Blame Ide for America's problems

[grumbler]

I don't watch Colbert. He isn't funny any more.

He used to be funny, but appears now to take himself seriously, which is the death of comedy.

[Sheilbh]

I didn't know that Britain lacks a middle class (home ownership there is low).

You might mean Germany, or when you were in Britain? But home ownership here is about the same as in the US in the high-60s.

It was one of Thatcher's successful revolutions: turning the UK into a 'property-owning democracy'.

It is increasingly out of reach, especially for people my age and especially in London and the South-East. But that's as much because we don't build enough houses as anything else.

[Ideologue]

Well, again, my understanding is that London is one of those places where property values preclude home ownership for all but true elites.  If you own a home in London, you're a rich dude.

[Admiral Yi]

Why don't you build enough homes?

[Sheilbh]

Why don't you build enough homes?

The state used to build lots and no-one's come in to replace them:

Despite the fact that the population's growing faster than it has for decades. In London it's worse, because the city's doing better. It's as big as it's been since the thirties and will probably grow bigger than ever:


We have incredibly difficult planning laws that give a lot of power to people who already homeowners in an area. Who, as much as not wanting to spoil the village green, wouldn't want to see the value of their primary asset decline. In London there are too many restrictions on height, via a rather arcane way of there being certain spots around the city from which you must be able to see the dome of St Paul's. Ken Livingstone halved the number, but still.

All of which leads to this:


See more from the wonderful Economist writer Daniel Knowles, through Buzzfeed here:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/dlknowles/britains-dysfunctional-property-market-in-gi-fm44
And, to a lesser extent, here:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/dlknowles/the-north-south-divide-fm44

We need to build more or do things to expand the economy outside of London. Or both!

Unfortunately old people, who own all the houses, vote:

[Valmy]

In London there are too many restrictions on height, via a rather arcane way of there being certain spots around the city from which you must be able to see the dome of St Paul's.

Why?  So Jesus rays can shine in?

Granted we used to have a similar rather silly law about being able to see the State Capital, I guess so Texan pride can warm your heart or something.

[Ed Anger]

Prince Chuck the tampon hates skyscrapers also.

[Sheilbh]

Why?  So Jesus rays can shine in?

So the view of St Paul's isn't spoiled:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_view

[Valmy]

In Edinburgh, a 2005 skyline study compiled a list of almost 170 key views which will now be protected in the planning process.

  My God.  Hopefully that is less stupid than it sounds.

[Barrister]

Whitehorse has a strict policy of no buildings over four stories.

It works well when you have a population density of 0.07 people per square kilometre.

[Sheilbh]

Whitehorse has a strict policy of no buildings over four stories.

It works well when you have a population density of 0.07 people per square kilometre.

Yeah, less well when you've got one of over 5000 per square km.

Given the restrictions on London sprawling (good) and London growing up (bad) the other sensible option would be to build new towns and expand the current new towns. But that's difficult too.

As ever, I'm with Lord Adoni in the FT:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f0d7b122-3d91-11e3-9928-00144feab7de.html#axzz2ldXvxP4R

Radical state action is the answer to Britain's housing crisis
By Andrew Adonis

The heart of Britain's housing and growth crisis is the failure to build anywhere near enough homes to meet the rise in population and households.

This is especially true in London, whose population has risen by nearly 2m in the past 20 years and is projected to rise by another 1m in little more than a decade. Boris Johnson, the city's mayor, has set himself an annual target of 40,000 new homes. But last year barely 18,000 were completed. Independent experts suggest the target ought to be about 60,000. This largely explains why the average house price in the capital is heading north of £500,000.

Nationally, the crisis is as severe as in the early 1950s, when Harold Macmillan, then housing minister, pledged to build 300,000 homes a year. Yet today's build rate is less than half that, and at its lowest level since the 1920s.

An acute analysis comes in a new book, Good Cities, Better Lives, by Sir Peter Hall. The eminent urban planner describes a double crisis. The first entails a collapse in the building of social housing by local authorities and registered social landlords in the late 1970s and 1980s, neither reversed thereafter nor replaced by a sustained rise in private building. The second was a collapse in private building after the 2008 crash. Before this, the number of completions peaked at 426,000 in 1968; it has never reached even half that figure in the past 25 years.

Reinforcing this was the state's withdrawal from a central role in planning new settlements. The postwar new towns, begun under Prime Minister Clement Attlee, were mostly a success. Those around London have a combined population of 1.5m. In employment and average earnings, they exceed the national average. Yet in 40 years no big urban development has been built except London Docklands – the vision of Michael Heseltine, a Conservative minister who resisted the "do nothing and leave it to the market" tide. He has been proved right.

Sir Peter, who advised Lord Heseltine, deserves attention. His message is that the state – national and local – must resume its responsibilities. It is not enough to exhort the market and fiddle with planning. The state must engage once more in building communities – including new towns, extensions to existing towns and cities, and a radically improved approach to transport investment linking infrastructure to new housing.

...

A serious problem in England is the weakness of local government – although London, which has had a mayoralty since 2000, is a partial exception. At present, even local authorities' borrowing against their own assets and income to build houses is tightly constrained. "Free the cities from the dead hand of the Treasury and fundamentally decentralise the structure of government," writes Sir Peter. Lord Heseltine, too, has been saying this for decades.

...

The writer is shadow infrastructure minister and was transport secretary in the last UK government

[CountDeMoney]

Too many potential archeological sites of Stone Age mud farmers dragging rocks for hundreds of kilometers for no reason whatsoever to expand London into the countryside.

[Valmy]

Is the primary problem the over-centralization of the British Government?  I mean this just does not make sense, this is a huge need and a great way to get people working and grow the economy. 

[Sheilbh]

Is the primary problem the over-centralization of the British Government?  I mean this just does not make sense, this is a huge need and a great way to get people working and grow the economy.

Sort of.

The local authorities have huge say over planning decisions and most people don't want their area to be any more developed than it already is. So many local councils are reluctant to approve proposals for new homes. Lord Adonis also gives an example of Stevenage, a new town largely built in the 50s. The council there want expand and build 16 000 new houses which would be great for the local economy and it's also a London commuter town. But the rural councils around it are doing everything they can to stop it - central government could step in to help Stevenage. This reluctance is probably worse because the Tories heartland are precisely the sort of councils most likely to object to any new building. That's also true throughout the South of England.

On the other hand historically local government used to build a lot of houses - see the chart up there - and then rent them out. Thatcher sold people their council houses, which was generally good, but nothing's come in to replace the houses previously built by the state. Part of the problem for local government, as Adonis points out, is that the councils actually can't necessarily get back into building because of how tightly local council finances are controlled by the Treasury.

Basically local councils have a lot of power over planning problems. But that's fine because when that was passed the plan was that the state would build lots of houses anyway (though many were crappy). Then the councils ability to build houses were restricted as were their ability to raise money except from the Treasury. But the planning laws weren't liberalised at the same time and even the slightest hint of liberalising planning laws sends a big chunk of the media insane.

I like the sound of this, again from the Adonis article:

Sir Peter hails the Dutch Vinex programme, through which central government achieved agreements with local authorities that generated 455,000 homes between 1996 and 2005. This followed the 1991 Vinex report, a national spatial strategy in the mould of the 1944 Abercrombie plan for postwar London, which gave rise to the new towns. The success of Vinex was not simply a function of state action. "The houses had to be in the right places," writes Sir Peter, "close to existing cities ... above all in the heart of the Randstad [the region incorporating Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague], and also to minimise travel to cities and secure maximum use of public transport, walking and bicycles." The UK government promised a paper on new towns two years ago – Prime Minister David Cameron cited garden cities as a model – but it has not yet been published.

This Buzzfeed piece is very good on the reasons, if you've not had a look already:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/dlknowles/britains-dysfunctional-property-market-in-gi-fm44

Edit: On the other hand at least the green belt has worked:


Edit: Also the Buzzfeed piece talks about how small our houses are. Because there are so few being built any that actually gets built will sell. The other effect of that is that I think our houses are also kind of shitty. They're not just smaller but I think they're still awfully insulated compared to the rest of Europe which means despite having one of the lowest prices for domestic energy, we have some of the highest energy bills

Edit: The shortage has also led to the horrible trend of landlords converting living rooms into extra bedrooms so they can up the rent

Having said all of that if I had any money I'd be buying up student houses like a modern day Rachman

[CountDeMoney]

We have "green belt" issues that try to address sprawl as well, they're just incredibly localized and not at the national government level like England.    Plenty of regions in America where all the well-off people (read: white) left the cities, built nice homes and schools in the countryside, then promptly passed lots of local laws to prevent anybody else (read: blacks) from following them out to their idyllic sylvan landscapes and golf courses.   We're just so big, it's not really a problem anybody cares to do anything about.

Or we can spend the rest of our lives fighting economic gladiatorial combat, where the people with the most money get the houses and the people at the bottom get to live five to a room in a B&B in Leicester.

That's the way people in power like it.  Good luck with that.