Genuine Question - How would YOU solve the UK's housing crisis?

[MrXxxx]

On 06/03/2024 at 15:40, Spiney Norman said:

Stop all immigration immediately including asylum seekers and students

The former has a cost to the UK, the latter is currently paying for that cost.

[MrXxxx]

2 hours ago, goldbug9999 said:

Government to build 2 million 3 bed houses to reestablish ubiquitous cheap decent quality social housing as the norm for low income families as per council housing in the 70s, rents would be set at 1/3rd mean take home pay. 10 years citizenship required to be eligible. For the benefit of the "thats just concreting over the whole country" brigade that would only add 1% total urbanisation of the UK land area - from 12% to 13%.

Errm , they don't have a very good track record on this one!

[goldbug9999]

19 minutes ago, MrXxxx said:

Errm , they don't have a very good track record on this one!

Well the point of the discussion is what WE would do ?. 

 

[BoSon]

1 hour ago, MrXxxx said:

You think so?...they will just 'adopt' conscientious objector principles [or cite PTSD from the situation they have run away from] in the same way that they have just 'Seen the light'/adopted Christianity.

Yep, centuries of laws growing into an overcomplicated mess and the need to allow the wealthy to get around them via loopholes means those able to get similar support from the court wigsters can exploit them also.

[kibuc]

According to Statista, the number of households went from 24.5m in 2001 to 28.1m in 2021, a 14.5% increase.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/295545/number-of-households-in-the-uk/

In the same time period, the number of housing units went from 21.2m to 25.1m, an increase of 18.3%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232302/number-of-dwellings-in-england/

Yet the prices tripled over the same period. So perhaps it's not about not building enough houses after all.

In my view, it's mostly about financialisation of the housing market and, especially early on, offering preferential financial treatment to investors over owner-occupiers (IO loans based on projected rental income, good Lord!). If you have 1000 people and 1000 houses, they can buy 1 house each. Allow one of them to get extra financing and he'll outbid someone (prices go up), the remaining 999 guys will start competing for 998 houses in a game of musical chairs (prices go up) and the last remaining fucker will have to rent from that first guy, justifying his investment case.
 

Which means that the way to solve it would be to go into reverse and protect houses from becoming (or remaining) investment vehicles. It's a bit too late to try to fix it on the money end, because money has alread been spent and properties have already been purchased, and that's the bit that needs unwinding. Allow only one residential property to be owned by members of one household. Ban residential property ownership for non-residents. Ban corporate ownership of residential property. Some thinking would have to go towards adjusting those absolutes to make sure that rental market still exists (don't think that nationalising it would be a good idea, but perhaps it's the lesser of two evils?) but that would be my general direction of travel. Houses are for people to live in, not to get rich by doing fuck all.

Edited March 23 by kibuc

[reformed nice guy]

1 hour ago, kibuc said:

According to Statista, the number of households went from 24.5m in 2001 to 28.1m in 2021, a 14.5% increase.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/295545/number-of-households-in-the-uk/

In the same time period, the number of housing units went from 21.2m to 25.1m, an increase of 18.3%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232302/number-of-dwellings-in-england/

Yet the prices tripled over the same period. So perhaps it's not about not building enough houses after all.

In my view, it's mostly about financialisation of the housing market and, especially early on, offering preferential financial treatment to investors over owner-occupiers (IO loans based on projected rental income, good Lord!). If you have 1000 people and 1000 houses, they can buy 1 house each. Allow one of them to get extra financing and he'll outbid someone (prices go up), the remaining 999 guys will start competing for 998 houses in a game of musical chairs (prices go up) and the last remaining fucker will have to rent from that first guy, justifying his investment case.
 

Which means that the way to solve it would be to go into reverse and protect houses from becoming (or remaining) investment vehicles. It's a bit too late to try to fix it on the money end, because money has alread been spent and properties have already been purchased, and that's the bit that needs unwinding. Allow only one residential property to be owned by members of one household. Ban residential property ownership for non-residents. Ban corporate ownership of residential property. Some thinking would have to go towards adjusting those absolutes to make sure that rental market still exists (don't think that nationalising it would be a good idea, but perhaps it's the lesser of two evils?) but that would be my general direction of travel. Houses are for people to live in, not to get rich by doing fuck all.

Probably easier to first stop millions and millions and millions and millions of people coming, and kick out the low value ones already here

[kibuc]

54 minutes ago, reformed nice guy said:

Probably easier to first stop millions and millions and millions and millions of people coming, and kick out the low value ones already here

I thinks that's banging on the wrong drum (as the data seem to suggest) but I don't want to turn this thread into a place where we dunk on each other's ideas

 

Edit: I'd also like to correct one piece from my previous post: the number of housing units given there is for England alone (whereas the number of households is for the UK). The number of dwellings in the UK was around 30mil, so there was more dwellings than households (as was also the case in 2001). In other words, despite the population increase there was always more than one dwelling per household while the prices went bananas.

Edited March 23 by kibuc

[reformed nice guy]

22 minutes ago, kibuc said:

I thinks that's banging on the wrong drum (as the data seem to suggest) but I don't want to turn this thread into a place where we dunk on each other's ideas

 

Edit: I'd also like to correct one piece from my previous post: the number of housing units given there is for England alone (whereas the number of households is for the UK). The number of dwellings in the UK was around 30mil, so there was more dwellings than households (as was also the case in 2001). In other words, despite the population increase there was always more than one dwelling per household while the prices went bananas.

Its a fair point and I apologise for being flippant.

There will always be excess dwellings as time marches on. Plenty of them near the old mining towns for example.

10% of gdp is imputed rent which is a function of housing cost. If immigration stopped and housing price declined then it would unmask that our gdp growth has been falsley increasing. Financialisation as your rightly point out is a huge part of that.

Decreasing population, with an ageing population, would increase the value of working so the older asset rich would have to liquidate more - particularly their second homes etc.

A person is a very very very expensive thing for a state to have on its books.

[kibuc]

15 hours ago, reformed nice guy said:

Its a fair point and I apologise for being flippant.

There will always be excess dwellings as time marches on. Plenty of them near the old mining towns for example.

10% of gdp is imputed rent which is a function of housing cost. If immigration stopped and housing price declined then it would unmask that our gdp growth has been falsley increasing. Financialisation as your rightly point out is a huge part of that.

Decreasing population, with an ageing population, would increase the value of working so the older asset rich would have to liquidate more - particularly their second homes etc.

A person is a very very very expensive thing for a state to have on its books.

I understand the cost of unproductive people to society and the strain that population increase puts on infrastructure, assuming that the infrastructure fails to scale proportionally. While things like education and healthcare (and land area, obviously) failed to keep up with increased demand, data seems to suggest that housing managed to do it just fine. I think it is due to housing being primarily handled by the private sector which could easily see the opportunity arising from increased immigration and responded to that new demand.

However, if population growth drives new housing supply, it stands to reason that the opposite is also true. Houses need to be maintained, doubly so if they are unoccupied. If they fall into a state of serious disrepair, the cost of making it good again can easily match the cost and time effort of producing a new one - effectively removing it from the housing stock. To avoid that fate, houses can also change their use from residential to some other type - becoming offices, treatment rooms, small business practices etc, again removing them from residential housing stock. That's a long-winded way of saying that population decrease can drive housing decrease.

There's plenty of areas where uncontrolled immigration has done great damage to the quality of public services, social cohesion and general quality of life, and while it feels like housing looms like the most obvious carea to include on that list, the data I can see makes me think again.

Edited March 24 by kibuc

[Frank Hovis]

23 hours ago, kibuc said:

However, if population growth drives new housing supply, it stands to reason that the opposite is also true. Houses need to be maintained, doubly so if they are unoccupied. If they fall into a state of serious disrepair, the cost of making it good again can easily match the cost and time effort of producing a new one - effectively removing it from the housing stock. To avoid that fate, houses can also change their use from residential to some other type - becoming offices, treatment rooms, small business practices etc, again removing them from residential housing stock. That's a long-winded way of saying that population decrease can drive housing decrease.

 

There is effective housing decrease happening on a creeping basis IME.

I have noticed the following groups of houses beginning to fall into obvious disrepair:

• Big houses with elderly owners
• Rentals
• Newbuild estates where there is high housing density - especially terraced

 

In each case it is going to be a combination of low finances (either so much going on mortgage / rent or low pension), lack of tradesmen, or inability to do it yourself.

 

 

[Mikhail Liebenstein]

Like gaining efficiency in computing, containers are the answer:

https://www.marine-fabrication.co.uk/shipping-containers/shipping-container-idea?gad_source=1