> 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.
This does not square with the fact that private builders are leaving nearly half of approved developments unbuilt. It's almost like private builders are incentivised to squeeze the market rather than bring prices down.
> The same number of people would need housing, regardless of whether the houses were privately owned or state owned.
Publicly owned housing: The state makes an initial capital investment which it recoups through a low monthly rent payment. After 30 years the state only pays maintenance costs for the property, covered by the monthly rent. Any excess rent can be reinvested towards the cost of another unit.
Privately rented housing: The state pays market rate rents forever, burning the money. The private landlord pays off the mortgage and gets to pocket more of the money. There's no benefit to the state.
It's the same with social care. The government could build social care, instead we're paying up to £50k/week per child[0] towards some cunt's yacht.
And it's the same with the NHS. Nurses have a hard time and poor pay and some quit. The government then bring in an agency nurse, paying the agency 2-4x the salary of the NHS nurse that will have to babysit them because they aren't familiar with their ward and refusing to raise the rate of pay for their own nurses. The remaining nurses see this and some more quit, agency work pays more and you get to choose when you work. This spirals into a very avoidable staffing crisis.
> 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.
I didn't claim you were arguing for no regulation, arguing that regulations should be made more lax in the face of those events is what's disheartening. Those disasters occurred because existing regulations were not sufficiently strict/enforced.
> 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 housing thing you've gone on a while, but basically if you remember the context, two comments up, I was replying to something that you're not arguing for, as far as I can tell, which is that if the government hadn't sold some houses it would have enough houses. This is not the case, and I don't think you've said it is.
> I didn't claim you were arguing for no regulation, arguing that regulations should be made more lax in the face of those events is what's disheartening. Those disasters occurred because existing regulations were not sufficiently strict/enforced.
Companies not obeying regulations in specific instances doesn't mean all regulations are good. Regulations are not a tower, with fire retardation regulations being piled on the stupid ones, and so removing the stupid ones would cause the ones you want to fall.
My fundamental bewilderment with this and some other comments is you're complaining about government-caused things, and you blame the private sector for it, and want the government to be in charge of more things, despite the evidence of your own eyes of how well the government does with what it already has.
> 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?
If youre both managing a property portfolio as well as building on it, free capital gains for no work are a pretty good deal.
Sure, if you're a small builder you want to build ASAP for cash flow reasons. However over the past decade both the UK and Irish building markets have become dominated by REITs who do in fact benefit from increased land prices in the absence of building.
Yes, because of the regulatory and zoning environment. Of course they should do this - in an environment where it's more profitable to do nothing than to build, building companies should do nothing. The problem is the environment they exist in. Fix the environment, and they will build more.
> in an environment where it's more profitable to do nothing than to build, building companies should do nothing.
I mean, sortof. I get where you're coming from, but if a development has planning permission (i.e. it's allowed to be built) then it should be massively penalised if development doesn't begin pretty soon after this. As a society, it's problematic for a whole bunch of reasons to have companies sit on land that could provide housing when there's a shortage.
You don't fix government/zoning disincentives to do things with government disincentives to not do things.
It's just more time and money wasted on people to inspect and enforce and run appeals systems (what if they had a good reason for not starting?) and write and update rules (what do we count as a good reason?). All of this costs endless tax money that could've been spent on building or buying houses. Or, in 2023, just buying enough food.
You highlight a bunch of examples where government policy/implementation has failed miserably in the backdrop of higher and higher demand from it. I wonder how far this needs to stretch before we realise that the problem isn't that the government doesn't behave correctly, but that the whole idea that a government is a good allocator of capital and resources is flawed.
This does not square with the fact that private builders are leaving nearly half of approved developments unbuilt. It's almost like private builders are incentivised to squeeze the market rather than bring prices down.
> The same number of people would need housing, regardless of whether the houses were privately owned or state owned.
Publicly owned housing: The state makes an initial capital investment which it recoups through a low monthly rent payment. After 30 years the state only pays maintenance costs for the property, covered by the monthly rent. Any excess rent can be reinvested towards the cost of another unit.
Privately rented housing: The state pays market rate rents forever, burning the money. The private landlord pays off the mortgage and gets to pocket more of the money. There's no benefit to the state.
It's the same with social care. The government could build social care, instead we're paying up to £50k/week per child[0] towards some cunt's yacht.
And it's the same with the NHS. Nurses have a hard time and poor pay and some quit. The government then bring in an agency nurse, paying the agency 2-4x the salary of the NHS nurse that will have to babysit them because they aren't familiar with their ward and refusing to raise the rate of pay for their own nurses. The remaining nurses see this and some more quit, agency work pays more and you get to choose when you work. This spirals into a very avoidable staffing crisis.
> 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.
I didn't claim you were arguing for no regulation, arguing that regulations should be made more lax in the face of those events is what's disheartening. Those disasters occurred because existing regulations were not sufficiently strict/enforced.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/apr/18/english-coun...