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Why Britain doesn’t build

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101–110 of 520 posts

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#101
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Travelling to another country for treatment sounds like the luxury to be honest. The unluxury would be no health care, or travelling 100 miles within the UK by train/bus.

Having to wait 6 months for treatment isn’t luxury, what are you talking about. That’s effectively no health care.

I am contesting the "having" part of that sentence. The UK has problems, but it is not a country in dire straits.

To be clear: We are talking about GP right? To say get your blood pressure checked, or some mild antibiotics, or a rash cream, or referral to specialist? Not a specific treatment or surgery.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#102
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a limited amount of space and a non-negligible portion of society are unable to afford market rates. When the state doesn't build accommodation, citizens end up transferring ludicrous amounts to private landlords to house foster children, asylum seekers, the poor, or the disabled. 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…

> There's a limited amount of space So build denser, taller housing. We sprawl massively compared to developments on the continent. > a non-negligible portion of society are unable to afford market rates If we increase supply, market rates will fall. That's how markets work. Therein lies the real problem, of course: real estate investors with existing holdings don't want the rates to fall, and they have influence ove…

> To be clear, the failure was not in the act of selling itself, but in the decision to not reinvest the proceeds into new housing stock. This is the part that made the housing problem worse instead of better.

The kind of mass sell-off that occurred could only be considered a massive failure. Selling individual properties at market value when the intention is to reinvest that money is clearly without objection. But to this day, the government offers discounts of up to 70% on social housing. It is a direct transfer of public wealth into private ownership and it has invariably led to worse outcomes where it has occurred. Social housing, royal mail, and water infrastructure are the obvious examples but less obviously there's PFIs, energy, and the nhs.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: I originally said Britain built 30k houses last year, which commenters have corrected. Thank you! I don't really understand all this. Surely the main reason for a lack of housing is the difference between house demand (e.g. Britain took in 606k people in net immigration last year) compared to house supply (Britain built I think around 200k houses last year). The state shouldn't need to build houses (in fact it…

> The state shouldn't need to build houses (in fact it doesn't; it just uses your tax money to pay private companies to build houses). It should just make the building and zoning rules simple enough that it's possible to make money from building houses and selling them, and let people get on with it. This is the modern wisdom in the west - it's the approach taken by many governments since the Reagan era (not just in…

I cannot comment on other countries, but this is clearly not practiced in the US. The US has not simplified building and zoning rules or made them more permissive. The US follows the third option: do nothing and hope it fixes itself.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#104
post #3

I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights declarations. What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix housing when states can do precisely that? Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes. It made individual househol…

It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes. It makes me question whether there is any real democracy; did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence? And it’s not as if the eventual negative outcomes of housing costs continually outstripping wage growth weren’t obvious and growing year on year. Who is actuall…

> Who is actually in control here? Is it blind forces pushing us to an inevitable outcome? The Illuminati? Lizard people?

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

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#105
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> current home owners - their ageing voting base - are NIMBYs who don't want the wrong sort of people living near them and any reduction in demand that would reduce their value of their homes New housing is directly against the interests of existing homeowners. Any plan that relies on people seriously disadvantaging themselves in order to benefit other people they don’t know is doomed to failure.

Only if those people who are going to be disadvantaged have political power. If the majority stand to gain by new housing, and they can elect a majority of MPs under the UK system, then the NIMBY voice is moot (although there will be no doubt resistance at local level where much of the planning will take place).

Don't get forget a lot of MPs are landlords. And not just Tory MPs.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#106
post #3

I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights declarations. What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix housing when states can do precisely that? Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes. It made individual househol…

It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes. It makes me question whether there is any real democracy; did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence? And it’s not as if the eventual negative outcomes of housing costs continually outstripping wage growth weren’t obvious and growing year on year. Who is actuall…

I can't see a problem here. It only happens because (slightly) more than half of voters are happy with their housing situation and prefer it stay the way it is (that is, perpetually increasing prices, so they can earn equity => retire). They consciously vote for people who ensures just that.

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

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#107
post #3

I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights declarations. What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix housing when states can do precisely that? Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes. It made individual househol…

It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes. It makes me question whether there is any real democracy; did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence? And it’s not as if the eventual negative outcomes of housing costs continually outstripping wage growth weren’t obvious and growing year on year. Who is actuall…

It's not coincidence, and it's not conspiracy. It's zeitgeist, and people seeing one place do something and decide that's a good idea, and people following everything from scientific (and pseudoscientific) studies that came out around the time, to philosophical works published around the time, to all of the above that were old but re-popularized around the time.

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.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#108
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something cannot both be a good investment and accessible to all. Roads are a perfect example of a good investment that is accessible to all. It's called a "common good", and it exists.

Who's out here speculating on roads?

Nobody, and it should be the damn same with housing.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#110
post #3

I find the economic reductionism in housing planning really irritating. It's not like other public utility functions, but it is damn close to a fundamental and is included in human rights declarations. What kind of state throws up it's hands and claims "it can't" fix housing when states can do precisely that? Thatcher's revolution in council housing is a cesspit of counterfactual outcomes. It made individual househol…

It’s the whole western world at the same time. The same policies, the same social outcomes. It makes me question whether there is any real democracy; did we all just happen to make the exact same decisions in lock step since the 70s by incredible coincidence? And it’s not as if the eventual negative outcomes of housing costs continually outstripping wage growth weren’t obvious and growing year on year. Who is actuall…

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