191–200 of 520 posts
Planning permits are questionable in their legality and you feel things just get rubber stamped and there's a pretense of process in the same vein of the first chapter of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate 2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate. 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners. The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or ch…
"Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". Sounds like democracy?
> Sounds like democracy?
Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID. And if they manage to get off work on election day. Meanwhile the elderly are reliably on the register (because they're not being forced to move around, because again they own a home) and encouraged to vote even if they're expected to die before the results take effect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". Sounds like democracy?
> "Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". > Sounds like democracy? Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID. And if they manage to get off work on election day. Meanwhile the elderly are reliably on the register (because t…
uhh what? we're talking about britain here. I don't know what kind of yank(?) political dysfunction you're alluding to, but nobody has any trouble voting because of a lack of ID here. you don't need one to vote. you notify the electoral roll when you move into a house or flat, then a few weeks before election day you get a bit of paper in the post, you can bring it to the polling station to prove you live there.
One key thing to understand is that private companies build homes, not governments. And if it's not profitable to do so, it will simply stop. And if not at least 75% of the project is sold beforehand, the project is stopped altogether.
And this is how our government's ambitious plan to build ~100K new homes per year got crushed. In particular due to rate hikes, making mortgages even more expensive than before, so potential buyers opt-out.
This part is critically important to reflect on as it keeps happening. There's an economic downturn and the building of new homes slows down or stops. This happened over here from 2008-2014 creating a massive backlog, in turn leading to a pricing boom in recent years. Ideally, you'd keep building during a downturn but nobody knows how as there's no buyers and it's too big to subsidize. Hence, at least in the Netherlands, unaffordable prices are not due to zoning, they are a supply deficit based on downturns.
There's also labor shortage, material shortage/inflation, far more complicated construction due to the energy transition. And yes, higher than usual immigration is a factor. One of many factors.
And guess what? In my area, the grid is full. A few more homes can get connected but not a single new company can connect for the coming 10 years or so and it takes billions in investments to fix. This in reference to new housing supply having lots of other dependencies.
We also tried rent control on private rent. Guess what? The land lords simply sell the property, now you'll have even less rent supply. Well done.
My point being: increasing supply is not easy in this perfect storm. Surely the entire western world would not have this problem if it was a simple as a policy change. It very much involves constraints in the physical and economical world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate 2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate. 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners. The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or ch…
"Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". Sounds like democracy?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my pet peeves is that UK infrastructure focus seems to be about getting people to the centre of London faster, and that just makes the pressure on London greater at excessive costs, and then you start the cycle all over. You see that even with HS1 and HS2, where instead of focusing on lines towards London it'd have been better to strengthen the triangle of Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and pour money into effe…
The New York City region is like this too. Forget connecting the NJ and CT suburbs, even Queens to Brooklyn to Bronx is inconvenient.
With a highway on the other hand, it seems a lot easier to serve more people with less complicated infrastructure. When you run a highway to a town instead of the subway line example above, pretty much everyone in town is close enough to the local highway ramp with a car on the existing road network. You don't have to consider schedules or hire train operators, people drive themselves when it works for their commute. This highway also serves freight, so now you don't need to sell right of way to a freight rail company with the expectation they maintain the line to your town forever (they probably wont). A truck bay is cheaper to build for a business than a freight rail loading dock and maintenance of a rail spur.
A lot of cities in the US that are I'd say less than 1 million people without any geographic bottlenecks are a dream to get around with a car. You pretty much never hit traffic on the highway, so 20 miles is 20 mins away always. The highway network serves the entire region, so you can go just about everywhere in the area in 20 miles in those 20 minutes, not just a handful of places.
To offer that sort of convenience, turnkey scheduling with basically 25 minute door to door commutes, in transit form across lets say a 20x20 mile area would be enormously expensive, in the low trillions I'd guess given current american prices on subway tunnels per mile. Whatever we can afford to build won't nearly be so useful, and people are already so addicted to this sort of high speed car based transit that the cat is entirely out of the bag and now this is the expectation, this simply unachievable level of personal convenience using transit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". Sounds like democracy?
> "Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". > Sounds like democracy? Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID. And if they manage to get off work on election day. Meanwhile the elderly are reliably on the register (because t…
Which is democracy. It is fair in that sense, although surely it will not feel that way at all times.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Politicians and the bureaucratic class have deep investments in real estate 2. Foreign money keeps flooding into western economies to find a safe haven and lack of capital controls. A bulk of it goes into real estate. 3. Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners. The entire system is rigged against anything that would impact home prices - such as an increase in supply or ch…
"Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". Sounds like democracy?
Large polities result in the same policies being applied to regions that are fundamentally different in ways that make policy good for some and bad for others.
I think housing issues present a good case for confederalism or even anarchism. States rights in the US or Swiss Cantons are examples where different regions have more control over policies and thus can suit them to their own specific needs. The smaller the polity the better. Also why special economic zones tend to produce good outcomes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Infrastructure isn't perfect, but we talk about housing shortages because people earning double the national average wage rent rooms with other professionals in houses designed for a single family whilst trying to save up double their annual wage for a deposit on a >25 year mortgage on a flat. Whereas for all the UK's infrastructure problems, power brownouts due to lack of generation capability or lack of a local pol…
This comment shows up the other issue, the London-centric nature of UK politics. If you think the UK transport network is OK, but pick the most extreme examples of housing costs, you're probably a Londoner. The housing situation is awful elsewhere, but still a long way from London's extremes. But if you live elsewhere, try getting anywhere by road or by rail, and it's usually a grim experience.
The reason why transport infrastructure is "so bad" is because in every city apart from London, you cannot build outside the city so developers often have to get planning permission on sites in rural areas and they can't connect transport to nearby cities.
It is quite maddening because building is often actually blocked in some of these cities because of infrastructure concerns too...even though, the problem would be solved at a higher level by building closer to cities.
The whole thing is bad intention arguments the whole way down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners". > Sounds like democracy? Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID. And if they manage to get off work on election day. Meanwhile the elderly are reliably on the register (because t…
>Young people might get their first chance to vote at age 23 - assuming they paid for the right kind of ID, or navigated an impenetrable web of underpaid bureaucrats to get the mythical free ID. uhh what? we're talking about britain here. I don't know what kind of yank(?) political dysfunction you're alluding to, but nobody has any trouble voting because of a lack of ID here. you don't need one to vote. you notify th…
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/about-14000-people-england-...