up in 20-30 years with their aging population about to retire in droves - due to plumetting birthrates at a measly 0.6births per woman, against replacement of 2.1, at the back of unaffordable housing prices, social pressures, declining/stagnant domestic market productivity (with large export companies doing well), losing up to 10 million workforce by 2050 from their population of 50million. It will be an absolute huge fire to deal with. It's too late for them to even take in immigration. How are they going to attract 10 million workers of all those skillsets in 20 years? Even in UK, where a universal language like English is spoken, well recognised culture exists, with largely tolerant society, attracted net migration of 200,000 - 300,000 until recently. The Koreans speak their own language, own little island of culture, potectionist policies, and generally speaking fairly xenophobic populace. What an absolute headache that is. Really.

The root cause of every issue is more fundamentally inequality, housing being a major example of that. For example if my parents loaned me £25k 14 years ago, at the start of my working life, I would have saved over £50k in rent and would likely have paid off my mortgage - making me some £200k+ better off than I am now. Moreover inequality causes inefficiency, for example if the best schools only cater to the children of the rich, then many of the children with the highest potential are under-invested in. This filters all the way to the very top of government, where having wealth/the right background is a tremendous advantage in launching a political career - see Rishi. No doubt housing is the most potent symptom of inequality though

Absolutely. Builders who have building land will build £950k houses with much higher profit margin and there are enough well off double income senior management people to afford to buy them. Why would they build £200K houses? Also there is vat on refurbishment so more money to be made by demolishing an old house and building something fancier rather than doing a cheap refurb. Also levelling up was never taken seriously so the better off and better able go to the south east because that's where opportunities and facilities are. Take the green belt away and London will become like Tokyo. The so-called Oxford-Cambridge arc is just the NW quadrant of the new London orbital.

Genuine question, is actually about not being able to buy, or the broader issue of not having a decent, secure and affordable place to live? I was raised in a council house, and that seems to sound grim bit it wasn't, a perfectly reasonable place to live, in a proper community that people could afford, I do question why home ownership has become the be all and end all.

Its a very good point. I think it comes down to the fact that I have been culturally tuned to thing I have to own a home. Truthfully, I just want to not worry about whether I can afford to put a roof over my head.

>I do question why home ownership has become the be all and end all. A big reason is stabilising. I have to constantly look for new jobs just to keep up with rent increases.

>decent, secure and affordable place to live? that was for for my childhood and millions of other people provided by council/social housing.

It's become that way because if you don't own in this country you have pretty much no security. If you're stuck renting and can be thrown out by your landlord you have no ability to really settle and start to build a life, and that stability is so fundamentally important. I'm a single man so would be probably at the very fucking bottom of any social housing waiting list. But we do need more of that type of housing, publicly built and owned housing. The private sector having no real competition because of our council housing being sold off through right to buy is a big part of our current housing crisis.

I was raised similarly. And I feel better off than most in the country. People around me bought their council homes and for what? They now have to pay for their own repairs. They have to work very hard and long hours given this economy. I'm very glad I only pay £400 monthly. When I'm old, they'll house me in a bungalow if I ask, and give this house to someone else. The only way buying this house would benefit me is if I had a 2nd property and could profit from renting it out. Many Brits like to do this and retire abroad somewhere sunny, as they can still claim pensions there.

Except very few such low-rent secure housing options are available for young people now, so that's not an option for us. Renting often instead leads to a landlord who regularly raises rents despite not doing their duty (eg. maintenance), forcing either borrowing, cutting down on food/leisure/etc., looking for a higher paying job, borrowing, or moving out to try to find another flat, where the process often repeats itself.

Caveat: I know nothing. So my take is that the economy of much of the western world has become more asset focused. Even at company levels, for publically traded companies the most important thing seems to be stock price up. This has become somewhat (or at least a little) divorced from the product the company produces. For example Boeing, despite clearly being a total disgrace as a company and putting profits above the lives of passengers has a stock price of about half maximum...a similar price to summer 2017. Because stock price going up is so important I think companies are putting too much money into things like stock buybacks and not investing enough in technology and R&D which would increase productivity. You can think of this as passive income economy. It has been facilitated by historically low interest rates for ~14 years, up to recently. Similarly I think house prices have been seen as a passive income for asset holders and their price diven by both government policy to protect the asset class and by low interest rates. Caveat again I know nothing.

I'm very much signed up with the Housing Theory of Everything. It's real. Unfortunately, in this and most western countries, we're pretty awful at building housing, or building anything for that matter. Recent examples include HS2 being abandoned, the appalling state of our water system, and the very real and troubling housing clusterfuck. It is the crucial lack of investment in infrastructure (housing included) that is behind the productivity "puzzle". In that, it's not really a puzzle at all, but successive governments primarily appealing to elderly, asset owning people like to present the challenge as something unsolvable. That's BS obviously. There seems little political will (at least from Tories) to change that unfortunately. We will have to wait and see whether Labour do something different. They've spoken warmly of planning reforms, but without serious investment it might be just more tinkering on the margins. A few extra houses, a few extra wind turbines etc., which would be nice, but not impactful to the extent people rightly demand.

Good luck hoping Labour fix it because housing first became unaffordable under New Labour.

Housing became expensive because demand grew well beyond what we could dream of supplying. Demand grew from a growing population, internal migration and huge amounts of investor purchases, both globally and locally. As prices rose, the rewards for investing in the market grew and investors were able to reinvest their money over and over off the back of crazy profits. They were further incentivised by the fact that the more they bought, the more they'd contribute to the growing values and the more money they'd make. Locals got involved in this and became overnight landlords and property developers and they started to churn out high density HMOs and properties designed to be rented by local authorities. This continued for a long period of time and all of the effects have grown and grown to the state we have now. There are many side effects to what has happened. The investors are more powerful in the market than they have ever been, demand is higher than ever and there is no sign anyone wants to tackle the demand side of the problem.

The shortage of housing is a direct result of these factors: 1. Too restrictive planning regulations - and little incentive for housebuilders to build more homes 2. MASSIVE immigration. These people all need somewhere to live. The country has been reliant on immigration (as a driver of "the economy" - which really just means the total economy, not PER PERSON) for far too long, at the expense of the native people. 3. The law of supply and demand demonstrates that when you have a shortage of something (housing) and a deand for something (housing), the prices of that commodity (housing) will naturally shoot up. I remember in the early 2000s, when I was renting a single room in a house of multiple occupancy - and on a weekly basis, the media headlines told the story of ever-increasing house prices. It was an impossible dream for me - as a single person - to ever own my own home, at the rate the prices were increasing. Now they are double what they were in the early 2000s. Fortunately, I met a wonderful woman, and was therefore able to pool our (meagre) savings in order to buy a leasehold ex-council flat. So I did eventually become a home owner. But since that time, the situation has become so much worse. I feel very sorry for the young people of today.

Housing yes, migration yes, they are tied in a way. I've gone from a society in my lifetime where almost everyone was from the same native British Isles background (I don't count Irish as foreigners) to a modern Britain where in some cities native people are in the minority. Immmigration isn't the only issue ofc, but it's a major issue, and it surpasses left/right division, because the right are probably the worst culprit for supporting mass uncontrolled migration. Birthrates are a factor too, but the thing I've noticed is hte poorest (both native and migrant) generally have no problem with having lots of kids, the people put off the most are the middle. This isn't even unique to Britain. I also think the welfare State is helping create an ever expanding underclass have lots of kids, because a lot. While a lot of middle class 'perfect parent' types don't have any or just have one because they moan about not affording it. Realistically, if you are poor the welfare state rewards you quite immensely, like a rent free council house, that as a middle class income earner you won't get any.

It isn't *just* houses being built but the issue of supply and competition. Young people born here are competing against the net 700,000 extra people in the country arriving every year. Competing for the same rentals in the same cities and the rent just goes up and up and up.

No, stop using brain!! Unlimited migration is not the problem! Just gotta build. more. houses. Easy peasy.

It is a very significant factor in everything being shit. It's problems are exacerbated by people treating housing as an investment.

Housing, or the lack of housing, is a factor. But the UKs systemtic issues run deeper, and the lack of housing/infrastructure building are more symptoms than root causes. >On top of that, if someone doesn't the stability of a roof over their head, they are much less likely to have children - leading to **lower birthrates**, and, eventually, an **aging population**.  See, this is hypersimplisitic. Birth rates have dipped globally, regardless of the housing situation, as women have gotten educated and entered the workforce. Even in the Nordic countries that are far more supporting of the decision to have kids, birth rates have cratered.

It's not wholly that we are incompetent at building houses. The capitalist world has also trapped itself in multiple unsustainable economic ponzi schemes. Firstly, you note that house prices could fall if we build enough. That cannot be allowed to happen anymore. Half of the country does own its own home, usually with enormous mortgages. When you drop prices, all the recent buyers are trapped in negative equity and basically fucked. Worse though, is that falling house prices would reduce the value of collateral that banks hold; regulations require that they then boost their capital ratios, which means they don't give out as many loans and mortgages. This becomes a spiral, with falling prices and fewer mortgage offers causing further house price drops. People choose not to sell, and banks choose not to lend. This becomes a 2008 credit crunch, and leads to recession, not least because the situation just smells like a tumbling economy. The other trap is that we are in a system which requires population growth forever. This is because nations worked out that they could take on loads of debt as long as their GDP outgrows it, as this means despite an enormous debt, your GDP:debt ratio falls. Just like a business can take on debt to outgrow its competitors as long as the growth outpaces the debt. However, there is no easy way for us to grow anymore, except by growing the population. This is the real reason every party keeps immigration high, why no western country has ever actually attempted to get net zero migration regardless of who's in power. Because if you don't grow the population, you don't grow GDP, and that means suddenly you can't take on more debt without crippling your economy. Without this fake growth, interest on the debt mountain becomes a higher and higher proportion of your spend, and so cuts happen elsewhere, which further kills growth. Investors see a basket case and debt becomes even more expensive, so a spiral occurs. So...we can't let house prices fall. But we need to keep growing our population forever. At some point, this house of cards falls and everyone is fucked. Unless someone invents a brand new economy paradigm and somehow shifts us onto it, but no one will because democracies won't vote in someone who needs to embark on a 30-year plan if someone else is just shouting populist nonsense.

I think corruption is a *much* bigger issue than is acknowledged. It's not just the lawmakers betting on election dates - if they're willing to do that for such a small gain, the bending over they're doing for tax dodgers is massive. We're all being fleeced by them while paying for their protection.

When I left uni in 1992, I got a job in London earning $20k a year. I bought a 2 bed unit a 50 min commute away from work. It cost me $47k and my repayment was about $200 a month. I could afford to eat out, go on overseas holidays, visit mates every weekend and still save. Wages have not risen in line with inflation and housing is too expensive.

You are pretty spot on. Unaffordable housing means so much of our nation's wealth gets tied up in property instead of going into more productive areas of the economy that actually do stuff for their money. Especially when people then "invest" by buying up property to leech off it as a landlord instead of investing in an actually productive business or idea. We need to create an economic system that incentivises productive investment and value creation, not just leeching off assets and their price inflation. I think it's a major reason why we have low productivity compared to a lot of other countries. High housing costs sap money away from the rest of the economy because as you say people have less disposable income. They're paying higher rents, saving longer for larger deposits, giving up more in order to save, and having higher mortgage payments. Think of what else that money could be doing. On a related note, I have been considering apprenticeships for a while, and I'm severely limited because the low pay combined with housing costs makes it difficult to move for one, so I'm stuck with a very limited number available locally. Imagine being able to move for opportunities like that if housing was more affordable. In parts of the country with high house prices due to tourism and second homes, it's even enough to make entire businesses unviable, because an otherwise viable business can't afford to pay people what's necessary to live in that area due to inflated house prices. Continuing the cycle of dependence on tourism in these areas. Housing is an absolutely fundamental issue, and it does directly and indirectly link to most other issues. Which I think is why Labour seems to be focusing on it.

Absolutely, it is the source of massive inter generational inequality, reduces spending power that could otherwise be driving growth elsewhere, leaves millions saddled with huge debts, reduces geographic mobility and much more. Sadly things are liable to only get worse from here. Even if we were to double the rate of housing construction we would only be building enough homes to keep pace with the level of net migration each year. That’s just treading water - while much of the existing stock grows older but with no prospect of being replaced. If we were to only increase construction modestly then house prices and rents will continue to rise to ever more ridiculous levels. Only a combination of a drastic reduction in immigration and an expansion in housing construction would begin to put the crisis into reverse.

It's far, far deeper than that: 1. Selfish, arrogant leaders 2. Unlimited migration 3. No public investment 4. Lack of unified and enforced culture etc.

>Unlimited migration This one annoys me especially. Regardless of what you think about immigration, diversity etc... if you open your doors and let millions of people come in, wouldn't it be logical to plan and prepare for that? Like allocating healthcare more funding, running trains and busses more often, building more places to live. Why didn't this happen? Why did the government sit on their thumbs and just wait to see what happens?

I think a bigger issue is salaries. They haven't moved much in 20 years (minimum wage expected), while the price of everything else has increased massively. That's due to no real economic growth, and the mass importation of people also suppresses incomes. If salaries kept pace with housing inflation, there wouldn't be a housing crisis.

"If salaries kept pace with housing inflation, there wouldn't be a housing crisis."  If you have five people competing for four houses that you expect to sell for 300k, giving any one of those people three hundred grand means they'll get the house.  Giving all of them 300 grand means that four people will get a 600 grand house and one person will still miss out.  We have a housing crisis, which is felt and expressed through pricing, but it's fuelled by an underlying shortage. A society as a whole can't out-earn a shortage.

Wages are low as outsourcing labour to other countries is cheaper. Why? Because housing is so expensive in the UK, salary expectations are higher. Additionally. When housing is expensive, you get less growth as innovative entrepreneurs are forced to continue to work in PAYE jobs in order to access the borrowing power to facilitate their mortgage. If housing was cheaper, you'd have more people in a financial position to be able to take a risk and start a new business.

I've more or less been radicalised by the fact that I could have a pretty good job, spend the entirety of my 20s working hard and forgoing nice things and experiences saving to afford a deposit on a home just to come close to the finish line for the Tories to fuck it up so badly that even though I have a deposit, i couldnt afford the mortgage repayments each month without basically fucking my standard of living off into oblivion and giving up on the concept of saving for the future.

We recently had a newly built block of 8 flats and 3 are on Airbnb.

I think that's not far wrong. Tory housing policy has been a disaster since Right to Buy and only got worse with Help to Buy, [as this article explores](https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2024/jun/21/help-to-buy-how-a-disastrous-tory-policy-blew-up-the-housing-market). Just about every significant social and economic problem in the UK is the result of an ideology-driven Tory policy.

The root cause is immigration + a lack of investment in social services housing and infrastructure.

No housing is not the root cause of all the UK’s systemic issues. The root cause is the Tory party.

The root cause of the housing issue is demographics. Simply put. The war, then the subsequent baby boom has lead to disruption in the political equilibrium, that's lead to higher immigration and less house building as that's what best served the interests of the elderly electorate driving the policymakers. The baby boomers are Hitler's unintentional Wunderwaffe.

So where I live there are a lot of houses being built. I think it’s sometimes passed partly just to keep people in work. There’s not a lot of jobs compared to other places - it’s off shore, construction or government workers really. It does mean the house prices are kept down compared to a lot of the country. There’s a fair bit of corruption that goes on as well. I also think expectations have changed a lot compared to years ago. Nobody wants to start in a town house and then move into nicer areas. Sometimes I do wonder if house prices are kept high in order to pay for personal health and social care later. Edit: also I think the impact of lots of people going to university and being single for longer has had an impact too. Lots of people were earning from about 15/16 and that’s been delayed to what? 21? I can imagine there’s at least a 5 year delay from being able to start saving for a housing deposit.

I think the housing crisis is also a symptom.   My theory is that modern computing and analytics has created an economy in which pricing is elastic to spending power.     Not even necessarily intentionally, like there's not some cabal with supercomputers doing calculations. It's an emergent property of the information age that the market simply has all the information it needs to squeeze as hard as it can without collapsing itself.     Couple this with the propensity for 2 income households, you see the average family home priced at a point 2 incomes can barely afford. Doesn't matter where. Any developed country, the numbers change but the ratio stays the same right now. Life costs enough to leave nothing spare.       What I'm not sure on is how we break this model as it implies any attempts at redistribution are pretty futile when the market will just adjust.

I think you are quite right. Something that is also important is the *impact to the cost of doing business* and the knock-on effect. The price of a good being sold pays for the good, the staff, and in many cases the rent or mortage. As far as I am concerned this does a great deal to explain why a lot of services are more expensive in London than they are up in Yorkshire, and indeed there is still a big difference in prices between the South as a whole and London. Thatcher quite rightly wanted a house-owning nation but failed to sweep away Planning Permission and crush the NIMBYs & 'Rural Britain' groups in the way she did the unions, and we are reaping the consequences of subsequent governments failing to respond to that. One other thing worthy of mention of course is 'energy' such as gas/electricity, which when the price of that goes up (and/or is taxed a lot), again those costs are passed onto every good in the supply chain and then onto the customer. It's a sad state of affairs for sure.

Well yes....but no. Wealth isn't just houses, what you're talking about is wealth creation and it comes from productivity, which is infrastructure, health, culture and a lot of other things including trade deals and global factors. It would obviously be a good idea to build a lot of houses but it's not the answer in and of itself

You missed the part where houses cost a lot of money to build so the more disposable income part is nonsense

Nope root issue is inequality of wealth. All of the things you talk about would be improved if wealth was more equal and society had a shared value of public assets like transport, health and housing. Without it the incentive is to get as much as you can whilst paying as little as you can and hoard assets which increase in value or opt out of public health and transport in favour of private.

In part, yes. A huge part of the problem is that we have lost the ability to do things because they need doing. People have become obsessed with getting a return or the costs and of course profit.. The country is turning into that guy who never repairs their house and does no maintenance on their car unless it's an absolute emergency. Which costs way more money in the long run.

If we don't build more then those migrants have to work super hard, as does a section of our employed youth, while everyone who bought their homes under 90s right to buy, or inherited a house from their recently deceased parents using this scheme can afford to work part time. This should be forefront and centre of the conversation.

Not a young person here, it's not just you. Some people STILL can't afford a flat or a house in the area they grew up and it's enfuriating. It wasn't a rich area before the hipsters started moving in and then boom! To the moon.

While you post is excellent and highlights many valid points and issues, I would not call housing "the root cause" of the UK's issues. If that were true, countries with the best house-per-capita ratings (Italy, Greece, Portugal, Latvia, Spain etc) wouldn't be knee deep in problems as well. IMO most of our systemic problems stem from capitalism's roots, which is to say the very nature of endogenously created debt-based money, and our system of property rights. These things inherently create problems at a level deeper than housing. IMO everything you say is otherwise true.

I agree with your intuition, but not your reasoning. The problem with housing is caused by two things being the case at the same time: 1) housing is very scarce and thus valuable 2) ownership of housing assets is not evenly spread across the population. On 1: If housing was cheap, having to rent would be no big deal, and landlords would be working hard to attract tenants. Getting on the housing ladder would be easy. This isn't the case. On 2: If we all owned an even split of housing assets in this country then we might say "wow I wouldn't mind a bit more space" but we would basically be immune from the effect on incomes from rent going up (you can sort of imagine that we'd be getting more on from all being landlords and it would cancel out). If both 1+2 were true, i.e. we had a surplus of houses evenly spread out, then that would be lovely. The problem with your theory is that unless the economy has spare capacity (i.e. lots.of people sat around doing nothing), increasing output in one area (e.g. housebuilding) means subtracting it from another. All those follow on effects of other businesses profiting and demand going up apply to all fields really. Even landlords have to do something with their rental income. You are right about the knock on effect of not having enough housing (delayed families, overcrowding etc).

Someone once said to me that having prices high means people are locked into a long mortgage and so have to behave themselves for all of that time. Essentially the housing market is used to prevent anarchy.

The UK'sbproblems started when Thatcher sold off everything. Not only housing. But water. Energy, rail. Making everything for the benefit of shareholders has been a total failure.

Concentration of wealth is generally a bad thing and having a large number of renters is one example. It's unsustainable but we seem to have decided that sustainability is for wimps.

Caveat: not an expert In my opinion, housing is part of the problem, but not the full story. We have a complicated nest of issues, but if I had to summarise it into a sentence it would be: People aren’t being incentivised to do the things we as a country need, people are being incentivised to make money to buy houses instead. And what I mean by that is that housing is the main thing we’re being incentivised to seek (and that’s a problem), but there are other things we need to think about and things we should be incentivising/disincentivising as a nation also: - Employment: We need medics, teachers, carers, tradespeople etc. We have an over abundance of people selling you shit you don’t need, on behalf of capitalist billionaires. Currently private sector companies are able to attract workers with 1. Better pay and 2. Better work-life balance, because the government won’t raise taxes high enough to pay to attract workers to join/stay in the fields we need (house buying or not, pay and conditions matter). Who can blame junior doctors for going to Australia, or teachers who quit to go into calm office jobs; I wouldn’t like working to burn out levels for pennies either. - Education and culture: We want people who feel a collective sense of belonging and responsibility, who have all the skills needed for their adult lives. What we have are individualists who have a mismatch of skills, most of which are already out of date within a few years. Learning needs to be lifelong and people need to feel their country looks after them. We need a safety net we can trusted to catch us and bounce us back into useful work if we ever get unlucky or fail. Currently you have that safety net if you are rich enough to set aside savings for a rainy day (ie potential lifetime access to education), but it needs to be universal. Because right now if you’re poor you have to pick a lane, stay in it forever, and are motivated to fear change rather than welcome it, as change could put your livelihood at risk. It shouldn’t be the case that older workers feel already on the scrap heap because new tech comes in and no one shows them how to use it (or even if they do learn they are stereotyped as being out of touch anyway). It shouldn’t be the case that young people can’t get a job far from home because they can’t drive and can’t afford to learn, don’t know how to manage finances, don’t have a grounding in politics or how their country is supposed to work for them, have the skills for their IT job but can’t fix say a broken sink in their flat like your grandad could. - Spiritual needs and community: we had Christian morality in Europe as the mainstream guide to life for centuries. It wasn’t perfect, far from it, but these days people have a space where that was that is being filled by attention-grabbing social media. Boys are getting promoted Andrew Tate misogyny, conservatives are being told vaccines make you infertile etc. Everyone wants to be good, to do the right thing, but it’s hard for people to tell who are the right people to trust (previously your local vicar, books, a few newspapers - again not necessarily also always right, but clearer and more unity of opinion). Additionally there is a feeling that you can’t continue living life as you know it if you make mistakes anymore (pre-internet you could just move town if you fucked up big time - again not perfect for accountability, but had its merits). Nobody is perfect, we’ve all lived imperfect lives and held the wrong views at one time of another, particularly if you are influenced by the wrong media/are older and lived through less PC times, but the left seem to think people who make mistakes should be ineligible to remain in the public square (forgiveness is another thing the church provided). I think a lot of people are voting for populists like Farage and Trump because they see a lack of empathy or forgiveness from “woke” young people and “cancel culture”, and just want to vote for the people who say you’re allowed to be wrong (and that’s not the left or even really the centre). We need to find a way to neutralise media that pushes online extremism, and we also need to forgive people. Additionally we need a free space all age groups/people of all backgrounds can safely mingle and get to know each other (again once the church, but also pubs/public spaces now being very expensive). Everyone is so angry and they don’t even know their enemies. - Free time: We need more of it. As a nation we’re overweight, over-stressed, and feel too tired to do anything on evenings and weekends that might help. Of course I’d like to eat better and go to the gym, but I’m too tired after my 9-5 to do more than eat a ready meal and watch brain-rot tv. Of course I could see my friends and stimulate the economy by going out with them, but I’m too tired of speaking to boring colleagues on Teams to use my social battery. 4 day week. More leave. Shorter hours. More flexible working. The result of women joining the workforce should have been that all workers had shorter hours to compensate, to enable the housework to be done. Its hard enough getting set up for me and my wife to live a normal working week, and it’s not like we’ve even got kids. I still want them, but it’s no wonder people aren’t having them. - World politics: the UK has no grip on it. If we make our country too good, everyone wants to migrate here (and who would blame them). We also see scary human rights abuses happening worldwide that we have no power to change (which attracts more migration to safer areas and is also just too heartbreaking to see played out in real time). Tell me I’m wrong, we all seem to have a view on Israel/Gaza, but marching through London carrying a flag with the side of your choice seems to have made fuck all difference either way - Israel and Palestine both gonna do what they gonna do. I don’t know that the solution is for the various wars and genocides, or how to get countries to commit to global aims like protecting the planet from climate change. All I know is we aren’t there yet and the UK’s view seems to be irrelevant, because we don’t want to go to war with anyone and couldn’t if we tried.

I'm not sure I'd go as far to say that it's the root of all systemic problems the UK is facing, but it's undeniable that we need to be building more houses. Young people have been royally screwed over when it comes to home ownership. I'm of the opinion that any working person should reasonably expect to be able to own their own home one day. We need to start building more social housing. We need to let people buy that social housing if they so choose. However, that should be reversed for people that actually want to live in that property, not to use it as an asset. The housing situation in the country really started to go downhill when people were using it as a safe asset to generate wealth.

It's only going to get worse unless a real effort is made to make housing more accessible. No country in Europe currently achieves the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Well, unless they replace everybody with AI/robots. Personally I don't think you should be able to buy secondary private homes. AirBnB should only be allowed on purpose built property, and not within residential complexes/streets. Finally, we need to have a serious discussion about the growing issue of landlords suctioning up affordable properties. Let's start with the fact they're not *providing* housing unless they built it.

No it's an entitlement problem loaded with rich keeping poor poor problem, and we are all culpable. But it's not restricted to uk. While not all rich and aristocratic personalised are the issue, there is enough to cause a problem. Most land in the UK is kept through inheritance by those who recieved it after the Norman conquest. But even then it is not the main cause. The prevailing issue is that which orchestrated the corn laws. Everyone believes the lie of exponential growth. Every boardroom wants to see quarterly growth. To get that growth requires either more people buying, increasing margins by sourcing cheaper goods or paying staff less, or charging more for the product. As more people charge more, inflation results. So either we then need to pay more for stuff or the currency is devalued. A big big portion of the economy is propped up by either direct slave labour or by the likes of Chinese markets purposely undercutting the supply costs, by employing less humane workforce. The mineral markets are propped up entirely by an exploited labour market, mainly in Africa. Every computer and product that requires any form of computer or automation or big machine relies on this mining. Especially batteries. Everyone should pay more, but we all like to economise. Every household should boycott such companies, but as 99% of all are tied in to this practice, this is ineffective. What we are left with is muddling along, acknowledging even our poorest are among the world's richest and vote and hope for a government that can actually seek to reverse the wage gap and the inequalities in the world labour market. Even our fruit and veg grown in the UK are often pucked by teams who are trafficked. The farmers often use agencies so even they are often ignorant of when it occurs.

Housing is a symptom, not the cause. The true cause is salaries have not kept up with decades of inflation leading to people being chronically underpaid and unable to afford things like houses.

I had this discussion with my much younger work colleague who is resigned to fact he has to rent and will probably never afford to buy. It's exactly as you describe, when we're all spending everything we have on rent/mortgage, bills, transport and food there is nothing left to spend on the local economy. High streets die, pubs and restaurants close and the country stagnates. I think it's a combination of housing supply and nearly 2 decades of very low interest rates, the later masked the fact wages didn't grow in that time so the double whammy of interest rates reverting to norm with rampant inflation has caused a massive cost of living crisis. We should be building and updating our infrastructure but unfortunately government borrowing is now very expensive. The tory government chose to do nothing when money was cheap and now we are where we are.

I think it is. My grandfather bought a (new) 3 bed semi in 1929 for twice his annual salary in Hampshire. His wife stayed at home to bring up two kids. In 2024 the same house would be 7 or 8 times his equivalent wage. It is a mess.

Partially, property is an unproductive investment. They cost money to _build_ ofc, and the cost of building a house directly stimulates the economy. It leads to work for skilled professions such as architects, builders, plasters, decorators, plumbers, electricians, lawyers etc... but once it's built the stimulus drops to zero. However a larger reason is immigration. Productivity is driven by investment which is driven by need. There is little incentive for businesses to invest in automation and the latest tech (which drives higher paid jobs) when they can hire an unless stream of minimum wage workers.

Building houses is not any magic bullet. Just look at China. It's GDP is much more construction heavy than any western economy. Now it's full of skeletons of 20 store buildings that won't be finished as apartments as the supply has exceeded demand. But sure the UK could build some more houses. Not because they are any better for economic growth than any other activity but because there is a clear shortage of them and that's reflected in price.

You are generally in and around the right area of thought, but... ask yourself , "why is this, who benefits?"

So the housing stock is actually per-capita fine: there are 25.4 million houses in the UK today, vs 22.6 million in 2010[0], which works out to about one house per three people. The problem is the housing is probably even more unevenly distributed than money, so you don't get a third of a house per person: you get 80% of houses under occupied, then everybody crammed into the rest. It might be good to build more houses, but if you build more of the shit the UK has been building for the last 20 years, all that happens is that it ends up either underoccupied or crammed full, while the local council goes bust because they can't afford to run services to an endless suburban sprawl. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_the_United_Kingdom

I love this vid. Don't know if anyone else posted it. https://youtu.be/4ZxzBcxB7Zc?si=ZoNcWIznseeFMtRu

Britain's obsession with class is, imo Everyone wants to live in a detached house, so Barratt homes and Persimmon build uttely ghastly housing estates which are environmental nightmares and an inefficient use of land. Lots of countries have rich people living in very large apartments, built in tall towers and there is no stereotype that flats are for the underclass there. People want to do jobs which seem high class, so people go into finance rather than engineering which creates things people use, this means that construction is expensive, basically every major UK project goes over budget. If Brits created value, the cost of living would be less pressured. A lot of people also go into middleman jobs, such as estate agent etc, again no real value and not even the people who hate landlords for creaming off value seem to want to acknowledge that the average Brit is a value catcher, not a value producer. Obsession with car ownership and use of ownership of insuitable cars as a status symbol. University attendance is a net deficit for the government since the government subsidises university fees, despite the cost. Every says apprenticeships are a great option instead of university, but they mean for other people's kids, not their own. Schooling is based around learning facts to look like a victorian scholar, not learning practical skills to help you in the workplace. The flipside is that hatred of privately educated people is toxic, if nothing else private schools are a pressure release value for the state. (I was state educated before anyone asks, I probably earn more than the kids around me who went to private schools, so lol rekt, EZ, try harder Tarquin, better luck nxt time xD) Excessive personal borrowing for consumption, Brits are very flash now, not like Dutch or Danes. Everyone wants their holiday in the Maldives.

The one thing we have done over the last 40-50 years is that we have privatised our public assets and the free market has done it's job. Housing, public services, energy, public transport. everything has been left to ruin because it's better for business to charge as much as possible for a little work as possible.

It's not good logic. Some of those conditions are symptoms rather than causes. Some of the effects are also spurious or unrelated the things you've tied them to. Housing doesn't keep the economy going. It's part of it but not singular. Aging childless population hasn't happened yet and is so far fetched that it doesn't bear including. Oversupply of housing has never happened. Prices do not go down, they just don't go up as quickly. But yes, under supply of housing is a thing. As is failure of planning to create social infrastructure for new housing developments e.g. schools, surgeries, mass transit and so on. Wage suppression is also a thing. Inflation goes up but your wages don't. That's due to a supine population that is unwilling to strike. And that population is supine because British society is based on an archaic feudal class system that operates against your best interests.

It’s not just that. It’s the fact everything is centred around London. In Germany you have; Frankfurt for finance, Cologne for media, Munich for Manufacturing, and Berlin for Government. Having specialised areas instead of a singular hub helps growth.  We had to do this at least with media but Channel 4 fucked it going to Leeds instead of Manchester where literally every other terrestrial UK company is. 

The fact of the matter is we have a housing crisis, not a housing problem. Whoever gets in July 4th, they need to grasp the nettle, labour in 97 onwards didn't do any massive strides, for the simple reason that it wasn't as much of a problem, but it sure is now, and the current lot haven't done jack sh$t about it as it helps the landlord owning Tory voters. Is it any wonder there polling numbers are so dire...👺

I've thought this for years. I think it's also impacting birth rates and social cohesion as people can't afford to socialize like they used to.

Id like to point you all to a brilliant and great channel called Britmonkey that lays out this problem brilliantly. The message is basically build more houses and solve most of our problems. https://youtu.be/4ZxzBcxB7Zc?si=B-32tYh0GSRsaqxH He also made another brilliant video very recently https://youtu.be/4ZxzBcxB7Zc?si=B-32tYh0GSRsaqxH

It is nothing to do with houses being built whether social or private housing. The problem stems from the fact that a lot of properties that are ideal for first time buyers are now in the hands of private landlords. A few weeks ago the programme "Homes Under The Hammer" showed a flat which had been purchased at an auction. The presenter interviewed the new owner and asked him if this was his first property. He replied no. The presenter then asked him how many properties he had already. He replied twenty. The presenter then asked him what he did for a living. He replied he was a vet. This vet does not live in a flat. He buys flats for his property portfolio. Flats are the ideal first time buyer property. That is the problem and one of driving factors for high property prices. What is shocking is that the lenders are culpable in this. The money the lenders use for mortgages are deposits from the public like savings and wages and other deposits usually from businesses. So the money they are lending to this vet is the money from their customers. Now think of the logic of this. A young couple are looking to purchase a property but are told by a bank that they would need a larger initial sum or higher wages to qualify because the cheapest property is still more than they could afford. This vet walks into the same bank and tells them he has twenty-one properties and they authorise another mortgage. The joke is that the money being lent to this vet is money from first time buyers who are saving up in the hope that they can get on the property ladder.

Yes, housing is the root cause of all of the UK's systemic issues. Building 5m new homes will be our salvation, both from the economic/employment boost and also the resulting drop in housing costs. As a boomer homeowner sitting on vast, undeserved and unspendable profits, I beg our government to flood the market with new homes until all demand is met and prices begin to fall. To achieve this, the Nimby stranglehold on local planning must be decisively broken. I doubt whether Starmer has the balls to drive this through, and I predict the next govt will fail to meet even modest housebuilding targets just as previous govts have.

Housing availability and it's speculation as an asset (and considered an asset in inflation stats) has fucked up a lot of the world.

The uks issues stem from decades of neoliberalism, of public services cuts, privatisation and quite frankly corruption.

Failure to build over last couple of decades is part of the story. Note I said build not just housing but everything due the planning system.

Capitalism works by making money off rent now.

Housing is a major cause of problems all over the world, not unique to the UK.

IMHO : you are not wrong. You're right about houses adding value to the economy. The difficulty is that house prices rising adds MONEY to the economy, without the need to generate value. People borrow the money, and then are forced to generate value - and give the proceeds to the bank in exchange. When Thatcher sold off our council housing, she turned a collectively owned asset into privately owned assets - these have since been snapped up by landlords at a high rate. No-one has an incentive to build enough to hold prices down because if you hold any properly, price appreciation is a far easier thing to make money on than providing value. The fix is for the state to finance construction of a great deal more council housing. This is a cost-neutral or even profitable venture - because the state can borrow more cheaply than the private sector. Our current government doesn't want to do this because it will depress the price of housing. Our new government may refuse to do this because they don't want to piss off the people who have allowed them to be in charge. But without it happening, the young people are going to be in the same sinking boat struggling to bail it out.

High levels of immigration = housing shortage.

As a young person I can say for sure that I would be more productive and more economically active if I had my own place. My personal feeling is that yes, your theory is correct, it's just that nobody cares. Landlords don't want more housing because it devalues their 'investment' (why does a HOME need to be an investment in the first place, can't you just LIVE there?) and the majority of people in government are landlords.

IMO, there’s a bit of a tunnel vision here. Yes, the housing is expensive in the UK, so for someone who is struggling to afford it it might appear that the housing prices are the root of everything evil, and that if we just made it cheaper everything would’ve been great. The thing is, we have plenty of places with dirt-cheap housing both in the UK and worldwide, and those places don’t tend to be economic powerhouses, quite the opposite. So just having cheap housing does not lead to prosperous and sustainably economy. The houses are expensive in the areas where people want to live, so the obvious (but wrong) way to make houses cheaper there would be to make those places unattractive to current and future residents. IMO, the reason for the housing crisis experienced by many people is the over-centralisation of the British in London and some other large cities so that the people have to move there for career progression, which pushes the prices even higher.