Why Britain doesn’t build

It’s a gravity well of incentives towards absolute property gluttony and creating an overheated housing market and massive social inequality.

So if you have laws restricting that development you need to look further than just "real-estate investors don't want development."

Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.

The better off - and therefore more politically-connected - you are as a homeowner, the more you care about "I don't want the wrong people living next to me" compared to "I need to maximize short-term property values." (And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.)

Crime has noticeably gone up and I'm sure it's just going to get worse as gangs increase. Even in safe areas, muggings and knife violence are on the rise.

My children went to a really terrible comprehensive which I had to move them out of. The kind of stuff going on there is just making the next generation of criminals possible. And it's not the school's fault - they just don't have the resources to manage with bulge classes and staff stretched to the mental breaking limit.

It's an utter shambles the state of this country. Without strong leadership it's not changing either - we need an Obama or similar charismatic leader with progressive (or hell, even moderate) ideas at this point to make some change.

One thing this country has going for it over the US is that governments have a mandate to make large changes. In the US, nothing can ever change because of gridlock in congress with filibusters. So we still have some hope here, although lack of proportional representation makes it very difficult to get proper representation.

This is just a self-defeating excuse. "Monopolised" implies that they're somehow preventing younger people from voting. The only way in which this is a thing is by scheduling elections on days that are inconvenient for younger people to vote.

If you want change in who represents you, the first thing you need to do is vote. The second thing is to get others to vote.

This, in my opinion, is the biggest factor compared to the other two. Politicians that want to win power have to win votes. Older people (and homeowners) vote more than younger (renting) people. A party that prioritises younger people over older people will be referred to as His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition.

The reason Liz Truss was kicked out of the PM's office by her party wasn't because her spending plans were economically illiterate. It's because her plans started rapidly increasing interest rates, so higher mortgages, which is starting the process of fucking over Tory voters.

Homeowners, irrespective of age, vote more. This is in part enabled by material comforts. But there may be other layers of causation.

The first two are problematic per se (though I'm uncertain of the effect size). But the last is fundamental--if someone can vote but can't care to, they're not going to have their interests represented.

Sounds like democracy?

The prices in high demand areas, are going to be high, whether residents can legally oppose new developments or not. How much does a house cost in California or New York?

This doesn't explain the constant increase in property tax levies being passed in Washington State.

Not US, and for reasons, the housing crisis is not _that_ bad where I live, but: in principle our country is exactly like our parent's generation imagined it. It's perfectly aligned with their interests. Where they'd hike to a hut in the mountains once, there is now a paved road, so they can still drive to the hut, even though they're not able to walk anymore. Somewhere else they built a cable car, for exactly the same purpose. They have houses. They have cars. They dominate every political institution there is. They voted to keep the conscription, so enough poor young people who alternatively chose community service would be available when they need care, eventually. They go on vacations three times a year. And heaven forbid they'd need to give up _anything_ they once had. Political parties that suggest anything like that would have no chance in elections.

> Who is actually in control here?

I think they are.

Then what about these consultants? Well, they don't need to actually solve the problem either. They just make various plans and present a slide deck to management at the end and collect a check. Whether the plan works or not doesn't even matter here, because the consultants got paid already and are on to the next job, the manager looks good because they brought in a consultancy, and if shit fails in the next three years well its no ones fault, because management will act like they did everything right bringing in the consultancy and will cut other staff first.

Consultancyism is everywhere these days. Its the next big thing in emerging markets which is even scarier and only a fig leaf away from imperialism with the terms of how some of these deals are struck, always to the benefit of capital with the people seen as a resource for extraction or exploitation. Consultancyism probably also encourages an unhealthy mercenary outlook on life. Never taking pride in projects because they are never your projects in your community, they are just jobs elsewhere to make some money.

less blind forces, more "well, what would you do in their situation": the people who first paid money for a given square of land were also the first to try to convince someone else to pay them more for that same land

natural resources aside, land only really has the value that other people are willing to pay for it, like currency. so if you want the "growth of your asset", the only thing you can really do is convince people the land is worth more than what you paid for it, for whatever reasons you dream up

globalisation just made everyone's marketing messages go 'round the world

There is will, and there is will.

Pretending that this doesn't apply to whole societies and that today's secular societies are not driven mostly by a deterministic mechanism consisting of human nature combined with the environment (technology + physical world) is a fool's act, and the ubiqiotus internet commenter attitude. Man yelling at the clouds, clouds of human nature and environment.

For the most part, I agree with building codes. They serve a purpose by ensuring that unsafe buildings aren't created. But they've become so esoteric, that meeting them is an exercise in futility.

I can't wait for the day that a "safe building" AI just watches everything, and tells people what to do. That way even unskilled labor can do work, and the work will be up to a safe standard.

Code officials are the worst sort of power tripping bureaucrats. I can't wait for them to be eliminated.

So yes, this is all something that is politically solvable in the west. We just need a unified legislative recipe, and strong advocacy. Other lobbying groups manage to get through very unpopular legislation. Why not for something that would actually help?

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSCNDW01ESA470N

It's technically possible that people just decided to vote the same way in half of the world for decades. Besides, the local plutocracy wanting the same things everywhere isn't easy to explain either.

It's clearly a global structural issue. Low interest rates are a pan-national commonality - and they can take a lot of blame for part of the situation we're in now. But they don't explain housing shortages.

Population growth probably plays a big part - housing is always going to be lagging population growth. The various stories I've seen about Japan - with low rents, falling house prices and large numbers of abandoned houses - seem to map with the falling Japanese population. "Things were better in the 70s/80s/90s" probably partly just means that the ratio of houses to people was better. The population of most major western cities was falling or flat through much of the 70s and 80s - leading to the situation where my parent's generation all seem to have snapped up large, well located houses for not very much money.

I'm fully supportive of the idea that, with all things equal, if we build more houses then supply and demand will drop prices. But if you allow unchecked population growth (which in the UK and Canada seems to be primarily caused by immigration) then the amount of building required is effectively infinite.

I've visited the Toronto area from the UK more or less every year since I was a child, and the overwhelming story is one of huge development. The change in the suburbs of Toronto over the past 30 years has been vast and unlike anything I've seen in the UK. Yet that clearly hasn't been enough to stop house prices going crazy as well. The net effect, though, is that there's miles and miles of sprawl and 6 lane streets dominated by cars. The answer definitely isn't to build more of that. The population of Canada has grown by 40% in the last 30 years.

Population growth combined with an ageing population and the kind of rights purchasing a house gives you in the west create increasing inequality driven by land. That seems to be the underlying issue that's driving city house values up everywhere.

There are possibly some answers. In the UK in the 60s-80s we built entire new cities, with the land purchased by the government at agricultural value so that the entire uplift was captured by the developers rather than speculators.

Cities were pretty similar to how they are now for all of human history except a brief period where things were weird after WW2 - see A Farewell to Alms and everything by Ricardo.

The US has one of the lowest Price to Rent ratios in the entire world.

And it's not like the US is rosey. There's really no where to look on the planet for somewhere that's doing things right beside maybe Singapore (which is a single city and has somewhat socialized the entire housing market) and Japan (which suffered through a lost 30 years and has a pretty rapidly declining population - possibly mainly as a result).

In both cases, I'd argue the US has a better housing market than either of those places. And again, it's still pretty sucky in most places in the US.

Nobody. If you wanted to point fingers though, then the reason nothing gets done is because "grandma". Not because grandma is some evil conspirator but rather because this is used to silence arguments by saying "you are hurting the weak, don't you feel ashamed?"

Honestly, I don't believe there is a solution that can be achieved through democratic vote because the only people that are being hurt are people who don't get to vote, aka children who will need a home in the future or migrants who are about to move.

Some form of private land trust will have to do a georgist experiment and reimburse tenants as some form of UBI. 50% of the profits will be reinvested, 50% reimbursed.

Is part of the problem that we think the 70s was normal and not the outlier?

https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...

Certainly there have been a couple recent bubbles, but even as recently as 2012 we were basically within the bounds of the long-term normal.

I'd like to say it's a supply problem, and demographics does support that argument to some extent, but the fact that it involves most of the western world makes me think it may have to do with monetary policy.

It might have been a combination of circumstances and intellectual tides turning. The 70ties saw stagflation everywhere, which led to a decade of economic problems that couldn't be fixed with existing, socialist policies. Finally, voters everywhere (starting with Thatcher in UK ) decided it's time to try something else.

Part of it might also have been a disillusionment with big leftist ideas in general - in the late seventies, there was enough reliable information coming from USSR and China to make it clear that anything resembling communism (a holy grail for much of the left back then) is an unmitigated disaster. People started to realise that capitalism, much like democracy, might be bad, but is better than all the alternatives.

There is no failure of democracy here, but rather a good indication of it's strength.

Not in a democracy, not when respecting free market and property. But they are able to do it in China.

You can just as easily ask "why was there a rise of right-wing nationalist and fascist sentiment throughout the Western world in the mid-to-late 2010s?" There's no grand conspiracy to any of it, and looking for one is likely to lead you down exactly the road that far too many conspiracy theorists have gone recently.

And, um, closely related, be aware that the "lizard people rule the world" thing isn't just a funny joke. It's deeply and inextricably rooted in a raft of antisemitic tropes, slurs, and propaganda going back...I forget exactly how long, but at least many decades. In fact, in general, when you encounter any conspiracy theory that posits a shadowy group of people secretly ruling the world, the chances are nearly 100% that you can trace it back to a version where that "shadowy group" is explicitly Jews. This is a big part of why conspiracy theorists have a tendency to find themselves in a pipeline to fascism.

The way out is revolution, where the working class become the ruling class. We may yet see that in our lifetimes in several countries.

Personally, I'd prefer my country do something that works faster than waiting for people to die. But yeah, on the other side of the curve, anything you try works like magic.

https://youtu.be/3dBaEo4QplQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUFZ1_fC3Kw

This is the modern wisdom in the west - it's the approach taken by many governments since the Reagan era (not just in the UK) and it's demonstrably unsuccessful in almost every metric except one: votes. Which is the only reason it continues. It panders to those who already hold assets, while doing very little to move the dial for those who need shelter.

Migration is not a new phenomenon; citing it as an excuse for the utter failure of modern housing policy is disingenuous.

The latest house building statistics show that in the financial year ending March 2022 there were 204,530 dwellings completed in the UK.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

Somebody who consumes a lot of high value land doesnt create the conditions for making more like somebody who, say, buys a lot of cars. They just create more profits for nearby land owners. Hoarding drives more hoarding and higher prices in a positive feedback loop unless arrested via a tax.

The elites can accomodate their market dysfunction by building public housing. They can neuter this market dysfunction by applying a steep land value tax (or by increasing property taxes).

Or they can sit back and profit, parasitically extracting ever higher land rents from the real economy.

The UK experimented with selling off it's social housing in the 70s. It was a colossal failure that has lead to the country having some of the worst housing stock in Europe, with renters paying more for less. Private landlords have been enriched at the expense of the wider society.

Without state intervention in housing regulation/supply we'd see shanty towns spring up fairly quickly, followed by violence. Refer to Champlain Towers, Grenfell Tower, or the collapsed luxury apartments in the Turkey earthquake to see what happens when the state does not do enough to ensure builders aren't building death traps.

I know something about the place where I live, which I'll not name because I don't think it's that special. Specifically, that houses are built if that seems profitable, or at the very least if the bank thinks the builder can earn enough to pay back the loan.

The organisation that build/rebuilt/renovated the buildings across the street from me expected to earn that investment back in very roughly half a century. They considered it possible that they'd earn their investment back in 30 years, but unlikely. They managed to secure financing, though, and did the building. Not sure how they plan to pay the bank on time.

You'll not be surprised to hear that this place too suffers from a lack of newly built housing.

The average price of a house in Canada is CAD716K vs £285K (=CAD480K) in the UK.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

What is the basis for this belief?

Every country that got people out of poverty, India, China and Singapore, has a massive state housing program. They work. We have results.

Why are we still building houses like it's 1800 though? Hand crafted houses built by local artisans are always going to be expensive

The ones in the 10s were by far the best build quality, however the plots were tiny, and they come with extra taxes. The estates were full of cars parked over the pavements because of the limited parking (claiming a garage as a parking space for example), and the green spaces were poorly maintained (due to the privatised companies that own them)

Yep it sucks. Many people I know cannot afford unless there are two people paying the bills. You need two to tango for kids of course, and some might argue why do you need a 3 bed house if you are single without kids (I am assuming here - you may not be). Of course that is no one's business apart from your own and shouldn't factor in to this.

In my experience (in Edinburgh) the vast majority of people I speak to tend to view the private developments (especially the insatiable appetite for student accommodation) and short term lets far less favourably.

Granted, Edinburgh is a special case with an incredibly high demand for short term letting and students.

If you think the UK transport network is OK, but pick the most extreme examples of housing costs, you're probably a Londoner. The housing situation is awful elsewhere, but still a long way from London's extremes.

But if you live elsewhere, try getting anywhere by road or by rail, and it's usually a grim experience.

And this is both how it ought to work and means that the UK has a lot of existing rail that could help solve this problem if the government would just commit to streamline planning processes and to increasing routes and frequency to stations where there is a potential for density increases at lower cost.

Over those decades UK population growth [1] is lower than the new house building rate [see chart in article].

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/pop...

Sabotaging London won't make the rest of the UK better - it will just mean less tax money available to subsidise the rest of the country. If you stop companies from expanding in London they won't go to Sheffield or Birmingham - they'll go to Amsterdam or Frankfurt or Paris.

> But even on a more local level, I wish instead of spending in the centre of London, focus shifted to bypassing the centre. E.g. I live in Croydon. Croydon has rail towards multiple towns around London, but anything not on the main lines in towards London doesn't have commuter level rail services running on them, or in some cases have no passenger trains at all.

They're trying that up to a point. Stratford has worked pretty well, and they're going to apply the same playbook at Old Oak Common. Croydon might be next on the list. But of course at the rate the UK builds anything that wil be what, 2060 before anything is done.

The government knows this but completely missold it to the public.

It’s unrealistic for me to get treatment from a GP in my area so I simply travel thousands of miles away to another country once a year for treatment.

Thousands more homes being built as well, so this isn’t changing any time soon.

For residents of small to medium sized towns and villages (where there's plenty of land available), the rapid sprawl and worstening traffic is incredibly visible.

At some point it becomes a government handout. Ok, so every person of 25 gets a 90%-off-your-first-home-voucher. So all the private companies building homes are getting 90% of their money straight from the government. This very quickly leads to a nimbyism/conservative local political environment which puts a stop to it.

Social housing stock was sold off, ostensibly to occupiers, at significantly less than market value. This comical scheme is still going on today, imagine the reaction of landlords if private renters were offered a 70% discount[0] on the purchase price of a property.

An interesting phenomenon occurred when the scheme was introduced as well, neighbourhoods were canvassed with offers to purchase the house they rented. Many of the people living in these houses wouldn't be approved for a mortgage, so on the same day many of these houses were sold at their insane discount, they would be sold on immediately to a private investor.

At the same time councils were prevented from reinvesting that capital in the construction of new housing stock. The result is that the UK has some of the highest rents in Europe and also some of the poorest housing quality. Privately rented flats are often full of mold, with tenants are unable to assert their rights due to fear of retaliation.

It has also contributed to the majority of the economy being centralised in London. Putting aside the intentional annihilation of the UK's productive industries for a moment. Private builders are incentivised to invest where demand is currently hottest leaving other regions to deteriorate. The result is that even more economic activity is now occurring in the region which encourages ever more economic concentration.

State provisioned housing is concerned with wider societal benefit. Short term profit matters much less, meaning they can invest in rural or currently unproductive areas in hope of nurturing economic growth there. This simply doesn't occur otherwise.

The power wielded by the kind of large enterprise encouraged by neo-liberal policy prevents the kind of organic growth that makes most communities a pleasant place to live. We can see that in the total dearth of parks, green space, local shops, doctors offices and schools in the UK's new build developments.

I won't go into much detail about the raft of other problems that neo-liberalism introduces but disposable income only recently recovered to 1960s levels, both members of the household are now working and yet they're often struggling to afford basic necessities. All of these contribute to the issue of housing affordability and provision.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/right-to-buy-buying-your-council-home/dis...

It wasnt a cheque, but a pair of first class tickets to the bahamas for the planning officer and their wife, totally worth it thought.

Its not even an open secret, its a known fact. https://www.theplanner.co.uk/2020/08/03/local-authorities-ar...

I am very familiar with other countries. Britain is up there with the worst. Why do you think nothing works? By chance? Incompetence?

Why would what happens in any other country change whether Britain is (and it demonstrably is) corrupt?

This isn't software where you can put it in a Docker container. There's a reason why everything requires planning approval in almost every big city in America: lives matter. People matter.