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> Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.

Well I don't.

Respectfully, when it appears everyone agrees but nothing happens, usually that means not everyone agrees.

You can get a lot of stalemate when the majority agrees that there is a problem, and often even what the problem is, but they can't agree on what the solution is. I think that's the situation in a lot of Western European countries right now — there's a broad dissatisfaction in governments, but there's isn't really a clear mobilisation towards any one solution because nobody can agree what the solution should be. That's why you see very low approval ratings for a lot of European governments, but you also don't see any single party capitalising on that. Even Labour's success in the UK was mainly the collapse of the Conservatives rather than a clear vote of confidence in Labour.

The Western European political system mostly depends on the center-right and the center-left working together and making compromises to reduce the support for more radical parties on the other side. During the Cold War, social democrats were addressing the same issues as communists, but their policies were far more palatable to conservatives.

That approach failed around 2000. When the left was protesting against globalization, social democrats had people like Blair in charge, leaving no moderate options for those opposing globalization. And when the nationalist right started growing a bit later, the center-right similarly rejected them and the issues they raised.

You could say that the center-right and center-left parties fail, because they are no longer center-right or center-left. Instead, they are divided into ideological and moderate wings. The former want to address the same issues as the more radical parties on the same side, but they are unwilling to collaborate with the other side. The latter are all for collaboration, but they are unwilling to disrupt the status quo.

Dutch politics is very very different from the UK. There is no concept of working together for the country in the UK. its party first, stab your leader and take their spot.

The issue in the UK is that living standards have been dropping, or perceived to be dropping for the last 15ish years.

Housing and local community are the bigger issues. most people under 35 who don't own a house now will not be able to. So youre stuck renting. which means shitty houses.

Your local council has no cash, so the only thing they provide is adult social care and bins. Everything else fun/cohesive/community making has been cut. There are no kids clubs, and because there are so many renters, no real community in a lot of places.

Job prosepects are not great for 18-25 year olds and there are a record amount not in education employment or training (NEETs) which means they are rightly pissed off and depressed.

The causes are many, globalisation, cost cutting, and poor industrial policies. (plus a boat load else.)

The issue with PMs is they come in and promise change, but deliver only sound bites.

Cameron: stopped spending on the poor, set in chain brexit

May: delivered "brexit" but couldnt sell it to her party, thus we got a really shit deal (mind you no one wanted to compromise, so we are all guilty on that)

Boris: corrupt chancer that couldnt give a shit about anything for any length of time. Had a great way to get something devisive in the news papers and nothing else

Sunak: Tim nice but dim. No experience, charisma, or authority. No real guiding vision for what britian is supposed to be

Truss: Utterly deranged.

Starmer: confused having shit opponents with being good. Failed to think about policy until after he got in. Didn't want to make decisions, had no ability to create an argument for anything.

Burnham: he was a weak performer in the brown years, but that makes him a star performer in this present age. He failed to read the room in the last two leadership election. Was somewhat effective as the mayor of manchester. He might be alright, but he also has fuck all time, money or authority to do much

I partly agree with this but I don't think it addresses the root cause sufficiently. And that is (IMHO) the hoarding of land.

What the UK actually needs to do is land reform. All these duchies (etc) need to be dissolved and returned to the state. Next, the UK needs to build significant stock in social housing, much like Vienna did a century ago. That would be through a combination of building new housing stock and buying existing stock. Part of doing that would be by popping the buy-to-let economy, which is the only thing the UK produces now. And that's political suicide because more than half of the voters are deeply committed to ever-increasing housing prcies.

The first 5 PMs on your list were just Conservative shills for the billionaire class and the aristocracy. They were astroturfed by those same interests that drove Brexit. It's just theft from the British taxpayer on a massive scale.

The real reason this was allowed to happen can be blamed on Tony Blair. Just like Bill Clinton in the US, there was this disastrous wave of so-called Third Way noeliberalism that abandoned the working class and just becamse Conservative Lites. Labor ceased to represent the working class in the 1990s as a result.

We had a brief bright spot with Jeremy Corbyn but this brings us to Keir Starmer. He was part of a political hit on Corbyn, in big part because Corbyn was anti-Israel. Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn did in either of his elections. All that happened was that the right-wing vote was split between Conservative and Reform. That mistake won't happen again. The Conservatives have effectively been wiped out since. This is a consequence of first-past-the-post.

So Starmer was just a tool of the same establishment that backed the previous 5 PMs who was there to maintain the status quo.

Burnham is still an open question but I'm not super hopeful.

> the UK needs to build significant stock in social housing

YES. I think this would solve a number of problems, especially if they were built well and were built for a mix of sizes, family up to old people studio apartment

> To give an concrete example. The Netherlands has a severe housing crisis. Despite being a relatively rich country it's not uncommon for people (sometimes even couples) to live with their parents untill they're well in their 30ies.

I'm now writing a book provisionally called "How Democracy Got Strangled by Bike Lanes".

> Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.

People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.

It is my understanding that they didn't in fact "Just build more" so how would they know it was or wasn't working?

They did. The Netherlands added more than 1 million new units between 2012 (8,425,398 units) and 2025 (9,486,933 units). Source: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/en/dataset/81955ENG/table

During that time, the population grew from 16785299 to 17722333.

So they literally built MORE houses than the increase in population! Yet it's somehow a "housing crisis".

> So they literally built MORE houses than the increase in population! Yet it's somehow a "housing crisis".

You need to account for:

- Existing deficit

- The changing demographics, people are more likely to (prefer to) live alone putting more stress on the housing market

- The location

More young people are single and more old people prefer to live alone.

At the same time the housing crisis in Groningen might be less severe than in Amsterdam which is not visible in the nationwide numbers.

For a young single person in Amsterdam the situation will definitely feel like a crisis.

I can address your arguments point-by-point, but think about this. I clearly demonstrated that it's NOT the "just build more" issue. There are more housing units per household than ever in the US (and in the Netherlands).

So there's clearly something else going on.

And what makes you think that just building even more housing without understanding the underlying reasons can solve the issue of the soaring costs?

I feel like relying so much on supply is a farce if the supply is always able to be bought up by people who are already rich and able to continue owning everything by outcompeting working people. Building more has started to mean little to me if we (as in arbitrary municipalities or governing bodies) don't treat it as a special market in which people can't just buy as many as they want

They did build more they just didn't build that.

What did they build more of then?

They built at least one house. That's more housing.

So they did not in fact build more, by any definition that a reasonable person would use.

OK so the "at least one" is a Binface campaign promise, used as a joke here. I'm going to leave it up to you to figure out if the Netherlands builds more than 1 additional housing unit every year.

>People understand instinctively that "just building more" is not working and never will.

Wait. Why? Do they?

If the problem is the lack of housing. Why wouldn't building more be a solution?

Or are you refering that the phrase itself is dismissive of existing issues?

The key word is just. If all the new apartments are luxury or investment properties and your economy is unequal enough then investors will buy them all up and sit on them forever (because selling would drop the value of their portfolio). That keeps them off the market so housing prices never go down.

On the other hand if you also have public and co-op projects, rent control, vacancy and second home taxes to complement private developers then prices will definitely go down or at least stop growing faster than inflation. The housing market can never be competitive without state involvement because land is a natural monopoly.

Of course making building easier is also an important piece of the solution. One radical change I support is replace top-down zoning with a community vote so corrupt developers can't bribe their way to gentrification, and loud NIMBYs can't stop projects everyone else wants. Architects will hate it but cities are for the locals not for aesthetics.

A third of new construction in Amsterdam is social housing (subsidized housing for poor people).

Does this seem to you like it's working?

> If the problem is the lack of housing.

It's not. I don't have statistics for the Netherlands ready, but I would bet that they have more housing units than households. In the US, there's 1.1 housing unit per household.

> Why wouldn't building more be a solution?

Because it's not a housing problem. It's a problem with housing near dense city cores in an ever-dwindling number of cities.

Economic forces concentrate people into dense areas: dense population provides a larger talent pool for employers, so companies with offices in dense city cores have a long-term competitive advantage. This in turn attracts more people. Rinse, wash, repeat.

The solution is to recognize the externalities and properly manage them. For example: cap&trade/tax the dense office space, give tax incentives for remote work, provide tax holidays for people in sparse areas, and so on.

I agree. Which is a problem, considering that it absolutely would work if only they actually did it.

but isn't the story that they did build more?

If you live in a town with eight beds and ten people, and you just 'build more' your way into building another bed...

You're still going to have someone sleeping under a bridge, but now really smart people will raise their hand, and yell: "See? Building more was stupid, it didn't work."

And smarter people ask: "Hmm... It would be nice to know why ten people had to come to a town with 8 beds, while there's a town with 20 empty beds nearby"

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure that one out.