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Why Britain doesn’t build

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Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#241

Post by hifromLA »

prottog wrote: post #177
parthdesai wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or at least in North America, younger people don't want to live in soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing to do apart from visiting the same big box stores, chain restaurants and bars in exactly same looking plaza.

Real estate isn't immune to the law of supply and demand, which mandate that you can only pick at most two out of size (or quality) of the housing unit, location (and the quality thereof), and price. Most places in the US are either affordable and boring or the other way around. > soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger people's part. You can have just as…

Let me offer a counterpoint: I live in LA because it is home to the largest immigrant population in the US from the country where my parents were born. When I go to the grocery store, restaurants, concerts, festivals, etc. I am experiencing that cultural connection.

There’s numerous spaces I’ve been in where English is rarely spoken and it gives me the opportunity to maintain my language skills.

Do you think I could have that in generic suburbia?

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#242

Post by mhh__ »

WalterBright wrote: post #235
edent wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not correct. During the recent elections in England about 14,000 people were denied a vote due to lack of ID. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-65988959

Great Britain has 67 million people. 14,000 people is unlikely to swing any election, even if they all voted in lockstep.

14,000 in the right places could easily topple a government in a tight election because of FPTP - although one can obviously not choose in reality.

In 2017 for example the minimum number of votes across the country needed to take down Theresa May (or more realistically have her form a true minority government) was something like 2500.

We have an extremely disproportional electoral system.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#243

Post by thebooktocome »

prottog wrote: post #177
parthdesai wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or at least in North America, younger people don't want to live in soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing to do apart from visiting the same big box stores, chain restaurants and bars in exactly same looking plaza.

Real estate isn't immune to the law of supply and demand, which mandate that you can only pick at most two out of size (or quality) of the housing unit, location (and the quality thereof), and price. Most places in the US are either affordable and boring or the other way around. > soulless suburbs where there's literally nothing This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger people's part. You can have just as…

> You can have just as much fun at the TGI Friday's at your local strip mall as you can at the hippest restaurant no one else has ever heard of in Brooklyn. It's just a matter of who you spend that time with, and how you perceive that time, in the Stoic tradition.

There is something fundamentally different about the cultural life in cities. The suburbs are actually "soulless" in comparison.

https://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl010.htm

Worth pointing out that every Stoic I can think of was an upper-class city-dweller. Epicurus—Athens. Marcus Aurelius—Rome. Zeno of Citium—Athens again, but perhaps apocryphal. Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus—Rome again [0].

[0] I'm reminded now that Epictetus was not particularly wealthy, and did live an ascetic lifestyle. Perhaps the exception that makes the rule.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#244

Post by pitaj »

majormajor wrote: post #225
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #128

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…

The purpose of real estate development is to make real estate more valuable. So if you have laws restricting that development you need to look further than just "real-estate investors don't want development." Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit. The better off - and therefore more politically-co…

> The purpose of real estate development is to make real estate more valuable.

Nope. It's to make money for the developers.

> Even ones not doing the development benefit financially - landlords love being able to raise the rents cause other people in the area built a bunch of new shit.

Gentrification is a result of shortage. When wealthier people are priced out of rich neighborhoods, the only place for them to go is poor neighborhoods. It just so happens that poor neighborhoods with the least amount of political power are the first ones to be redeveloped when there's a shortage of housing.

> And the long-term property values trends clearly shows that cities with more development, that more people want to move to, are where you find ROI.

Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values. Places that are actually able to build housing to even kinda meet demand are doing much better.

You can see a ton of development but that doesn't really mean anything. Often there's not even enough development to meet the rate of growth in a given city, let alone reduce prices meaningfully.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#245

Post by dan-robertson »

dahwolf wrote: post #194

In the Netherlands we don't really have a big NIMBY issue and we still can't keep up supply with demand. Supply is complicated and not just restricted by zoning. 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 go…

The Netherlands has basically the highest long-term private:public building rate in Europe. Uk is second. Other Western European countries have publicly built units as a higher proportion, so it feels it ought to be possible for the Netherlands government to build more public housing. Doubt it’s necessary though. I expect there might be some kind of public-private middle ground that gets classified differently in NL, but that’s a guess.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#246

Post by gumballindie »

If you wish to solve the housing issue then make it easier for individuals to build homes. Build quality in the uk is appalling anyway so why not streamline the process for people to buy land, build on said land? Also incentivise companies to allow work from home. There is no need for people to cram into overcrowded cities for jobs that dont require in office presence. That way folks can spread around, as i did, in cleaner, safer, less crowded areas of the country.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#247

Post by bradleyjg »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #128
ggm wrote: 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…

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…

Greed is exactly the right word. There is a flat unwillingness to acknowledge or reason from the fact by so many homeowners that they are sitting on giant, completely unearned windfalls. There’s a huge sense of entitlement around these inflated prices.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#248

Post by dan-robertson »

leg100 wrote: post #22

The housing crisis is universal. There's been growing inability to build in many countries, as the article readily admits. People can't afford homes across the world: USA, Canada, Australia, even China, where supply isn't a problem per se. The article should then address this global phenomenon rather than conclude it is a "political problem", suggesting it is some kind of peculiar ideology exported out of Britain.

Interestingly, I think it’s much worse in English speaking countries than other developed countries. The real estate problems in China are quite different, I think.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#249

Post by ericd »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #230
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> adult social care crisis, a pension crisis, and in some areas a rundown NHS I remember about 10 years ago, "the idea" was that retirees would, as their health starts to decline, do equity-release in their homes to pay for their care needs (on the basis that the NHS would start to means-test care based on the value of all assets, including housing, so that if an OAP has £1m locked-up in their house and they probably…

Theresa May tried to sell this as part of her election campaign. It was a disaster. No one wants to be forced to give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into. That may not be fair, but when most voters are property owners you're not going to get a different outcome. This is an interesting topic because it highlights how the political and economic culture is broken and incapab…

It seems like maybe they didn’t pay in enough - baby boom demographics meant there were relatively more productive workers paying for relatively few old people, so each worker was paying a fraction of what it would cost to carry themselves through old age.

Also, not enough kids, and of those, not enough who wanted to go into medicine.

It seems like baby booms have a way of making things seem artificially good for a while, and then there’s a hangover.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#250

Post by hadlock »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #49
ggm wrote: 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…

Something like 10-50 of the population worldwide, depending on where/how you measure, moved from rural areas to cities since WW2. This completely upended the large scale population density situation that had existed for millennia. Also, as I'm sure anyone in California or Texas will tell you, there are 1) only so many good places to build and/or 2) so far someone is willing to commute. There is lots of land available to build on 4 hours from San Francisco at pretty reasonable prices (I looked at a 2.5 acre triangle of land with a seasonal creek on it for $40,000), but nobody will pay $900/sq ft for a house that far from their office, even if they WFH 4 days a week.
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