Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Britain doesn’t build

worksinprogress.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 520 posts

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#311

Post by danjac »

oh_sigh wrote: post #220
danjac wrote: post #26

This is an interesting political trap for the ruling Conservatives that they have made for themselves. The traditional Conservative voter is a home-owner. So you might be a rabid socialist in your youth, but once you get a job, save up for a deposit, and buy your own home, you eventually transition to become yet another middle-aged Tory voter. That pipeline is now broken - young people are unable to save up for their…

So on this theory, will millennials turn to Tories, just a little later than their parents? Since they will be inheriting the properties their parents own soon enough.

That assumes that they will leave their houses to their children, and not just sell them to pay for social care.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#312

Post by IceHegel »

It seems like lots of places that used to build don't anymore (USA anyone) and detailed analysis about why a particular nation or sector is having issues is always helpful. That being said, I think there is also a background issue of much of the "democratic" (really oligarchic) way of governing being overall spent and exhausted.

It can't focus energy at anywhere near the intensity it used to. Compare the New Deal to recent infrastructure bills. Imagine building the CA Highway 1 today... that was one of hundreds of successful new deal projects.

But you can't repeat the past and we keep trying to with ever larger bureaucracies doing fainter and fainter imitations of the new deal.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#313

Post by andyferris »

aetherson wrote: post #308
majormajor wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nope. It's to make money for the developers. Sure. Let's look a simple condo case: Developer pays X for property. Developer spends Y to build a building. Developer sells N units for Z. To make money, N Z has to be greater than X Y aka the total value of that parcel is now higher. > Reversed causation. It's literally just supply and demand. Places with high demand and not enough supply have growing property values.…

When you build new housing (as in, increase the number of units of housing that are available in total), you make your lot more valuable, which makes other lots less valuable. So a developer makes makes money by making their lot more valuable, but they do not "make real estate more valuable" generally. This is much like, you know, every other thing in the world. When a shoe manufacturer makes shoes, their shoes have…

With shoes, sure.

With housing, it depends. There can be a proximity effect. The old house next to all the nicely redeveloped new houses is now worth more, even if the total number of bedrooms hasn't changed during the redevelopment, because it is in a nicer environment (and a buyer might want to redevelop the old house, and live in a nice house in a nice suburb).

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#314

Post by littlestymaar »

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…

> we still can't keep up supply with demand

Are you even sure that this is true? I'm French and I've been hearing the construction sector complaining about too low supply for my entire life to eventually learn in my 30s that we in fact have an ever increasing record number of empty houses…

> One key thing to understand is that private companies build homes, not governments.

You say this as if it was some law of nature, but it's not: states are completely able to build housing, it's just a political decision not to and leave the private sector do the work. And given that we've all been living in a “housing crisis” for post of our life, we can empirically conclude that the private sector is unable to provide enough housing.

> Surely the entire western world would not have this problem if it was a simple as a policy change.

As long as entire western world shares the same political ideology and have the same power structures, there's no wonder they face the same issues. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#315

Post by watwut »

nervousvarun wrote: post #205
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.

Until they get married/have kids and do the same thing their parents and their parent's parents did...move to the suburbs. One difference with "younger" kids now is they're getting married later...but once you have kids the suburbs look completely different and it's been that way for as long as there have been suburbs.

I do notnthink suburbs are better for kids or parents. They can't go anywhere unless being driven, so they are either stuck at home or parent have to drive then around. There are less other kids to play with, kids are limited to backyard. Same for after school activities, much less is going on.

Unless you are talking about literal toddler, it is nit that awesome.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#316

Post by FreshStart »

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…

The kind of state that is suicidally anorexic.

And all the companies then become little monopoly states within the state, bloated and unable to perform basic task. Which why the dysfunctional ideology has to be pushed worldwide. Any state not participating and not protecting the monopolies could easily out outcompete this mess and they do.

Worst of all it ain't even news, ambitious people disassembling the spaceship that keeps them alive is as old as time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Hungary_(1301%E2%...

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#317

Post by HWR_14 »

parthdesai wrote: post #261
prottog wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is a bit of a reductionist take on those younger people's part. 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. I'm one of those younger people. The main difference here is, "the hip" restaurant in Brooklyn will have vastly different food than a hip restaurant in SF. Can't say that about TGIFs

I haven't noticed that there is "vastly different food" in SF vs Brooklyn. TGIF has bad food, but that's a different question.

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#318

Post by thwarted »

bobthepanda wrote: post #253
majormajor wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thing is that large developers love restricting development because it limits competition. If there is only a limited supply of land to build further on, it is much easier to corner said market of land and sit on it if the prices are not high enough for your liking. The cheapest development is the kind that larger developers do not bother with (one house to two or three on a single plot of land, rather than large…

This is not the case in SF. Developers want to build, but entrenched interests fight and delay, often using the rhetoric that doing so only makes developers richer and the only reason developers want to develop is so the developers themselves make money (as if this is some kind of purity test of intent).

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#319

Post by robertlagrant »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #266
robertlagrant wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's almost like private builders are incentivised to squeeze the market rather than bring prices down. Yes - incentivised by government regulations to do so, and moreover too disincentivised to build. If you can't make money by building, it's better to wait. No builder wants to stop building - money now is much better than money in the future - but enough government and local intervention will cause this. The hous…

> No builder wants to stop building - money now is much better than money in the future This is plainly false in every way. Firstly, buildijg is an expense - why would you build now if you can put off the expense? Seocndly, market manipulation is as old as markets themselves.

> This is plainly false in every way. Firstly, buildijg is an expense - why would you build now if you can put off the expense?

It might be worth considering how, if that were true, anything that has a capital investment required of it ever gets done. Building is not an expense to a building company. What do you think the company does to generate revenue, if it's not building?

Re: Why Britain doesn’t build

#320

Post by WalterBright »

klyrs wrote: post #252
WalterBright wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elections are largely monopolized by older people who mostly tend to be homeowners. This doesn't explain the constant increase in property tax levies being passed in Washington State.

If you're going to cherrypick a single example to rebut the existence of an overarching trend in the UK, you could at least pick a state with an income tax. Or, perhaps, not beat the dead horse at all and talk about Britain.

Washington state just decided that capital gains were not income, and imposed a 7% tax on them.

Besides, I don't see how the age demographics in Wa state would be materially different from Britain's.

Post reply on HN