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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

> With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.

I'm not sure that's a fair comparison, France has double the area of UK, and more of it is usable.

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But the UK is nowhere near full in terms of housing. The Netherlands is the densest large country in Europe, and rocks double the population density of the UK. Despite this, the two countries have a roughly equal ratio of people to homes (~2.2). It's not as if a country actually needs that much land to build homes - humans simply don't take up that much space in terms of housing.

But the Netherlands are in a huge housing crisis at the moment.

If you want to compare the UK against the Netherlands, you'd have to compare the numbers in the article: how many Dutch own houses, how many have second homes. And adjust the numbers to be relative to population size of course. I'm not sure how well the Netherlands would come out of that comparison.

This doesn't really seem relevant since no one is disputing whether the UK as a whole has enough space for more houses. The relevant comparisons are Paris vs London and then the various 2nd tier cities in the countries. Paris has a MUCH HIGHER population density than London, in part due to the housing mix, e.g. Parisian mansion blocks.

Prosperity comes from cities where densification is allowed (far too much of inner London is only 2-storeys) and being able to affordably put in supporting infrastructure.

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