Why Britain doesn’t build

Hahaha. Can't we just ditch capitalism altogether? It can't even pay and provide housing to people who perform critical jobs.

Or are we discussing building barracks for slaves?

Not really discussing the slowdown of building and mass-selloff of council owned housing since 1979 is a curious omission from an otherwise detailed description of public policy on housing. Private sector housebuilders have different incentives from public authorities, and maximising the profit from a site need not mean maximising the number of available homes (especially not given Britons with purchasing power were the original suburbanites). Nor does it mean building on all the limited supply of local land suitable for development at once, when it can be released in tranches (homebuilders have several years worth of plots with planning permission for every home they build in a year)

I'll amend, but noting the change.

Part of the solution could be governments shifting people and jobs around to secondary less popular cities.

You say it's a failure but for those who own land or have tenants - including the average homeowner, it's a success. It's also a success for house builders, of course.

From [1]:

> In total 115 MPs across all parties are landlords, accounting for 18 per cent of the House of Commons. This compares to around three per cent of the UK adult population who are landlords.

It's in their interests.

On top of that, the supply is dwarfed by demand even before all that migration, which drives the "success" I outlined above, the high inward migration has kept wages low and reduced the need for the kind of large capital investment that would be needed to replace cheap labour.

Again, the kind of wealthy people who are landowners benefit from this, perhaps in this instance not the average homeowner, though there was that woman on Question Time who wondered where they'd find people to make her Pret coffee[2].

The real failures here are the failure to understand the interests of all the parties involved: those with land (high migration drives demand, increases wealth and suppresses outgoings like wages and R&D), and the interests of those without (stronger negotiating position in labour market, lower demand for housing). The average Joe should oppose large scale unskilled migration with all their might, if they want a home, enough doctors, better working conditions etc.

Strangely enough, the media, largely owned by very rich people or run by government aligned interests, seem to be against that. It's a mystery how so many people are called racists for being against migration levels unparalleled in history with so many deleterious effects. A total mystery.

[1] https://www.landlordtoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2021/7/reveale...

[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bbc-question-time-pre...

Let workers buy land cheap and you will have a lower base level of housing cost, bringing the cost for all other housing down. Why would I want the government to rob me to build a house, when I could have built it myself if I hadn't been robbed?

Space is limited by regulation and zoning. 90% of the UK is rural. Market rates are high because of the supply not matching the demand, or being allowed to match it. Asulym seekers make up a small amount (3%?) of the people who we take in - e.g. in 2022 we took in 606k people, but under 20k of them were asulum seekers.

> 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 some of the worst housing stock in Europe, with renters paying more for less.

The same number of people would need housing, regardless of whether the houses were privately owned or state owned.

> Without state intervention in housing regulation/supply we'd see shanty towns spring up fairly quickly, followed by violence. Refer to Champlain Towers, Grenfell Tower, or the collapsed luxury apartments in the Turkey earthquake to see what happens when the state does not do enough to ensure builders aren't building death traps.

I don't understand this. I didn't say no regulation. But there's a huge gap between that and making it incredibly difficult to build. Citing some basic anti-zero regulation argument in response to what I said is disheartening.

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 over how much new stock gets built.

> It was a colossal failure

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.

We are literally subsidising the least productive "profession" in society, to the tune of billions. It's an absolute joke.

Yes, probably, but isn’t this worse? Group incentives favour those that already have capital (material and political), which creates a feedback-loop increasing the rich-poor divide until… what exactly? What’s the end-state? A return to feudalism? Bloody revolution?

It just seems like there was a “once upon a time” where politics was about “this is the society we want”, and they tried to build it. Now it seems we’ve all just given up.

Meaningless! Meaningless! Let’s deconstruct society until we can argue that a future of 1% home ownership is somehow better.

What you're hearing isn't accurate. Rents are going up in Tokyo, not down. Sure, there's a bunch of abandoned houses way out in remote rural areas, but no one wants to live there (for good reason). Housing prices do seem a lot more stable than in Anglosphere nations, however, and they're constantly building new housing (and knocking down old buildings to make way for them). Just like many other places, the population is concentrating in the big cities, so the population is generally rising there. However, unlike the US in particular, the Japanese yen has fallen a lot in value during the pandemic, and combined with recent inflation, this might have something to do with the recent rise in rents.

It seems a bit silly to argue that increasing land prices is principally a result of marketing. The amount of earth on the planet in the last 10k years essentially hasn't changed but the number of humans has increased almost 2000%. Population growth is surely a "blind force", right?

I think nimbyism just appeals to the monkey side of the brain we all have. If you are happy and surviving, there's probably millions of years of biological evolution in your behavior that's telling you to keep up what you are doing where you are. There's probably a side of your brain that subconsciously gets irritated at seeing more humans move into an area competing for resources with you, even if today that just means a parking spot at the grocery store and not an appreciable dent on game populations. Stuff like cities and dense living on top of many different "tribes" only happened within the last few thousand years, that's only like 50-100 generations and that's only considering those ancient cities that were around then, plenty of places have been rural for all of human history. Not nearly enough time to expect a significant amount of adaption, and that's only if there is a remarkably strong selective pressure favoring adaption.

However, we haven't exactly seen better systems of governance, plus not all democratic societies are filled with such short-sighted idiots like we see in the US, and those societies are doing much better long-term and stability-wise.

Also, alternative explanation of the lizard people thing: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600>

A good example of this is the age at which our constitutions were drafted vs how old politicians are now. This is also the case in Norway but I think the US is a more relatable example on HN: Biden is twice the average age of the delegates in 1787.

Makes one wonder whether capitalism is actually compatible with democracy.

It is to the extent that various laws and regulations prevent or strongly disincentivize new construction, yes.

> the fact that it involves most of the western world makes me think it may have to do with monetary policy

It does. Mortgage loans have always been one of the primary places that governments choose to put newly printed money. The ostensible purpose of this is to make it easier for people to own homes, but what it actually does is bid up home prices to the point where consumers are no better off than they were before, but financial institutions and other corporate interests make a nice extra profit. It's similar to the way the easy availability of financial aid for college has not actually made it easier for people to go to the college of their choice (indeed, admission rates to many colleges have sharply declined as financial aid becomes more available), it's just transferred more wealth to the colleges from taxpayers.

In my opinion, this is an underutilized term that could be used to group trends/behaviors and consequently policy decisions.

Consultancy can be a good thing - or a bad thing, depending on which consultants are brought in, and why.

It is one of the oldest tropes that consultants are brought in to tell people what they already know - and there is some truth in it. But when it comes down to it, consultants are asked to do this job because they are external - and they can tell truth to power without being seen as having an internal political agenda.

As consultants, we are brought in by clients to provide skills that they don't have in house. There tend to be two reasons for this. Either they want us for a short period to do a specific task which wouldn't be worth them recruiting for, or they are looking for a longer term relationship - in which case we can offer them access to a wider pool of talent than they would get by recruiting in.

Finally, I have worked with a great number of talented folks at all stages of their careers. Almost without exception, every one of them has been passionate about their work, and determined to do the best job possible for the clients. And a number of them have left us to work directly for clients.

[edited for typos]

also, people getting surprised by the continuation of urbanization is ridiculous (but also a complete fucking tragedy).

Because the 3 bed house is a signal to potential mates that you are financially capable of starting a family. Don't get me wrong there's a lot that goes into picking a partner and not everyone is going to be bothered by it, but there's a substantial portion out there who are going to look at where you live as an indicator of whether you're a potential long term suitor. Which is sad really because I think people used to meet, fall in love with the actual person rather than a checklist, and then took on challenges together and grew as a result, like moving into a small or rundown house, renovating it and then starting a family. There is an insidious streak in dating culture now where getting with someone who hasn't already made it is interpreted as "settling for less than you deserve". Don't get me wrong, you've got to have some standards and dealbreakers, but if you watch any of the matchmaking shows on Netflix, the criteria most of the dates have for their potential partners is wild. There's a reason Sima Aunty is always telling them to compromise, she knows exactly what's up!

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/millennials-will-not...

This is a pretty good analysis. Yes, some rightward shift. Things to change, though sometimes they change back as well. Millennials are still far more left-leaning than boomers as they age.

> Critically, millennials are also much more Democratic than their predecessors were at the same age, as the chart above on the age gap in recent U.S. elections makes clear. And this exceptional partisan distribution is rooted in the generation’s distinctive social values, which do not typically change drastically over time.

This data is particularly telling: https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

Other reading material: https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767... https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/generation-wars-ov... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/21/age-not-cla...

Having a permanent, of sorts, attachment to a location incentivizes people to vote to protect their interests in that location.

This is ofc a rhetorical question as you can see the answers play out very clearly in nearly every conservative party in the world (and much more subtle and convoluted in the parties left of them).

Nobody wants to rent a shoebox apartment in NYC for the rest of their life. But if you're not rich your only choices are to rent the shoebox or to leave NYC, and people choose which one matters more to them.

You should read about Vienna, which is a relatively large city that’s bucking the trend.

And forget wages, sticking around in small cities is often career suicide. As a young person, you can’t be blamed for wanting McKinsey in NYC on your resume instead of Acme Hardware Store in random town, Idaho.

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 have less than 5-6 years to live it's only fair that they liquidate some of that wealth instead of expecting the NHS to pay for everything - while those who don't own their own houses, would still benefit from free NHS care).

I left the UK just-over 10 years ago (but I still visit my parents a few times a year and do the WFH-thing-but-abroad) so I'm not as clued-in on subtler points of public policy, but I'm curious if that's still the case? ...or if the Tories reversed that decision in the 8 years they've held power? (after-all, it would be anathema to Daily Mail readers, who give me the impression that they fully expect to enjoy their house-prices even after they're dead).

It's also about rapidly declining population and people not willing to work. The result of welfare state.

If you incentivize people to develop themselves, acquire skills and knowledge, work and make kids, then they will be able to afford housing, medical care and pensions.

> 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.

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.

Here is an example -

16 year olds who have a keen interest in their futute, are not allowed to vote.

A 90 year old, who does not even remember that USSR has already collapsed, votes for a war-Mongering government.

18 year olds are drafted into the army and sent to fight a war, and they never had a chance to vote at all. Maybe their entire experience of democracy is getting sent to faraway land to die.

Their experience is indistinguishable from tyrany

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.

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 complexes)

Then, by some modern definition, you are a nazi and a bigot.

There is a real demographic advantage for the elderly, and those who own homes, even if we ignore the propensity for young people to fail to vote.

If you assume 2.5 people per household for those new homes, their needs would be met by the addition of a single GP to an existing surgery.

Then consider that the typical buyers of new builds will be younger and healthier than average.

And that of those ~2,500 new residents, some are likely to be doctors themselves who would otherwise be unable to live in the area.

And that GP surgeries are private for-profit businesses.

And you realise the issues are more complex than they might at first seem.

But by no objective measure is the UK building "loads" of housing.

We've been building around 200k houses a year for decades, much less than that during most years of Conservative rule: https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new...

This is around 0.3% of the population. The population increase year on year is consistently larger than this.

We need to be building new houses much faster than we are. We need to build at 1960s rates or faster at least until it is possible for people on median wages to have somewhere sane to live again.

So the UK population is not the complete set of entities that want to buy housing stock, and measuring population alone is not sufficient to capture the entirety of the demand. This means we need to build even faster! Saturate these markets. Those folks are giving us money to build empty houses; use it! Once supply outstrips all demand, prices fall - that's how markets work. Let the invisible hand of the free market inform the foreign investors that housing bubbles are a bad bet. Certainly nothing else has worked.

But I also live in a real world where most developed countries have significantly cheaper housing but nowhere near as many rail lines as the UK as a whole, and where it's a lot easier to build more affordable homes than to ensure there are enough roads for nobody to ever experience a traffic queue.

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.

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.

It's not about sabotaging London, but about return on investment. It doesn't matter that companies for which going to Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Paris is an option won't go to Sheffield or Birmingham - if you draw companies that can go elsewhere in the UK, and often would love to, out to the regions, then there's plenty of capacity for those who desperately prefer London. I used to work in VC, and just the sheer number of companies founded outside of London that moved to London not because they wanted to but because they didn't see it as viable to stay in the regions was depressing. Apart from access to capital, a big driver for that was smaller commutable regions. WFH helps, but upgrading internal links within the regions would do even more.

> They're trying that up to a point. Stratford has worked pretty well, and they're going to apply the same playbook at Old Oak Common. Croydon might be next on the list. But of course at the rate the UK builds anything that wil be what, 2060 before anything is done.

Croydon town centre is extremely well connected already, and the town centre is filling up with highrises, w/several over 40 floors so far and one w/planning permission for 75. But the problem isn't for these places, but the places that could have better connections to places set further out from the centre of London to draw demand further out to lines that are poorly utilised.

E.g. places like Epsom and Sutton and smaller stations in between, or any of the train stations in Croydon not on one of the direct lines to London (West, East, South Croydon and the Purley stations are well served as is. E.g. put direct trains in places at commuter frequencies between Croydon and Guildford via Epsom, and you have a whole range stations that suddenly form a much more viable commuter pool and with capacity for increased building density, and makes several locations along the route more attractive to businesses that might otherwise pull further in. There are a lot of routes like that surrounding London.

As a homeowner, I'd be opposed to most new housing developments in my area. New developments aren't backed by the same level of investment in local services such as transport, schools, and GP surgeries.

> Ask yourself if as an investor you'd rather own a single family home in some New Jersey farm town, or a lot in Manhattan?

I think this is the key flaw in your argument. I chose to live in a village, not a city.

When someone includes statements in an argument that can be trivially disputed, they should fully expect those weak points to be disputed. The rest of the argument, imo, does not deserve critique until the trivially disputable points are resolved.

You can't exactly force people to sell SFHs either, but that doesn't stop developers from finding a few adjacent parcels to join together. (Rather, it's not the difficulty that stops them, it's typically zoning.)

Yes in a country of 1 billion people there are dodgy apartments, but then again in my country of 26 million people an estimated 60% of new apartments have flaws, big ones in the middle of Sydney have been deemed unlivable only a few years after being built.

China overbuilds entire cities and everyone mocks them for it, but a few years later those cities fill up and people conveniently forget about that.

Even the commentator who coined the term Ghost Cities admits they have become functional economic powerhouses.

> Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...

> At the same time councils were prevented from reinvesting that capital in the construction of new housing stock.

They were formerly obligated to reinvest that capital in the construction of new housing stock. Current legislation forces the councils to replace the stock and gives councils 100% of the proceeds, but again it doest appear to work.

> Privately rented flats

I have seen nightmare land lords - and nightmare tenants. Its a wild unreglulated system full of the worst of humanity, along with estate agents. I have no solutions.

> Private builders are incentivised to invest where demand is currently hottest leaving other regions to deteriorate

Unironically I expect that government would build in the same places ... as these places have the greatest demands for social housing as well as being the hottest regions. Relocating people from "their home" to areas where the is less demand is one of the unacceptable solutions that I would propose and would be considered to be heartlessly destroying communities.

The social housing system is broken, social houses are free houses for life and its not uncommon to see multiple generations of families never live in any different environment. People who grew up in social housing in Kensington expect that they and future generations should be housed in Kensington.

Geographic mobility is nearly 0 as well. For those that do want to move to somewhere else, its a new council to apply to a new housing association, if you give up your (social) house in one place you go to the back of the queue.

> disposable income only recently recovered to 1960s levels, both members of the household are now working

The not working poor, the working poor and incresingly the middle classes are now poor in the UK. If you want to buy a home in the UK you can, there are lots of them for sale, but even if you reduced the number on the asking price sticker by 20%, 30% even 50% people just dont have the money. At 50% off though, the litteral bricks and wood of the house is worth more than that, let alone the land / labour etc to make a house.

Unfortunately many councils (including my own) are now run by an executive consisting of officials. People have known for decades that the planning committee is crooked; but I guess that's what you get in a university town where the uni owns most of the best land in the town, is the largest employer, and even used to have it's own parliamentary seat.

Also the transition from manufacturing to service sector.

Quite likely that the inefficient burning of coal would explain away some of the difference. We barely burn any coal for electricity generation now, and residential coal fires are far less common.