Most of the new towers you see in the pictures are flats. For instance, around Wembley Stadium the vast majority are flats. Lots of (fancy) flats on the Isle of Dogs as well.
It's mostly offices only in the City and Canary Wharf.
It's mostly offices only in the City and Canary Wharf.
Is there any data showing that if we let loose and build a ton of housing that purchase prices and (especially) rents will reduce significantly? It's intuitively true but all the cities you can see a ton of construction in have also gone from "expensive" to "more expensive" at the same time.
Did any major city people want to live in got more affordable (or stayed affordable) in the last 10-20 years?
Increasing supply of housing in London, or increasing supply of cities with qualities similar to London so that demand for London decreases. Or reducing the number of people eligible to live in London.
Increasing prices for labor at the bottom is also an option. Again, reduce supply of labor by offering free education to obtain higher paid work, etc.
Note that there will always be a tier of society who are at the edge of affordable for any desirable area. Not that efforts should not be continuously be made, but as some people are helped, others will arrive to compete (due to the desirability).
The specific city might see then rise, instead. It’ll grow, and that generally makes prices go up.
2) A lot of the building has not necessarily been what you'd call affordable. While you will get some benefit moving wealthier people, expats, and short term business lets, etc. to new stuff, that's way less efficient for solving the problem of affordability than just building enough homes for the people who need them directly.
3) Too much of London's (new and existing) real estate is owned as an investment and goes mostly unoccupied. This is a scandal and there should be large tax penalties for unoccupied housing.
I think what you hear is true but it is not the whole truth. It would be easy to allow developers in to build new housing in a way that wouldn't help at all (but would make them lots of money).
But I think the average could be misleading if the household size had gone up significantly in council homes, hiding a slightly falling household size in the private sector. But that's pure speculation.
Obviously making up the infrastructure and investment gap in other medium and large UK cities might make more sense. Most of the UK’s next 10-20 cities by size (at least) could probably take on a doubling or more in population while also becoming wealthier, easier to get around, and better overall for everyone who lives in them.
Just needs competent government and proper investment in the right places, which have sadly been far from forthcoming for a while now.
There are very pleasant and extremely livable high density cities (or areas within them) as well as many example of lower density urban and suburban environments that are awful.
Also, buildings are not really getting “ever denser and taller” except in the most extreme cases. In London, for example we’re usually talking about taking low density low quality housing or currently unused or underused ex-industrial land and turning it into higher density housing, offices, and retail. But this is not so high density that it icomes close to pushing the boundaries of what’s already known to be workable, especially when paired (as it usually is in London at least) with public space, local amenities, and transport upgrades.
At some point more people means quality of life has to go down.
Now, the UK's population does not even grow intrinsically, we're creating the problem by literally importing people.
London is nowhere near that. The relatively dense parts that suck to live in suck for other reasons or because of poor design (read: lack of care for the people who will live there from the designers/funders). Sprawl scales as badly, though it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t.
As for the rest of the UK: there’s even more opportunity to introduce well thought out density alongside infrastructure improvements and create a net benefit for everyone.
> we're creating the problem by literally importing people.
This is the opposite of how I see it. The UK could easily grow by properly investing in cities and infrastructure without eating into green space (and still meet climate goals).
Given the current unsettled world, we should be opening the doors to the smart and ambitious with a sensible but significant plan to increase population and have multiple globally important cities in say 20 years. Check out Canada for an (albeit incomplete and not without its challenges) example.
Net migration to the UK has been about 250k per year (with some variance) since 2000. I remember reading somewhere that 2/3 of that was to London.
So you'd need to add hundreds of thousands of homes per year just to break even. Instead much less than 100k are built, usually under 40k.
There's other reasons for the price and rent rises but this is one of the big ones.
Eyeballing from a chart here (https://www.plumplot.co.uk/London-house-prices.html)
- 1995 to 2010: 300% growth (10% p.a.)
- 2010 to 2023: 75% growth (4% p.a.)