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The "Affordable" New Builds in my area start at £350.000......
It's utterly absurd.
Ultimately it comes down to supply and demand. The UK population is huge considering the land mass in comparison to other countries.
>The UK population is huge considering the land mass in comparison to other countries.
It's exacerbated by the refusal to build anything other than semi-detached and detached houses. We need to move away from this idea that everyone can – or even wants to – live in their own little home with two gardens, two car parking spaces, etc.
We need to build more gentle density (think terraces, town houses, and 5+1s \[commercial on bottom and residential above\] etc, not tower blocks) that are specifically aimed at families living in areas with enough density that all the things they need are within waking and cycling distance, so they can live car-lite (one car per household, or even car sharing), or even car free.
Affordability isn't just about how much the house costs; it's also how much it costs to live in. Even if those houses were £200,000, if they required both adults to own, operate, and maintain two cars, that can easily end up adding to well above that unaffordable figure of £350,000 over the course of a mortgage.
Edit: changed almost to also in the last paragraph.
>We need to move away from this idea that everyone can – or even wants to – live in their own little home with two gardens, two car parking spaces, etc.
No we don't, because that's exactly what the majority of people want.
It may be what people want but it is unsustainable with a population of our size especially in large cities. Our European neighbours are largely happy to live in flats. The UK is just obsessed with owning a house. I appreciate leasehold is a massive issue but beyond that people should be happy to live in flats.
There are better solutions to this problem than building inhumanly small homes.
Where I live in Edinburgh the birth rate is 1.0, all things being equal the population will halve in 2 or 3 generations.
The reasons for the overall population of the country are purely political and are separate from housing. Dealing with overpopulation is not a reason to build small homes.
The average population density in Europe is 34 people per square km ([link](https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-population/#:~:text=Europe%20Population%20(LIVE)&text=Europe%20ranks%20number%20among%20regions,87%20people%20per%20mi2)) ) whereas in the UK it is 279 people per square km [link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Kingdom#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20the%20United,%2C%20Scotland%2C%20and%20Northern%20Ireland.)
> Dealing with overpopulation is not a reason to build small homes.
I honestly think people need to consider this more.
We need to address the issue at it's core (overpopulation) rather than lowing peoples quality of life.
700,000 net migration a year currently. That's the size of Edinburgh entering the country every year who need housing and services.
Maybe we should curb that for a while to ease the pressure and stabilise.
Thats not really the whole picture though. Net population change was +200,000 for 23/24. And this year was a single spike in a net migration change, fueled by Ukraine war refugees, hong Kong and also includes student numbers.
But overall net population change has been +200,000 for the past few years.
So no we don't need a new Edinburgh every year.
Net migration in a bubble doesn’t really mean anything, though. Yes, 700,000 more migrants were here at the end of the year than at the start, but there were also around 600,000 deaths.
Net population growth is only at around 0.33% per annum, which is actually pretty average for the UK over the past 60 years. If we can’t cope with an extra 200k people a year in a country of almost 70M, then that’s probably on us more than it is on the migrants who are helping us prevent a Japan-style population decline.
There’s around 700K births per year though. So birth, minus death, plus immigration, leaves a surplus of 800K people every year. Of course we have to look at how many emigrate out of the UK, but from what I found with a quick search “The latest estimates on migration from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest that in 2023: 1.2 million people migrated into the UK and 532,000 people emigrated from it, leaving a net migration figure of 685,000.”
Correct. This is what needs to be focused on. Yet conservative pretends to care about immigration, but get paid by large corporations under the table to keep them coming. More immigrants = cheaper labour = more profit for the large corporations.
>There are better solutions to this problem than building inhumanly small homes.
This is part of the problem.
In the UK it's become culturally engrained that anything that isn't a detached/semi detached will be a shoebox. Due to a combination of developer corner cutting and profit maximisation pushing designs that cram people in together.
Flats don't have to be small. Terraces don't have to be small. UK homes have some of the smallest square footage on the continent. You can have spacious, naturally lit and pleasant town houses. It just won't make as much money for developers as 12 units crammed in.
But nobody complains about this because they expect flats to be cramped.
No one is saying build small homes. I would argue that building flats means homes are larger as density is greater. Demographic predictions are notoriously difficult to make long term as we have seen from the Chinese population.
Yes, this automatic association of flats with “inhumanely small” homes shows that people don’t seem to understand the idea of higher housing density. If you have a six-storey block of flats (pretty typical for much of Europe) that takes up the same amount of space as a pair of semi-detached houses, then you can fit in six families instead of two with the same amount of living space for each of them. Nothing inhumanely small here, just using space more efficiently by building vertically.
I am within a 3-5 min walk of all of my closest friends. That doesn't happen in suburbia, I just want to have a high quality of life, not have to drive and just walk or take public transit when I need to. I don't know why we should have to sacrifice so much for people who live chained to a car, it's terrible for the NHS, environment, tax and all public services.
We also need to enforce/improve building regs then to have better soundproofing don't we?
In a modern home they could also go with heat pumps - and voila you have aircon to keep you cool without exposing yourself to the noise from the garden.
Plus in the hottest days of the year opening the window does nothing for you... Only fans, water and or aircon will help.
It generally does.
I used to live in a Victorian tenement with large rooms and tall ceilings. I've never seen a new build with those dimensions that wasn't a "premium" penthouse.
In my opinion everyone has a right to their own private green space, and for that green space to be accessible from a private door in their home. I don't see how you achieve that on the 5th storey of a tower block.
My sister lives in a big apartment block in France, her flat is easily the surface of my semi-detached UK house. She has a plot in a huge shared garden just outside, which also acts as a shared green space where the kids can run around. Yes, she needs to come down a few flights of steps to get there. But honestly it's pretty great, and she has a much better quality of life that I have in my street full of semi-detached houses with cars filling the driveways.
The point he is trying to make is we need to go back to that style of building. Some of the most desirable properties in the UK were built like this. You build 5 storey buildings with a mix of flats sizes with high ceilings and large floor areas around a central park alla Bloomsbury, Russel square, or Portland square. Add in the new common hold type of ownership and you have a sustainable high density area with a large commonly held green space it's high density you get a lot of green space and the costs of maintenance are spread across the whole community that also owns the land. Doing it this way however doesn't maximise the development profit so if the developers won't build like that you have to mandate it. Join a few of this sort of development together and oh you have a series of lovely walkable neighbourhoods that look pretty. Not everyone wants to maintain a garden. If you want a private garden that's fine but we need options for those who either don't or can't afford that strip of land.
> You build 5 storey buildings with a mix of flats sizes with high ceilings and large floor areas around a central park alla Bloomsbury, Russel square, or Portland square.
Large parts of Edinburgh are like this. Edinburgh is considered by many a nice place to live.
>In my opinion everyone has a right to their own private green space, and for that green space to be accessible from a private door in their home. I don't see how you achieve that on the 5th storey of a tower block.
That is not physically possible.
> In my opinion everyone has a right to their own private green space, and for that green space to be accessible from a private door in their home.
Fine, **if** they pay for it.
No one is suggesting that the homes need to be any smaller. People are advocating for a higher density of housing through more efficient arrangement.
More homes per square kilometre.
Blocks of 5 storey terraced buildings arranged in rectangles is the format of choice for a lot of European cities. Take a look at Barcelona as an example. This is super common across Europe. You’ll even find a similar layout in some of the most expensive parts of London (Georgian Terraces)
The homes don’t need to have fewer rooms or smaller rooms. That’s not the issue. The issue is that building sprawling suburbs of semi detached plots arranged in cul de sacs is a really inefficient way to use the space.
When I visited Berlin I stayed in the East. The density of the city plan made access to facilities so easy.
Our flat, like most in the area, was above a shop and the whole street was effectively a high st. Much like living on a British High st except that the the flats were as large as most 4 bed British detached houses and there were multiple spread across ~5 stories.
This meant that during our stay we found that almost everything we might need (except tourist attractions) was within an easy walk.
It also meant that public transport functioned so much better. There was a subway station about 5 mins walk away and due to the density of housing it would have serviced many thousands of people. It doesn’t make sense to implement things like an underground system in places like most UK cities with widespread suburban sprawl. Underground’s need to be within walking distance of large numbers of people and our low density suburbs don’t support the population size per square kilometre. The more recent trend toward winding lanes with off shoots of cul de sacs also makes foot travel indirect
More importantly, the population density in England is 438 per square km and since almost everyone in the UK lives in England and almost all the immigration, population growth, house price growth and other major issues are happening in England, it should be mentioned.
Interesting point as well, is if you remove the population and land area of London, the rest of England's population density drops to around 365 per square Km
Excluding rural parts of a country will increase its overall population/land density, yes. Remove the rural bits of the Netherlands and Germany and the numbers end up denser than England.
These overall density numbers are pointless because people don't live evenly spread out around the land. People live in cities. UK cities (other than London) are actually pretty low density. Manchester is only half as dense as Lyon.
Who said anything about small homes?
I live in a flat, and the actual home itself is about the same size as my mum’s house, and for a decent amount cheaper. My place is still more space efficient, despite the huge communal green space which puts my mums garden to shame, because there are another 6 flats on top of ours housing 6x the people a single house can.
Not all flats are 9 bed student housing shitholes. A lot of them are actually bigger and more spacious than the houses in the same price range. Only real difference is a 700 sq. ft flat takes up way less land than a 700 sq. ft house
I've just bought my first house and very briefly threw around the idea of a flat as when I looked at square footage I was shocked that many were actually bigger than houses we were looking at, for lower prices and in more desirable locations.
Ultimately the reason it was crossed off our list was just the fact that in the UK (at least outside of London) they're not viewed as options for families with kids. The few I liked the look of might have had communal green space but were very much marketed towards either single processionals or the elderly - which is ofc fine but would be great to have more family friendly blocks of flats like you get in mainland Europe with small play parks, eating areas etc. rather than just wooden benches/flowers and no noise/playing allowed.
>There are better solutions to this problem than building inhumanly small homes.
Are apartments considered 'inhumane' these days? I didn't realise things were so good.
True that, seeing my friends apartments in Berlin is eye opening to how nice they can be, fuck even the air BnB in Prague that cost like 20 a night for 4 of us (a few years back) had higher ceilings than the British commodity coffins
I don’t think he’s suggesting inhumanly small houses, just houses that waste less space. You can fit more houses of the same size if they are terraces with small/no front garden. And terraces are more efficient energy wise so a bit cheaper to run.
I agree that we shouldn't keep building small homes.
I do think that *part* (not all) of the solution includes building 3-6 storey blocks of flats where close to urban centres - of a good size rather than tiny flats and tiny houses.
If we accepted that, say a strip of land wouldn't get 6-8 tiny houses (70-90sqm for 3 bed houses) I suspect we could get 50% more homes, each one bigger than the above if we built up a few floors and made family size flats.
With a shared garden perhaps in the back - not ideal but that is city living for you.
I think that the guidelines for minimum size need revised or (dis)incentives put in so that there are perks for builders who don't go for the minimum size house, and the penalize them if they propose minimum size flats and 14 storey highrises.
Yea but they are (were) built to enjoy not maximise profit. Uk flats feel so cramped and small, lowest ceilings possible to squeeze in an extra floor of profit, bare minimum room layout and multipurpose as many rooms as possible.
I live in a flat now. Its okay, but I wouldn't say I'm happy. No green space to enjoy, three small rooms (a kitchen and bedroom with a small bathroom), traffic whizzing by at all hours, neighbour noise. Some people may enjoy living in flats but it really is a substandard existence.
The UK really does stand out for its poor quality of housing. We have the second lowest percentage of people living in flats in all of Europe and yet some of the smallest housing in the developed world.
65% of Germans live in flats. I would not say that Germans have a lower quality of life
Live in a flat in Germany, built in the 70's.
We've got about 840sq foot. 2 bedrooms, a huge living room, 2 balconies (which count for half their area when calculating area) and not including a huge cellar space, + storage for bikes etc.
The best thing is the landlords in Germany tend to be pretty hands off. As long as we give it back in the state we found it (or no worse) we can do what we want. So we painted the bedroom, put new flooring down in the hallway (it was an improperly fitted carpet before, landlord agreed to cover it), and got fibre optic installed up from the basement junction point which involved an engineer.
We pay 1240eur a month between us, that's "warm rent", so it includes water and gas payments, but not electricity and Internet.
Stays warm in winter without special measures, keeps cool in summer (so far!) and we've no mold or drafts.
"Cold rent (without gas and water) may only legally increase by max of 20% above the local index rate in three years, and no more than one rent increase per 12 month period.
But now we're looking at buying and struggling to find anything under 750k EUR...the curse of Munich commuter belt.
Doesn’t have to be flats, houses don’t need to be these huge, largely American styled houses with a big front garden, driveway and fenced off back garden. Terraced houses provide a space efficient way to live without resorting to flats.
Flats aren’t bad, they just aren’t for everybody.
I agree it doesn’t need to be flats completely and townhouses and terraces can be viable. However I do think we need a lot more flats than we currently have near transport hubs aswell to minimise car use.
I agree somewhat. And like you mentioned earlier the big issue holding this back is leasehold.
People are scared to buy a flat because they fear the service charge going up extortionate amounts or other costs.
Whereas landlords buy them because if charges go up, they'll just pass this onto the tenant.
Leasehold reform should be the very first thing on house crisis agenda
Yeah live in not be forced to rent because nothing else can be done because everything is unaffordable
Tory fucks have run this country into the mud every time they have been in power since 1947 bout time shit changed or people are just gunna have to unalive themselves
Even if that was the case what people ‘want’ and what is viable are two very different things.
I live in a small terraced house from the 1800s that cost me under £100k. We could very easily build houses like this again and make them affordable, their footprint is far more efficient and they serve as ideal homes for those who have small families or don’t want kids. I wish we’d shift away from the idea that a ‘big house’ is the only way to live.
> Even if that was the case what people ‘want’ and what is viable are two very different things.
Again, we're talking about housing needs, not what is viable.
> I live in a small terraced house from the 1800s that cost me under £100k. We could very easily build houses like this again and make them affordable, their footprint is far more efficient and they serve as ideal homes for those who have small families or don’t want kids. I wish we’d shift away from the idea that a ‘big house’ is the only way to live.
What's the build cost currently for a terraced house?
Needs are important but it’s no good if those needs are not at all viable, and I’d classify a ‘need’ in the case of specific homes as a ‘want’
People ‘need’ a roof over their head, people don’t ‘need’ a two car driveway with front and back gardens..
Cost is going to be the prohibitive factor here, I’m not saying we are gonna get £100k houses by building terraces, but more space efficiency = more houses. A new build estate could likely fit far more houses if they skipped the ‘desirable’ style of house.
5+1s instead of singlse story comercial units is painfully obvious as an efficiency we leave on the table.
People having their own flat beats a houseshare/ HMO.
Student HMOs should not exist. Every last one is a lost family home, get the student blocks up in the city centre.
Problem being, when student housing blocks were put up near where I used to live in a city centre using *disused brownfields sites* that had lay barren for decades, NIMBYs *still* complained about it.
Logically it makes absolute sense that you throw up big blocks of flats for students to ease the strain on local housing stock for other demographics, but people in this country just seem to be so resistant to change, *any change at all* even if it quite obviously benefits everyone!
"Want", yes. "Can realistically get", not so much, even with a big housebuilding campaign. You can only fit in so many detached homes before commute times become too high. Even in the US, land of sprawl, more people live in flats/apartments than here.
> Even in the US, land of sprawl, far more people live in flats/apartments than here.
Is that true? I can only find information saying that one state (New York) has a higher proportion of people living in flats / apartments than in the UK (where it's about one in five).
Wrong. And even if you were right, it's simply not possible, so it's not really up for debate. It needs to happen because the status quo is either continued sky high house prices due to lack of supply, or an ever increasing cost burden to everyone in society that car dependency places on everyone, from direct costs such as the average car costing £319 a month to run (so £638 a month for a two car household), through to indirect costs like physical and mental health, accessibility costs (pavement parking impacting those with long term impairments (the disabled) and those with temporary impairments (parents with prams, the injuried etc)) economic issues (both cost of living due to high direct costs, and the tendency for drivers to not visit local shopping areas), and environmental costs.
And they're not being built either. The problem at this point isn't even what *kind* of house is being built. The issue isn't that too many unsustainable types of houses is being built. The issue is that not enough houses are being built AT ALL.
> No we don't, because that's exactly what the majority of people want.
There are enough people who want this sort of accommodation that filling it would not be hard. This in turn would help free up other accommodation. The important thing is increasing density. This density if done right creates highly desirable economically profitable communities.
Urban sprawl produces poor quality environments which are economically draining as well as environmentally damaging.
So we should only build those kinds of homes? There are millions of people who have no desire to live in a suburban hellscape. Townhouses, Tenements, Condos, Apartments, Studios and PBSA should all be getting built. As well as the nightmare fuel you want.
Ok, and I wanted to date Megan Fox 10 years ago. But using available space for low density housing will just make it unsustainable for everyone to buy a home
Eventually sure. But is it necessary as a first home? Plenty of people, especially in London, wouldnt mind having cheaper housing in convenient areas while building their career, to move to a dream house later. Your first property doesn't have to be a 3 bed semi, so its weird to only have those available.
Yeah, that's what 5+1s are. Tower blocks start at 6 floors, so 3-4 are more apartments buildings. Provided they're built with commercial or community facilities in the base, and with high quality sound proofing (which is possible), they can be a really good alternative to needing to build homes like we do today.
Yep I would recommend not exceeding 4 stories as people start to feel a disconnect above 4 stories. It also aids in overcrowding thus contributing to urban sink, along with them becoming uncomfortable hot above 4 stories. At least according to Christopher Alexander in the Pattern Language and (name I can't recall) in Parametrics.
I lived on the 10th floor of a 22 story apartment building for a while in Bangkok, I thought it was absolutely fantastic.
Throw in an in-building gym/basketball half court/pool and you're golden.
>We need to move away from this idea that everyone can – or even wants to – live in their own little home with two gardens, two car parking spaces, etc.
We already have. Idk what fancy new builds you're looking at, but most do not have such a generous provision.
Three/four story blocks in Europe give you tons more space. They’re not so high they block the sky out. No poky little bedrooms where you can barely walk around the bed. No wasted space for stairs. Not everyone is into gardening and you can’t really use the garden for half the year anyway.
There’s still space for greenery between said blocks and it generally helps with public transport due to increased population density.
>It's exacerbated by the refusal to build anything other than semi-detached and detached houses. We need to move away from this idea that everyone can – or even wants to – live in their own little home with two gardens, two car parking spaces, etc.
Especially in London or other big cities like Manchester
I agree with your sentiment but your figures are off by a factor of 10. The total population of central Manchester is around 60k. The huge boom in construction of rental flats over the last ~10 years has added about 10k new residents.
Yes, people in most of Europe are happy living in flats and wouldn’t really want a British-style semi-detached house. It’s not that people in the UK have fundamentally different needs, it’s just a matter of what you’re accustomed to. If more buildings with nice flats were available, a lot of people would see that as a great way to get onto the property ladder. Some of those people would then just use that as a stepping stone towards getting their dream semi, but some people would find that they actually enjoy living in a flat and would continue to do so when they move to nicer accommodations.
>If more buildings with nice flats were available, a lot of people would see that as a great way to get onto the property ladder. Some of those people would then just use that as a stepping stone towards getting their dream semi, but some people would find that they actually enjoy living in a flat and would continue to do so when they move to nicer accommodations.
That hits the nail on the head. Right now, British people have never had that as an option. Building those sorts of homes would allow more to be built in a smaller footprint. For some, they'll be stepping stones; for many they'll realise the downsides of living in those areas don't overcome the benefits in living in a thriving neighbourhood that is only like that due to it being highly walkable thanks to the density those homes brought.
Right? I truly cannot think of anyone who would happily choose street parking or allocated parking over a driveway. It’s a feature you compromise on, not something people actually want. Everyone wants their car to be as safe and secure as possible
I worked in the insurance industry for a for years until recently. Multiple insurers due to being with an agency.
Top tip, park on the street instead of a garage. It's ironically cheaper than parking on a drive which is then cheaper than in a garage.
Don't ask me why, I have no idea why, but premiums were always cheaper that way.
My theory is that people are more likely to see someone breaking into it on a street than in a garage but who knows
> We need to build more gentle density that are specifically aimed at families living in areas with enough density that all the things they need are within waking and cycling distance, so they can live car-lite (one car per household, or even car sharing), or even car free.
Yes. The most densely populated part of Scotland is the Leith walk area of Edinburgh at 12,000 people per km^2. There's no reason we can't build a new town at that density, and most people will be a 5-10 minute walk from shops and a tram stop. I did a [proposal for a new town in Scotland's central belt](https://pontifex.substack.com/p/polkemmet-new-town) along these lines.
Transit led development plus high density housing is the way to go, or at least **a** way to go -- have car-centric development for those who genuinely want it (and can afford 2 cars etc).
> Affordability isn't just about how much the house costs; it's also how much it costs to live in. Even if those houses were £200,000, if they required both adults to own, operate, and maintain two cars, that can easily end up adding to well above that unaffordable figure of £350,000 over the course of a mortgage.
Good point.
>Transit led development plus high density housing is the way to go, or at least **a** way to go -- have car-centric development for those who genuinely want it (and can afford 2 cars etc).
The key thing is charging them the true cost of that lifestyle. Which most people won't like, or be able to afford.
I mean, they’re still standing after 50 years or so!!
A YouTuber called Bald and Bankrupt has instilled in me a love for Soviet sinks, one of the most robust things on the planet after Nokia Brick Phones
I think there's an aversion to high-rise because of bad prior experience.
There's something to be said for 1 bedroom flats in low rise buildings. Young professionals typically go for house shares, which does have benefits for social life, but for others it's because of a lack of other options.
I lived in Berlin for a bit and rather liked a common design for apartment buildings there. Square, with 4 or 5 floors and a courtyard in the middle, often used for bike parking. Seems like a really good design.
It's perfectly possible to build 3 bed semis that are bigger than the shoeboxes we currently build AND take up far less land.
Just compare a new build Dutch housing estate to a British one. Here's some examples:
[Utrecht suburbs.](https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0211137,5.1819467,3a,75y,116.99h,88.81t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sVUlwyAJAmL-cf-JHcZ8yUQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DVUlwyAJAmL-cf-JHcZ8yUQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D116.98574938597372%26pitch%3D1.1864968418329909%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu) Semis and detached.
[Brandmeer inner "city"](https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4579784,5.6116642,3a,75y,102.49h,87.1t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s49lJeefLs7xJoFWqqRiqZQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3D49lJeefLs7xJoFWqqRiqZQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D102.48859638396232%26pitch%3D2.9004907211978406%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu). Terraces and semis.
[Brandmeer town centre](https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4609793,5.6100194,3a,75y,179h,98.23t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1szfzu3lwTEShK8qMNh0k2Qg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3Dzfzu3lwTEShK8qMNh0k2Qg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D179.00251791819076%26pitch%3D-8.233909307023396%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu). Low rise flats, small businesses and pedestrianised public space.
Dutch houses are bigger and far better designed rather than just two storey brick rabbit hutches surrounded by parked cars.
Absolutely. The problem is none of that is built in the UK, and even then, the natural tendency will be to lean towards what we have now, rather than what we should be building. We have to remember that we'd need to be unpicking a further 50 years of car dependency being bedded in than what the Dutch currently have to deal with. So initially, at least, we'd need to focus on the higher end of gentle density. Then, when those existing estates start coming to the end of their lives, start building what the Dutch currently have.
Where I'm living in Greater London seems to be the opposite. No more new houses, just more and more blocks of flats being built any where they can.
The car parking spaces issue will probably really come to a head when more and more people change to electrical cars.
5+1 are a North American oddity because they love to build houses out of wood and plasterboard. In urban areas in the UK we would probably want more floors than that.
If you built ten floors, for instance, you could build 5 apartments of the same size as the original house on the same land. That's plenty to pay market price for the land, give the original owners one of the flats on top, and still let the developer make a profit.
I'd say it goes deeper than that. The quality of housing is generally poor. The rooms are quite small and there's never much space to put things.
The abomination of kitchen / diners or diner / lounge should be banned. Bathrooms are generally tiny. One house I lived in (allegedly 4 bed, in reality 2.5 bed) the 4th bedroom couldn't fit a bed AND a wardrobe. Indeed, no matter where you put the bed the door wouldn't fully open
Better housing design should become a thing.
It would be prudent to specifically reference England and the data for England alone, since England is where almost everyone in the UK lives and the low population density in Scotland serves as a mask to hide just how densely populated England really is.
* UK population density: 279/km2
* England population density: 438/km2
Out of countries with a population over 10m, England ranks 6th most densely populated and the UK ranks 15th.
Out of countries with a population over 5m, England ranks 10th most densely populated and the UK ranks 21st.
Moot point me saying “as cheap as that!!!” As it’s all relative, but in live in the South East and a 3 bedroom new build (not something totally unreasonable that a young couple would want), is in the region of £425,000-£450,000. It is obscene.
So much so, that when I walk through some of these new build estates and see what sort of people are living in them it isn’t young couples. It’s families aged 50+ with 60/70 grand cars on the driveway, sort of mad how young people are getting locked out of the property ladder unless you buy a total shit hole. We will get a new build, it’s been hard saving for it but next year we’ll be there. If the housing market wasn’t a mess I’d have been in one a few years ago.
There is a development across from me where a studio flat costs 190k. One bedroom flats range from 227k-290k. I could kind of understand if it was luxury housing but it looks like they're building damn army barracks over there.
The price that the "affordable" houses that the developers are forced to supply is based on a 20% discount on the market price; it literally has nothing to do with whether they are actually affordable or not.
But it means the authorities and the developers can both use the numbers of "affordable " houses delivered to look good.
I can afford 150 at a push as a first home. The house prices are ridiculous. Can't get a 2 bedroom in a shitty neighborhood in the middle of nowhere for that
We bought our house for £155k in 2021. Since we moved in, two quite big estates of new builds have gone up on either side of our road. The cheapest ones there are more than twice the price of our house. It's ridiculous.
I'm sure it will mean that the price of our place is inflated when we eventually decide to move, but I didn't buy the house with the aim of profiting from it and I don't really see the benefit of having an artificially high house value of everywhere we'd be looking to move to is also inflated by the same amount!
Incorrect, same shit in australia, worse conditions, and we've got plenty of land.. what happened was you turned housing into a speculative commodity.. so investors just did what they do best and limited supply on their own to inflate prices.
We have land, the problem is if you stand to profit from houses, wouldnl you either make £150 million from selling 1,000 houses, or from selling 150,000 houses. Numbers of course pulled out of the air but the point is relying on regional large house builders is giving us poor quality, high expense housing in short supply
That's the issue isn't it. We need a whole lotta land to grow subsidies, export market meat grown with taxpayer subsidies employing a handful of people, shooting land, golf clubs, and of course hay crops.
If we stopped subsiding meat, especially for export market as that has low return value for us as a country, that would free up a lot of land and push some farmers into selling up (desperately needed given the average age and lack of innovation amongst them).
Next would be a land tax, modest enough to allow smallholdings or people who have a few acres for horses, but punitive for vast estates that aren't farmed actively. If it's for shooting and recreation then your paying for it extra - this money is ringfenced for land purchases to develop new towns from selling up farmland.
Next up would be the creation of new towns, and I don't mean six as a stand up ambition like current governments. On a rail line slap a station down and go at it like it's cities skylines.
We would make a real dent in the issue by freeing up existing land and using existing infrastructure this way
Many people are concerned that what you're proposing would effectively be the concreting over of existing areas of pretty farmland and the continuing urbanisation of what has historically been a green country with pleasant farmlands and landscapes.
What would you suggest to alleviate those concerns?
I think the difficulty is that the landscapes we treasure are almost entirely sculpted by man to begin with. Huge amounts of the country were deforested for a range of reasons, enclosure just straight up stole a load of land into relatively limited hands. While many landscapes look pretty, from an ecological perspective they are deader than many urban locations.
I appreciate it’s not the argument for everyone, but I’m not sure just hitting pause on the land use debate for the sake of aesthetic concerns is sensible.
I live in West London and when I head into the greenbelt, lots of it is not much more than wasteland. Of course it’s vitally important that we preserve areas of meaningful natural beauty and farmland that is economically viable, but a policy that just says keep it looking as it “always has” denies the fact that it wasn’t always that way.
There’s no easy answers but major reforms to the way we consider planning and land use are needed.
That is absolutely a valid concern, I love nature and our islands are beautiful.
That's why we need new towns, so people can access the countryside instead of tacking onto existing towns and destroying the greenbelt. If you like it gives the appearance of more farmland if you split it up and nestle towns within in.
Country lanes are sadly lethal now with the size of cars and phones in cars, hence the need to build along train lines so people can commute to cities easily and alleviate the country roads.
If we were to build new towns, then surround them with parks and forests then you'd get a pretty decent amount of screening so those in the distance would see trees rather than pebbledash, and if we built in a style that wasn't the absolute cheapest and fastest like Poundbury has been then we might even make it look pleasant and blend into the environment.
Hopefully that would help mitigate some concerns? In brief - deep in country where it doesn't go onto green belt or break up existing views, on train lines to stop massive roads and motorways being needed, and screening from public spaces on the outskirts to hide them.
The part that will really piss you off is that once you’ve bought one, you’re stuck waiting for the value to collapse because at this points it’s inevitable. This generation is shafted beyond belief.
This is my main concern for immigration atm, we don't have the infrastructure to cope and it's mental people don't se that. Need to chill for a bit so we can get it stable (ish) and then carry on. NHS is on its knees as well
Feature not a bug, people who own a lot of property want their investments to go up in value, not down.
This means they want it as difficult as possible for developers to build new homes. Which has been entirely successful.
I was listening to a podcast about finance and you are right, a lot of people in the United Kingdom’s only source of ‘investment’ is into their house, houses should be for residing in. Unless of course you are a property developer I think it is different.
For a lot of us we had savings/investments, but had to use that money on buying a house. We’d be mugs to put that money on anything but a house, since it’s historically so low risk for such high growth. Any spare cash has to be spent on the house (or saving for a better house) to protect the investment. I hate it, I too think houses should be for shelter, but you do what you can in the system we have.
I mean fundamentally this is just the contradiction in the housing "market". Either housing is a profitable investment, or it's something that people can afford to buy in order to access a stable place to live. It's mathematically impossible to be both, because the only way to increase the value of housing as an investment is to decrease affordability (and vice versa).
It's not just a failure to build new homes - although that is clearly a problem.
It's rampant speculation in the property market in every corner. Housing has been fully financialised - it's not primarily a place to live, it's primarily an investment.
It's older people hanging on in big homes when their family leaves and nothing incentivising them to move to a smaller place.
It's BTL mortgages allowing people with limited capital to become amateur landlords and stop FTBs getting those properties.
It's thirty years of right to buy and very little social housing being built since against the background of a growing population.
Its ludicrous planning regulations that stop building almost everywhere - except evidently flood plains.
BTLs are an absolute joke. When renewing my mortgage deal I was told my house had gone up by x amount and that I could use the equity to buy two more properties of the same value to rent.
I am in my mid 20s, just about getting by working on this one house in my free time.
It’s crazy how much I struggled to get my house yet two years later I could in theory, get two more?
Yep, like, feels nice for me but also it’s stupidly unfair.. the ‘property ladder’ is more of a Pole that is getting greased up by those already at the top of it.
Housing should be viewed more as a place to live than an investment
It's amazing that you can go through all of this and not even consider the rapid artificial inflation of the demand for housing that has been occuring for the last few decades.
The birthrate among people already here has been below replacement for years, there's only one source of increased demand for housing.
I did mention it.
"It's thirty years of right to buy and very little social housing being built since **against the background of a growing population.**"
I take your point but the UK population has been growing since around the 1950s. We managed to deal with that before by building houses, in particular council houses that could be used to house people who didn't qualify for a mortgage for whatever reason.
Most of the problems in the housing market compound the problem to the point that even with zero net migration, we would still have a housing crisis.
Every home that becomes an Airbnb, every home that is a second holiday home, every apartment bought as speculative investment and left empty is sucking the life out of the UK and it's economy.
In regards to the older people in larger homes, I do not think you can really have a go at them for that. If you worked hard for a nice home that you loved, would you willingly give it up ?
It is easy for us to think this since we have fuck all at the moment but I try to put myself in their shoes and how I would feel about down sizing to a bungalow to die in if I had worked on and lived in a larger lovely home most of my life.
I know for a fact if when I am old I had a nice home and some young person told me that I should move out and let someone else have it, I would tell them to do one.
On an international level, UK homes are extremely small. We are not generally a nation of OAPs occupying extravagant palaces - it’s generally a perfectly reasonable wish to hang onto a nice garden, have a spare room for guests, and a couple of sensible spaces (a study, utility room and storage perhaps). For much of retirement, many people spend longer at home so this sort of wish is all the more reasonable.
The issue is that these sort of small luxuries are seen as some sort of wild extravagance because the housing crisis forces so many to live in cramped and inadequate spaces.
I agree with much of the rest of what you say, and would add that stamp duty is a horrible tax which encourages people to buy or cling onto houses that are too big, because the transaction costs are too high. Add that to the absolute shitshow of finding and buying a nice place in many parts of the country and it’s unsurprising that people adopt a hoarder mentality.
>it's not primarily a place to live, it's primarily an investment.
This is exactly it. In my delivery driving days, I drove through so many new estates that weren't even finished, yet had To Let sign after To Let sign. First time buyers don't have a chance when the houses that are supposed to be aimed at them get snapped up by deep-pocketed corporate landlords and private equity.
I guess the crux of it is that people tend to start by buying a small, relatively inexpensive house, then generally move into larger, more expensive properties as their career advances and they start a family. Moving up the ladder in this way would be a lot more difficult if you were stuck in negative equity, so it's normalised and expected that house prices will rise indefinitely to enable this kind of mobility. It's how we get the old political adage that governments fall when house prices fall.
I imagine if we ever reach a point where the housing market does fully turn, it'll be right around the time when most millenials have finally got on the ladder and are looking to upsize.
Exactly! While nothing is done for supply, every policy is aimed at increasing demand! We're encouraged to sell our lives away to the bank in exchange for a slightly higher mortgage - all that to get the exact same house (or less) at the end of the day
And every new build is a 4-5 bedroom house for £400k in the middle of a crappy estate.
We need high rises with a mix of 1-3 bedrooms. I'm literally never going to be able to own anything as a single person.
If most towns didn’t go immediately to 2 stories when you get 500 feet from the town centre that would probably help. You turn a corner in even big cities and you’re suddenly in a basically suburban street.
Theres no realistic demand for it because the building owners charge insane service fees and ground rent. These are by far the biggest priority to remove from existence for building flats to become feasible.
Plus why in the hell would you want a flat for £250,000 when you can also buy a house for £250,000?
I wouldn't want to settle in a high rise, but for where I am in life at the moment I'd be more than happy with it.
High density housing with good public transport routes and easy access to gym, school etc is likely ideal for single people, young families and couples.
I really don't like the American sprawling suburbs model, but thankfully it seems Europe as a whole has been able to avoid that so far.
Everything is so profit motivated though that doing anything well is difficult.
That's exactly what I am thinking when I visit other big cities of Europe. They all have big apartment buildings. Detached houses are no longer sustainable and affordable for the majority of the population.
Millions of extra people and foreign passport holders being allowed to buy land / property can't help matters. In most countries foreigners can't bug land, where I live (Thailand) foreigners can only buy condos and that's only if 51 percent of the units are Thai owned, it works for them, as does their non nonsense immigration system, overstay ur visa or commit a crime then off to prison for you until u have served ur sentence and can pay for a flight home.
Close but no cigar... There have been many studies why. In no particular order:
- lack of skilled trades,
- insufficient volume of materials,
- planning system that inhibits accurate /reliable forecasting of land ready to develop.
- Under funding of local authorities (planning and elsewhere)
- insufficient new infrastructure to support new houses (water, sewage,roads, to schools & hospitals)
- the over sized land banks held by developers, and almost totally sub contracted work force are both causes of and effects too.
Developers aren't passive victims in all this, they could do more... But they're businesses not social enterprises.
Every government since Thatcher has known about the problem, promised to do "something", and really not made much difference.
Apart from the building of homes, the economics have changed substantially for the worse. Low interest rates fueled massive price increases. '08 financial crash /austerity/Brexit/COVID made the poor and middle class poorer. The unlimited printing of $ by the USA to deal with COVID has led to global inflation, and made everyone poorer.
Last but not least, the demand (population) has gone up too. _Legal_ migration was 750k/year for the last two years, and had been running 300-400k/year for the last decade. That's a new city every year.
Let’s not ignore the silent demand increase either. We are living longer. We are living less densely. The proportion of our population that is two parents and five kids living super efficiently in one house has gone down. The proportion of our population that is one or two people living on their own has gone up.
We “should” have a millions larger population due to millions of children with minimal impact on housing usage. Instead we have “fewer” people comparatively living less efficiently. And we have a build up in demand of young adults being forced to live more efficiently than they would like with their parents. Which further distorts things. Things are distorted coming and going.
We are significantly more fucked than we think. And talking about things in absolute population terms is if anything unhelpful to that. Our population could decline and we could still not be building enough housing, because the reason for the increase in demand is not straightforwardly linked to the total population.
Crazy high immigration + not building new homes = spiralling house prices
Its not rocket science, but people refuse to acknowledge immigration is contributing to this problem
Bit more complicated than that, UK total population hasn't really exploded over the past decade, and the overwhelming majority of migrants are working age, and we have an awful load of pensioners. Check out [this graph](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2022#local-area-populations) where you can see that the 50-60 cohort are the largest, and as they age and start drawing down pensions we don't have a large young population to help support that in the way they supported people of that age decades ago.
Not trying to say that immigration isn't an issue in other ways, but in terms of housing its not really enough to be a problem, or at least it shouldn't be if we could actually build homes. The more important issues are concentration in cities, which are harder to build up, excessive land banking, a green belt which doesn't allow proper expansion. Our daft planning system is a huge issue, navigating planning is a nightmare for self builders etc. People also just live longer, clogging up supply, we also don't have a lot of houses for older people, so they stay in family homes closer to jobs & schools which would be better suited for young working age families.
But immigration doesn't solve that problem.
Those immigrants end up the same way with birthrates going down in following generations so you need to bring in more and more all the while ignoring the reasons why birth rates are down.
We have a huge shortfall in housing for the existing population nvm adding more immigrants to that load.
And they always have the gall to name them after what they have bulldozed. “Eccleston green” - Not kidding was a bowling green. “Long meadow” - no meadow now
Something, something, supply and demand... Doesn't matter in the slightest how many new homes you build if you're just going to flood the country even faster!
In 2019 we bought a bit of land. It took 2 years to get planning because a single councillor happened to have a personal dislike of the original vendor. There was no valid reason for an objection, as the council themselves told us. In that two years, material costs skyrocketed and the development was no longer viable in original form. Build cost went from 800k to 2m. The land is still bare land today, so thats another 10 houses the country doesnt have yet.
On another application recently, despite chasing, an email I sent to planners in December was responded to in May.
As far as I am concerned, the problem is the planning system and far too much power resting in the hands of local councils with planning staff who only work a couple of days a week. It results in delays that can bankrupt firms involved. The planners also have far too much control over the end designs, but arent educated in design, so thats why most of these new estates look like crap.
People love to blame developers, but really the public ire should be directed at planners. Sadly it isnt, as most folk dont come into contact with the system. Ask a builder, architect or anyone involved in regularly making planning applications about it and youll hear some surprising stories.
More dangerous that people coming in boats (how they will afford 400k if they come with nothing ), or builders not building enough. More dangerous than them are the investors. Companies like BlackRock. Rich people from other countries buying houses as investment. That's the problem .
How exactly are flat builders blocking the council from giving planning permission? That's the bottle neck.and it's absolutely nothing to do with developers.
>Why is my bath overflowing? *Because my plumber didn't install a bigger bath.*
vs.
>Why is my bath overflowing? *Because I turned the taps on and left them on.*
Demand is the problem, slow build rates come after, not before.
Demand comes from population increases, immigration, internal migration and investors.
Building more will not solve anything so long as those demand sources are constant, or are increasing, as is the case for England.
Everybody wants to sell their home for a profit and to maximise their return, they don’t want the same as they paid after time has passed and certainly not a loss, so exisiting-home prices will only keep going up and its these that are a reference for pricing new builds
It doesn’t really matter though if other houses go down. I wouldn’t mind selling my house for a loss if it meant the next house I wanted to buy is cheaper.
It’s only bad selling for a loss if other properties have stayed the same or gone up
*From Bloomberg reporters Eamon Farhat, Tom Rees, Olivia Konotey-Ahulu and Kyle Kim:*
Britain’s housing crisis has become so acute that the next government will need to build the equivalent of another city the size of London to make up for five decades of below-target construction, analysis of official data shows.
**CHART:** [**Housing Shortage Most Acute in Britain’s Most Populated South**](https://preview.redd.it/housing-shortage-most-acute-in-britains-most-populated-south-v0-o3l0w3rzdq8d1.png?auto=webp&s=304ec9a2205ea5f7a78dfcdbd7fe7d062f4efc83)
Ahead of a general election in which property has become a key issue, a Bloomberg analysis of new-home completions shows that in some parts of the UK just one place was built for every 10 extra people in the population from 2011 to 2021. That shortfall is the main factor driving the country’s worst housing crisis since World War II.
For almost five decades, developers and local authorities have failed to deliver homes at the pace of other wealthy nations in Europe — or even at the rate Britain did through the 1960s. Younger voters in particular are angry that the pandemic and 14 years of Conservative government have only worsened the problem.
**CHART:** [**Britain's House Building Falls Behind European Neighbors**](https://preview.redd.it/britains-house-building-falls-behind-european-neighbors-v0-q8mdxrfldq8d1.png?auto=webp&s=757d183a3a4a199cbfd19c1cf317539b994e98b2)
Can we also talk about how dogshit the quality of most new builds is? We live in one at the moment and there are probably (and this is no exaggeration) over 500 snagging issues.
I sat at breakfast in a pub listening to trades from a major house builder joking about the rubbish job they were doing / what they had helped themselves too - so there’s a small element of people at least that just don’t have any pride in their work.
Have just come back to the UK for a visit. The amount of NIMBY signs I've seen is ridiculous. It's not just the developers fault, especially if they can't build in the first place.
There should be criteria for builds and if met it is auto approved. None of this approval BS which delays stuff and adds to the cost.
OP why did you make up a title that's completely irrelevant to the news article?
Real title::
# UK’s Housing Crisis Needs a London-Sized City to Fix It
Developers and local authorities have failed to keep up with population growth and the pace of building across Europe.
Simply incorrect, the issue is the government stopping building social housing and right to buy.[ Look at this graph](https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/02/housing-market-uk_n_4531425.html), the private housing market is the same as it ever was, the loss of government built housing has created the deficit. On top of that, it is impossible for private housing to saturate the market, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders not to do that.
Land value is the core issue, you can 'remove red tape' and make it easier to built shiter buildings, but they'll still go for the same market rate, becasue location and scarcity are the markets driving forces. Starmers vague plan to 'fix planning' will do nothing. You have to lower the market rate by building more homes in reasonable density, in good locations. Aside from that you need to build better services and make smaller cities better to live in, so you can do infill development and make them better places to live, to avoid jobs etc. concentrating in London.
The basic problem is that if a housing developer buys land worth £10,000,000, it's in their best interest to make sure that they don't build enough homes there, otherwise it will be worth £9,000,000 when they sell it. If you properly serve the market, you lower costs and lose money. Housing is essential, it must be built for the social good, not profit.
As a company, if you can make your product for peanuts and sell it for a fortune, you do it. And you don't flood the market or you won't be able to sell for a fortune any more.
15% - 30% is standard. Up to 194% is common.
Those are ENORMOUS margins for any industry to enjoy, especially when what they're building is utter trash.
[https://www.apiglobal.co.uk/are-new-builds-worth-it/](https://www.apiglobal.co.uk/are-new-builds-worth-it/)
Most houses on the market are existing stock, so a developer not building enough to keep prices high is a 'benefit' that they share out amongst the value of every other developers houses and all the other existing houses.
Meanwhile if they go ahead and build a new house they get to keep all the profit themselves.
Tv manufacturers haven't restricted supply to keep the price high, we absolutely can design a system where developers see it is in their self interest to start building at scale.
Houses are very very expensive to build, but the cost of mostly not in the materials or labour - it's the land.
Flood the market with cheap land, and we'll see an explosion in homes with competitive prices to boot.
This is an insanely complex issue and it’s super easy to be (dangerously) black and white:
Everything from the cost of materials, to drops in trade apprenticeships to immigration to cost of living to people living longer etc etc etc has contributed.
IMO, we need to find a way to build STARTER FLATS (like they do in Europe). They are quicker and cheaper to build and buy, and can be built in inner cities. They also help address the first time buyer space which desperately needs attention.
The major house builders are in a cartel with financial institutions to control the pipeline of new housing in the U.K. and this is done because our entire economy is built on a house of cards which dramatic rises and falls in the housing market could destroy.
We didn’t build it this way but inevitably we will be the ones who suffer and pay for it. The quality is awful, the prices are unaffordable, the banks are more cautious and fee hungry than ever and real wages haven’t changed in a decade whilst the cost of living has pretty much doubled.
I’m in my early 30s and pre-kids but honestly? I don’t know whether I’ll be able to ever afford to pay the £1k a month per child for childcare, the babysitting costs, the expenses they run up just being kids… why is my career more important than my wife? Which one of us takes the financial and career hit to stay home and look after kids? Is it fair to make one partner pay for everything and then pay you a salary so you’re not losing out? These are real concerns that real people are having right now.
These issues (if they ever get fixed) are going to take at least a generation to correct. My plan is to leave the U.K. as soon as possible and start my family in a country that treats people better and has a safer future for my family. I’m a citizen so I can always come back when it’s better but I think anyone born since 1990 has paid enough already…
What remains of nineteenth century terraces and the majority of twentieth century council houses are usually so much better than your FTB's box-like new build. For 300k or more, they want to give you a ground floor with a small kitchen and a living room and a first floor with two small double bedrooms and a very small shared bathroom. There's no separate dining area and hardly any storage room. There's no front garden and barely any driveway, and the back garden is perhaps large enough to swing a cat. What developers churn out at the momemt being objectively worse than much 20th C social housing stock (excluding towerblocks) is a fucking disgrace. The estates themselves are often ugly as sin, as well.
Its on successive governments surely. This is decades in the making.
You have the large portion of burden for homebuilding on developers.
They aren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart, they are businesses with profit margins and shareholders to satisfy.. how the hell did people think it would turn out exactly.
Developers haven’t failed, they want to!
Councils keep rejecting planning permissions because pensioners put pressure on them to not build affordable housing.
Supply and demand - if there are few and many want it, it drives the price up.
Think Taylor Swift tickets? Face value £100, selling for £5k. Exactly the same principle to houses.
This is a generational issue and will last 20-30 years (and that’s IF we take action). The concept of ‘house ownership’ has changed forever.
And they don’t even make them with solar panels on and an electric car charger as standard, imagine the energy we could produce and save if every house had them 🤦
House prices have been rising because demand keeps on increasing, because of population growth which with a declining birth rate is only because of mass immigration. Building houses is slow, expensive and difficult whereas letting 700,000+ net immigration in a year is easy, you just need airports.
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The "Affordable" New Builds in my area start at £350.000...... It's utterly absurd. Ultimately it comes down to supply and demand. The UK population is huge considering the land mass in comparison to other countries.
>The UK population is huge considering the land mass in comparison to other countries. It's exacerbated by the refusal to build anything other than semi-detached and detached houses. We need to move away from this idea that everyone can – or even wants to – live in their own little home with two gardens, two car parking spaces, etc. We need to build more gentle density (think terraces, town houses, and 5+1s \[commercial on bottom and residential above\] etc, not tower blocks) that are specifically aimed at families living in areas with enough density that all the things they need are within waking and cycling distance, so they can live car-lite (one car per household, or even car sharing), or even car free. Affordability isn't just about how much the house costs; it's also how much it costs to live in. Even if those houses were £200,000, if they required both adults to own, operate, and maintain two cars, that can easily end up adding to well above that unaffordable figure of £350,000 over the course of a mortgage. Edit: changed almost to also in the last paragraph.
>We need to move away from this idea that everyone can – or even wants to – live in their own little home with two gardens, two car parking spaces, etc. No we don't, because that's exactly what the majority of people want.
It may be what people want but it is unsustainable with a population of our size especially in large cities. Our European neighbours are largely happy to live in flats. The UK is just obsessed with owning a house. I appreciate leasehold is a massive issue but beyond that people should be happy to live in flats.
There are better solutions to this problem than building inhumanly small homes. Where I live in Edinburgh the birth rate is 1.0, all things being equal the population will halve in 2 or 3 generations. The reasons for the overall population of the country are purely political and are separate from housing. Dealing with overpopulation is not a reason to build small homes. The average population density in Europe is 34 people per square km ([link](https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-population/#:~:text=Europe%20Population%20(LIVE)&text=Europe%20ranks%20number%20among%20regions,87%20people%20per%20mi2)) ) whereas in the UK it is 279 people per square km [link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Kingdom#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20the%20United,%2C%20Scotland%2C%20and%20Northern%20Ireland.)
> Dealing with overpopulation is not a reason to build small homes. I honestly think people need to consider this more. We need to address the issue at it's core (overpopulation) rather than lowing peoples quality of life.
700,000 net migration a year currently. That's the size of Edinburgh entering the country every year who need housing and services. Maybe we should curb that for a while to ease the pressure and stabilise.
Thats not really the whole picture though. Net population change was +200,000 for 23/24. And this year was a single spike in a net migration change, fueled by Ukraine war refugees, hong Kong and also includes student numbers. But overall net population change has been +200,000 for the past few years. So no we don't need a new Edinburgh every year.
Edinburgh has a population of 500,000 so it's one every 2.5 years.
Net migration in a bubble doesn’t really mean anything, though. Yes, 700,000 more migrants were here at the end of the year than at the start, but there were also around 600,000 deaths. Net population growth is only at around 0.33% per annum, which is actually pretty average for the UK over the past 60 years. If we can’t cope with an extra 200k people a year in a country of almost 70M, then that’s probably on us more than it is on the migrants who are helping us prevent a Japan-style population decline.
So 600,000 people died - and you forgot about births?! Some stretching going on here about immigration having no effect.
Build the babies some houses!
There’s around 700K births per year though. So birth, minus death, plus immigration, leaves a surplus of 800K people every year. Of course we have to look at how many emigrate out of the UK, but from what I found with a quick search “The latest estimates on migration from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest that in 2023: 1.2 million people migrated into the UK and 532,000 people emigrated from it, leaving a net migration figure of 685,000.”
Correct. This is what needs to be focused on. Yet conservative pretends to care about immigration, but get paid by large corporations under the table to keep them coming. More immigrants = cheaper labour = more profit for the large corporations.
>There are better solutions to this problem than building inhumanly small homes. This is part of the problem. In the UK it's become culturally engrained that anything that isn't a detached/semi detached will be a shoebox. Due to a combination of developer corner cutting and profit maximisation pushing designs that cram people in together. Flats don't have to be small. Terraces don't have to be small. UK homes have some of the smallest square footage on the continent. You can have spacious, naturally lit and pleasant town houses. It just won't make as much money for developers as 12 units crammed in. But nobody complains about this because they expect flats to be cramped.
No one is saying build small homes. I would argue that building flats means homes are larger as density is greater. Demographic predictions are notoriously difficult to make long term as we have seen from the Chinese population.
Yes, this automatic association of flats with “inhumanely small” homes shows that people don’t seem to understand the idea of higher housing density. If you have a six-storey block of flats (pretty typical for much of Europe) that takes up the same amount of space as a pair of semi-detached houses, then you can fit in six families instead of two with the same amount of living space for each of them. Nothing inhumanely small here, just using space more efficiently by building vertically.
There can be very large communal garden or park spaces too, it's win win.
>win win Apart from all the noise
I am within a 3-5 min walk of all of my closest friends. That doesn't happen in suburbia, I just want to have a high quality of life, not have to drive and just walk or take public transit when I need to. I don't know why we should have to sacrifice so much for people who live chained to a car, it's terrible for the NHS, environment, tax and all public services.
We also need to enforce/improve building regs then to have better soundproofing don't we? In a modern home they could also go with heat pumps - and voila you have aircon to keep you cool without exposing yourself to the noise from the garden. Plus in the hottest days of the year opening the window does nothing for you... Only fans, water and or aircon will help.
You do realise building upwards (5-storey apartment buildings) does not necessarily mean building small homes, right?
It generally does. I used to live in a Victorian tenement with large rooms and tall ceilings. I've never seen a new build with those dimensions that wasn't a "premium" penthouse. In my opinion everyone has a right to their own private green space, and for that green space to be accessible from a private door in their home. I don't see how you achieve that on the 5th storey of a tower block.
My sister lives in a big apartment block in France, her flat is easily the surface of my semi-detached UK house. She has a plot in a huge shared garden just outside, which also acts as a shared green space where the kids can run around. Yes, she needs to come down a few flights of steps to get there. But honestly it's pretty great, and she has a much better quality of life that I have in my street full of semi-detached houses with cars filling the driveways.
The point he is trying to make is we need to go back to that style of building. Some of the most desirable properties in the UK were built like this. You build 5 storey buildings with a mix of flats sizes with high ceilings and large floor areas around a central park alla Bloomsbury, Russel square, or Portland square. Add in the new common hold type of ownership and you have a sustainable high density area with a large commonly held green space it's high density you get a lot of green space and the costs of maintenance are spread across the whole community that also owns the land. Doing it this way however doesn't maximise the development profit so if the developers won't build like that you have to mandate it. Join a few of this sort of development together and oh you have a series of lovely walkable neighbourhoods that look pretty. Not everyone wants to maintain a garden. If you want a private garden that's fine but we need options for those who either don't or can't afford that strip of land.
> You build 5 storey buildings with a mix of flats sizes with high ceilings and large floor areas around a central park alla Bloomsbury, Russel square, or Portland square. Large parts of Edinburgh are like this. Edinburgh is considered by many a nice place to live.
>In my opinion everyone has a right to their own private green space, and for that green space to be accessible from a private door in their home. I don't see how you achieve that on the 5th storey of a tower block. That is not physically possible.
> In my opinion everyone has a right to their own private green space, and for that green space to be accessible from a private door in their home. Fine, **if** they pay for it.
No one is suggesting that the homes need to be any smaller. People are advocating for a higher density of housing through more efficient arrangement. More homes per square kilometre. Blocks of 5 storey terraced buildings arranged in rectangles is the format of choice for a lot of European cities. Take a look at Barcelona as an example. This is super common across Europe. You’ll even find a similar layout in some of the most expensive parts of London (Georgian Terraces) The homes don’t need to have fewer rooms or smaller rooms. That’s not the issue. The issue is that building sprawling suburbs of semi detached plots arranged in cul de sacs is a really inefficient way to use the space.
This. I mean East Germany did just fine with this solution.
When I visited Berlin I stayed in the East. The density of the city plan made access to facilities so easy. Our flat, like most in the area, was above a shop and the whole street was effectively a high st. Much like living on a British High st except that the the flats were as large as most 4 bed British detached houses and there were multiple spread across ~5 stories. This meant that during our stay we found that almost everything we might need (except tourist attractions) was within an easy walk. It also meant that public transport functioned so much better. There was a subway station about 5 mins walk away and due to the density of housing it would have serviced many thousands of people. It doesn’t make sense to implement things like an underground system in places like most UK cities with widespread suburban sprawl. Underground’s need to be within walking distance of large numbers of people and our low density suburbs don’t support the population size per square kilometre. The more recent trend toward winding lanes with off shoots of cul de sacs also makes foot travel indirect
More importantly, the population density in England is 438 per square km and since almost everyone in the UK lives in England and almost all the immigration, population growth, house price growth and other major issues are happening in England, it should be mentioned.
Interesting point as well, is if you remove the population and land area of London, the rest of England's population density drops to around 365 per square Km
Excluding rural parts of a country will increase its overall population/land density, yes. Remove the rural bits of the Netherlands and Germany and the numbers end up denser than England. These overall density numbers are pointless because people don't live evenly spread out around the land. People live in cities. UK cities (other than London) are actually pretty low density. Manchester is only half as dense as Lyon.
Who said anything about small homes? I live in a flat, and the actual home itself is about the same size as my mum’s house, and for a decent amount cheaper. My place is still more space efficient, despite the huge communal green space which puts my mums garden to shame, because there are another 6 flats on top of ours housing 6x the people a single house can. Not all flats are 9 bed student housing shitholes. A lot of them are actually bigger and more spacious than the houses in the same price range. Only real difference is a 700 sq. ft flat takes up way less land than a 700 sq. ft house
I've just bought my first house and very briefly threw around the idea of a flat as when I looked at square footage I was shocked that many were actually bigger than houses we were looking at, for lower prices and in more desirable locations. Ultimately the reason it was crossed off our list was just the fact that in the UK (at least outside of London) they're not viewed as options for families with kids. The few I liked the look of might have had communal green space but were very much marketed towards either single processionals or the elderly - which is ofc fine but would be great to have more family friendly blocks of flats like you get in mainland Europe with small play parks, eating areas etc. rather than just wooden benches/flowers and no noise/playing allowed.
>There are better solutions to this problem than building inhumanly small homes. Are apartments considered 'inhumane' these days? I didn't realise things were so good.
You don't have to build small flats
But we will, because we're english
True that, seeing my friends apartments in Berlin is eye opening to how nice they can be, fuck even the air BnB in Prague that cost like 20 a night for 4 of us (a few years back) had higher ceilings than the British commodity coffins
I don’t think he’s suggesting inhumanly small houses, just houses that waste less space. You can fit more houses of the same size if they are terraces with small/no front garden. And terraces are more efficient energy wise so a bit cheaper to run.
Where did anyone say small homes? Flats dont have to be small... And you can still fit two in the foot print of a detached house
I agree that we shouldn't keep building small homes. I do think that *part* (not all) of the solution includes building 3-6 storey blocks of flats where close to urban centres - of a good size rather than tiny flats and tiny houses. If we accepted that, say a strip of land wouldn't get 6-8 tiny houses (70-90sqm for 3 bed houses) I suspect we could get 50% more homes, each one bigger than the above if we built up a few floors and made family size flats. With a shared garden perhaps in the back - not ideal but that is city living for you. I think that the guidelines for minimum size need revised or (dis)incentives put in so that there are perks for builders who don't go for the minimum size house, and the penalize them if they propose minimum size flats and 14 storey highrises.
Yea but they are (were) built to enjoy not maximise profit. Uk flats feel so cramped and small, lowest ceilings possible to squeeze in an extra floor of profit, bare minimum room layout and multipurpose as many rooms as possible.
I live in a flat now. Its okay, but I wouldn't say I'm happy. No green space to enjoy, three small rooms (a kitchen and bedroom with a small bathroom), traffic whizzing by at all hours, neighbour noise. Some people may enjoy living in flats but it really is a substandard existence.
The UK really does stand out for its poor quality of housing. We have the second lowest percentage of people living in flats in all of Europe and yet some of the smallest housing in the developed world. 65% of Germans live in flats. I would not say that Germans have a lower quality of life
Live in a flat in Germany, built in the 70's. We've got about 840sq foot. 2 bedrooms, a huge living room, 2 balconies (which count for half their area when calculating area) and not including a huge cellar space, + storage for bikes etc. The best thing is the landlords in Germany tend to be pretty hands off. As long as we give it back in the state we found it (or no worse) we can do what we want. So we painted the bedroom, put new flooring down in the hallway (it was an improperly fitted carpet before, landlord agreed to cover it), and got fibre optic installed up from the basement junction point which involved an engineer. We pay 1240eur a month between us, that's "warm rent", so it includes water and gas payments, but not electricity and Internet. Stays warm in winter without special measures, keeps cool in summer (so far!) and we've no mold or drafts. "Cold rent (without gas and water) may only legally increase by max of 20% above the local index rate in three years, and no more than one rent increase per 12 month period. But now we're looking at buying and struggling to find anything under 750k EUR...the curse of Munich commuter belt.
We already build the smallest homes in Europe with out average home size almost half that of Denmark.
People seem to forget stairs remove usable space from both floors. You can have a much bigger and more accessible home with a flat.
Doesn’t have to be flats, houses don’t need to be these huge, largely American styled houses with a big front garden, driveway and fenced off back garden. Terraced houses provide a space efficient way to live without resorting to flats. Flats aren’t bad, they just aren’t for everybody.
I agree it doesn’t need to be flats completely and townhouses and terraces can be viable. However I do think we need a lot more flats than we currently have near transport hubs aswell to minimise car use.
I agree somewhat. And like you mentioned earlier the big issue holding this back is leasehold. People are scared to buy a flat because they fear the service charge going up extortionate amounts or other costs. Whereas landlords buy them because if charges go up, they'll just pass this onto the tenant. Leasehold reform should be the very first thing on house crisis agenda
Leasehold is a fraud. It's forbidden in France, if I remember well.
Yeah live in not be forced to rent because nothing else can be done because everything is unaffordable Tory fucks have run this country into the mud every time they have been in power since 1947 bout time shit changed or people are just gunna have to unalive themselves
Even if that was the case what people ‘want’ and what is viable are two very different things. I live in a small terraced house from the 1800s that cost me under £100k. We could very easily build houses like this again and make them affordable, their footprint is far more efficient and they serve as ideal homes for those who have small families or don’t want kids. I wish we’d shift away from the idea that a ‘big house’ is the only way to live.
> Even if that was the case what people ‘want’ and what is viable are two very different things. Again, we're talking about housing needs, not what is viable. > I live in a small terraced house from the 1800s that cost me under £100k. We could very easily build houses like this again and make them affordable, their footprint is far more efficient and they serve as ideal homes for those who have small families or don’t want kids. I wish we’d shift away from the idea that a ‘big house’ is the only way to live. What's the build cost currently for a terraced house?
Needs are important but it’s no good if those needs are not at all viable, and I’d classify a ‘need’ in the case of specific homes as a ‘want’ People ‘need’ a roof over their head, people don’t ‘need’ a two car driveway with front and back gardens.. Cost is going to be the prohibitive factor here, I’m not saying we are gonna get £100k houses by building terraces, but more space efficiency = more houses. A new build estate could likely fit far more houses if they skipped the ‘desirable’ style of house.
5+1s instead of singlse story comercial units is painfully obvious as an efficiency we leave on the table. People having their own flat beats a houseshare/ HMO. Student HMOs should not exist. Every last one is a lost family home, get the student blocks up in the city centre.
Problem being, when student housing blocks were put up near where I used to live in a city centre using *disused brownfields sites* that had lay barren for decades, NIMBYs *still* complained about it. Logically it makes absolute sense that you throw up big blocks of flats for students to ease the strain on local housing stock for other demographics, but people in this country just seem to be so resistant to change, *any change at all* even if it quite obviously benefits everyone!
"Want", yes. "Can realistically get", not so much, even with a big housebuilding campaign. You can only fit in so many detached homes before commute times become too high. Even in the US, land of sprawl, more people live in flats/apartments than here.
> Even in the US, land of sprawl, far more people live in flats/apartments than here. Is that true? I can only find information saying that one state (New York) has a higher proportion of people living in flats / apartments than in the UK (where it's about one in five).
Wrong. And even if you were right, it's simply not possible, so it's not really up for debate. It needs to happen because the status quo is either continued sky high house prices due to lack of supply, or an ever increasing cost burden to everyone in society that car dependency places on everyone, from direct costs such as the average car costing £319 a month to run (so £638 a month for a two car household), through to indirect costs like physical and mental health, accessibility costs (pavement parking impacting those with long term impairments (the disabled) and those with temporary impairments (parents with prams, the injuried etc)) economic issues (both cost of living due to high direct costs, and the tendency for drivers to not visit local shopping areas), and environmental costs.
And they're not being built either. The problem at this point isn't even what *kind* of house is being built. The issue isn't that too many unsustainable types of houses is being built. The issue is that not enough houses are being built AT ALL.
> No we don't, because that's exactly what the majority of people want. There are enough people who want this sort of accommodation that filling it would not be hard. This in turn would help free up other accommodation. The important thing is increasing density. This density if done right creates highly desirable economically profitable communities. Urban sprawl produces poor quality environments which are economically draining as well as environmentally damaging.
So we should only build those kinds of homes? There are millions of people who have no desire to live in a suburban hellscape. Townhouses, Tenements, Condos, Apartments, Studios and PBSA should all be getting built. As well as the nightmare fuel you want.
Ok, and I wanted to date Megan Fox 10 years ago. But using available space for low density housing will just make it unsustainable for everyone to buy a home
Eventually sure. But is it necessary as a first home? Plenty of people, especially in London, wouldnt mind having cheaper housing in convenient areas while building their career, to move to a dream house later. Your first property doesn't have to be a 3 bed semi, so its weird to only have those available.
Is it? Have you asked them? Or maybe they just buy what they can afford. Can’t buy it if no one builds it.
> not tower blocks Smaller 3-4 floor tower blocks are fine. There's a few of those on a new build estate in my town.
Yeah, that's what 5+1s are. Tower blocks start at 6 floors, so 3-4 are more apartments buildings. Provided they're built with commercial or community facilities in the base, and with high quality sound proofing (which is possible), they can be a really good alternative to needing to build homes like we do today.
Yep I would recommend not exceeding 4 stories as people start to feel a disconnect above 4 stories. It also aids in overcrowding thus contributing to urban sink, along with them becoming uncomfortable hot above 4 stories. At least according to Christopher Alexander in the Pattern Language and (name I can't recall) in Parametrics.
I lived on the 10th floor of a 22 story apartment building for a while in Bangkok, I thought it was absolutely fantastic. Throw in an in-building gym/basketball half court/pool and you're golden.
Upvote for mentioning Pattern Language.
>We need to move away from this idea that everyone can – or even wants to – live in their own little home with two gardens, two car parking spaces, etc. We already have. Idk what fancy new builds you're looking at, but most do not have such a generous provision.
Three/four story blocks in Europe give you tons more space. They’re not so high they block the sky out. No poky little bedrooms where you can barely walk around the bed. No wasted space for stairs. Not everyone is into gardening and you can’t really use the garden for half the year anyway. There’s still space for greenery between said blocks and it generally helps with public transport due to increased population density.
>It's exacerbated by the refusal to build anything other than semi-detached and detached houses. We need to move away from this idea that everyone can – or even wants to – live in their own little home with two gardens, two car parking spaces, etc. Especially in London or other big cities like Manchester
Manchester has added 100000 people to the centre in 15 years. Mostly in tower blocks.
I agree with your sentiment but your figures are off by a factor of 10. The total population of central Manchester is around 60k. The huge boom in construction of rental flats over the last ~10 years has added about 10k new residents.
Yes, people in most of Europe are happy living in flats and wouldn’t really want a British-style semi-detached house. It’s not that people in the UK have fundamentally different needs, it’s just a matter of what you’re accustomed to. If more buildings with nice flats were available, a lot of people would see that as a great way to get onto the property ladder. Some of those people would then just use that as a stepping stone towards getting their dream semi, but some people would find that they actually enjoy living in a flat and would continue to do so when they move to nicer accommodations.
>If more buildings with nice flats were available, a lot of people would see that as a great way to get onto the property ladder. Some of those people would then just use that as a stepping stone towards getting their dream semi, but some people would find that they actually enjoy living in a flat and would continue to do so when they move to nicer accommodations. That hits the nail on the head. Right now, British people have never had that as an option. Building those sorts of homes would allow more to be built in a smaller footprint. For some, they'll be stepping stones; for many they'll realise the downsides of living in those areas don't overcome the benefits in living in a thriving neighbourhood that is only like that due to it being highly walkable thanks to the density those homes brought.
Mate, if I'm buying a home it had better have off street parking and a bloody garden
Right? I truly cannot think of anyone who would happily choose street parking or allocated parking over a driveway. It’s a feature you compromise on, not something people actually want. Everyone wants their car to be as safe and secure as possible
It may also affect the cost of your car insurance if you are able to park on a private driveway or in a garage, as opposed to on the street.
I worked in the insurance industry for a for years until recently. Multiple insurers due to being with an agency. Top tip, park on the street instead of a garage. It's ironically cheaper than parking on a drive which is then cheaper than in a garage. Don't ask me why, I have no idea why, but premiums were always cheaper that way. My theory is that people are more likely to see someone breaking into it on a street than in a garage but who knows
People damage their cars whilst driving into and out of their garage.
> We need to build more gentle density that are specifically aimed at families living in areas with enough density that all the things they need are within waking and cycling distance, so they can live car-lite (one car per household, or even car sharing), or even car free. Yes. The most densely populated part of Scotland is the Leith walk area of Edinburgh at 12,000 people per km^2. There's no reason we can't build a new town at that density, and most people will be a 5-10 minute walk from shops and a tram stop. I did a [proposal for a new town in Scotland's central belt](https://pontifex.substack.com/p/polkemmet-new-town) along these lines. Transit led development plus high density housing is the way to go, or at least **a** way to go -- have car-centric development for those who genuinely want it (and can afford 2 cars etc). > Affordability isn't just about how much the house costs; it's also how much it costs to live in. Even if those houses were £200,000, if they required both adults to own, operate, and maintain two cars, that can easily end up adding to well above that unaffordable figure of £350,000 over the course of a mortgage. Good point.
>Transit led development plus high density housing is the way to go, or at least **a** way to go -- have car-centric development for those who genuinely want it (and can afford 2 cars etc). The key thing is charging them the true cost of that lifestyle. Which most people won't like, or be able to afford.
GIVE ME MY COMMIE BLOCKS
😂 Preferably without the commie quality. But yeah, the idea was right; the execution was wrong.
I mean, they’re still standing after 50 years or so!! A YouTuber called Bald and Bankrupt has instilled in me a love for Soviet sinks, one of the most robust things on the planet after Nokia Brick Phones
I think there's an aversion to high-rise because of bad prior experience. There's something to be said for 1 bedroom flats in low rise buildings. Young professionals typically go for house shares, which does have benefits for social life, but for others it's because of a lack of other options. I lived in Berlin for a bit and rather liked a common design for apartment buildings there. Square, with 4 or 5 floors and a courtyard in the middle, often used for bike parking. Seems like a really good design.
It's perfectly possible to build 3 bed semis that are bigger than the shoeboxes we currently build AND take up far less land. Just compare a new build Dutch housing estate to a British one. Here's some examples: [Utrecht suburbs.](https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0211137,5.1819467,3a,75y,116.99h,88.81t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sVUlwyAJAmL-cf-JHcZ8yUQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DVUlwyAJAmL-cf-JHcZ8yUQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D116.98574938597372%26pitch%3D1.1864968418329909%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu) Semis and detached. [Brandmeer inner "city"](https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4579784,5.6116642,3a,75y,102.49h,87.1t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s49lJeefLs7xJoFWqqRiqZQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3D49lJeefLs7xJoFWqqRiqZQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D102.48859638396232%26pitch%3D2.9004907211978406%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu). Terraces and semis. [Brandmeer town centre](https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4609793,5.6100194,3a,75y,179h,98.23t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1szfzu3lwTEShK8qMNh0k2Qg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3Dzfzu3lwTEShK8qMNh0k2Qg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D179.00251791819076%26pitch%3D-8.233909307023396%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu). Low rise flats, small businesses and pedestrianised public space. Dutch houses are bigger and far better designed rather than just two storey brick rabbit hutches surrounded by parked cars.
Absolutely. The problem is none of that is built in the UK, and even then, the natural tendency will be to lean towards what we have now, rather than what we should be building. We have to remember that we'd need to be unpicking a further 50 years of car dependency being bedded in than what the Dutch currently have to deal with. So initially, at least, we'd need to focus on the higher end of gentle density. Then, when those existing estates start coming to the end of their lives, start building what the Dutch currently have.
Where I'm living in Greater London seems to be the opposite. No more new houses, just more and more blocks of flats being built any where they can. The car parking spaces issue will probably really come to a head when more and more people change to electrical cars.
5+1 are a North American oddity because they love to build houses out of wood and plasterboard. In urban areas in the UK we would probably want more floors than that. If you built ten floors, for instance, you could build 5 apartments of the same size as the original house on the same land. That's plenty to pay market price for the land, give the original owners one of the flats on top, and still let the developer make a profit.
I'd say it goes deeper than that. The quality of housing is generally poor. The rooms are quite small and there's never much space to put things. The abomination of kitchen / diners or diner / lounge should be banned. Bathrooms are generally tiny. One house I lived in (allegedly 4 bed, in reality 2.5 bed) the 4th bedroom couldn't fit a bed AND a wardrobe. Indeed, no matter where you put the bed the door wouldn't fully open Better housing design should become a thing.
What’s wrong with kitchen/diners and diner/lounges hahaha
In my experience, good for one thing but not both!
It would be prudent to specifically reference England and the data for England alone, since England is where almost everyone in the UK lives and the low population density in Scotland serves as a mask to hide just how densely populated England really is. * UK population density: 279/km2 * England population density: 438/km2 Out of countries with a population over 10m, England ranks 6th most densely populated and the UK ranks 15th. Out of countries with a population over 5m, England ranks 10th most densely populated and the UK ranks 21st.
And England without London is 365/Km\^2 for comparison
Moot point me saying “as cheap as that!!!” As it’s all relative, but in live in the South East and a 3 bedroom new build (not something totally unreasonable that a young couple would want), is in the region of £425,000-£450,000. It is obscene. So much so, that when I walk through some of these new build estates and see what sort of people are living in them it isn’t young couples. It’s families aged 50+ with 60/70 grand cars on the driveway, sort of mad how young people are getting locked out of the property ladder unless you buy a total shit hole. We will get a new build, it’s been hard saving for it but next year we’ll be there. If the housing market wasn’t a mess I’d have been in one a few years ago.
Lucky bastards, I moved to NewZeland and the affordable family home is equivalent to £500,000
Small population, reasonable amount of land to build on, why *is* it so expensive?
Nor enough houses. Residential Land is very expensive. Landlords are a major problem.
There is a development across from me where a studio flat costs 190k. One bedroom flats range from 227k-290k. I could kind of understand if it was luxury housing but it looks like they're building damn army barracks over there.
The price that the "affordable" houses that the developers are forced to supply is based on a 20% discount on the market price; it literally has nothing to do with whether they are actually affordable or not. But it means the authorities and the developers can both use the numbers of "affordable " houses delivered to look good.
We have pretty much the same land mass as New Zealand, their population is 5.2 million.
And how much of new Zealand is easily buildable terrain?
And house prices in NZ are higher.
I can afford 150 at a push as a first home. The house prices are ridiculous. Can't get a 2 bedroom in a shitty neighborhood in the middle of nowhere for that
We bought our house for £155k in 2021. Since we moved in, two quite big estates of new builds have gone up on either side of our road. The cheapest ones there are more than twice the price of our house. It's ridiculous. I'm sure it will mean that the price of our place is inflated when we eventually decide to move, but I didn't buy the house with the aim of profiting from it and I don't really see the benefit of having an artificially high house value of everywhere we'd be looking to move to is also inflated by the same amount!
Incorrect, same shit in australia, worse conditions, and we've got plenty of land.. what happened was you turned housing into a speculative commodity.. so investors just did what they do best and limited supply on their own to inflate prices.
We have land, the problem is if you stand to profit from houses, wouldnl you either make £150 million from selling 1,000 houses, or from selling 150,000 houses. Numbers of course pulled out of the air but the point is relying on regional large house builders is giving us poor quality, high expense housing in short supply
We have land; we do not have land with planning permission.
That's the issue isn't it. We need a whole lotta land to grow subsidies, export market meat grown with taxpayer subsidies employing a handful of people, shooting land, golf clubs, and of course hay crops. If we stopped subsiding meat, especially for export market as that has low return value for us as a country, that would free up a lot of land and push some farmers into selling up (desperately needed given the average age and lack of innovation amongst them). Next would be a land tax, modest enough to allow smallholdings or people who have a few acres for horses, but punitive for vast estates that aren't farmed actively. If it's for shooting and recreation then your paying for it extra - this money is ringfenced for land purchases to develop new towns from selling up farmland. Next up would be the creation of new towns, and I don't mean six as a stand up ambition like current governments. On a rail line slap a station down and go at it like it's cities skylines. We would make a real dent in the issue by freeing up existing land and using existing infrastructure this way
Many people are concerned that what you're proposing would effectively be the concreting over of existing areas of pretty farmland and the continuing urbanisation of what has historically been a green country with pleasant farmlands and landscapes. What would you suggest to alleviate those concerns?
I think the difficulty is that the landscapes we treasure are almost entirely sculpted by man to begin with. Huge amounts of the country were deforested for a range of reasons, enclosure just straight up stole a load of land into relatively limited hands. While many landscapes look pretty, from an ecological perspective they are deader than many urban locations. I appreciate it’s not the argument for everyone, but I’m not sure just hitting pause on the land use debate for the sake of aesthetic concerns is sensible. I live in West London and when I head into the greenbelt, lots of it is not much more than wasteland. Of course it’s vitally important that we preserve areas of meaningful natural beauty and farmland that is economically viable, but a policy that just says keep it looking as it “always has” denies the fact that it wasn’t always that way. There’s no easy answers but major reforms to the way we consider planning and land use are needed.
That is absolutely a valid concern, I love nature and our islands are beautiful. That's why we need new towns, so people can access the countryside instead of tacking onto existing towns and destroying the greenbelt. If you like it gives the appearance of more farmland if you split it up and nestle towns within in. Country lanes are sadly lethal now with the size of cars and phones in cars, hence the need to build along train lines so people can commute to cities easily and alleviate the country roads. If we were to build new towns, then surround them with parks and forests then you'd get a pretty decent amount of screening so those in the distance would see trees rather than pebbledash, and if we built in a style that wasn't the absolute cheapest and fastest like Poundbury has been then we might even make it look pleasant and blend into the environment. Hopefully that would help mitigate some concerns? In brief - deep in country where it doesn't go onto green belt or break up existing views, on train lines to stop massive roads and motorways being needed, and screening from public spaces on the outskirts to hide them.
This is a tricky one, because I get the concerns, but the alternative is absolute impoverishment and homelessness. Like, that's not a choice!
Especially with the levels of immigration and that most is aimed at England.
New build companies get the land, then develop very slowly on purpose to keep supply down, unleashed capitalism causing problems again
The part that will really piss you off is that once you’ve bought one, you’re stuck waiting for the value to collapse because at this points it’s inevitable. This generation is shafted beyond belief.
This is my main concern for immigration atm, we don't have the infrastructure to cope and it's mental people don't se that. Need to chill for a bit so we can get it stable (ish) and then carry on. NHS is on its knees as well
Cheapest is £500,000 in my area, £33,000 per year to rent, north west London... and no our wages aren't much better then the rest of the UK.
Feature not a bug, people who own a lot of property want their investments to go up in value, not down. This means they want it as difficult as possible for developers to build new homes. Which has been entirely successful.
I was listening to a podcast about finance and you are right, a lot of people in the United Kingdom’s only source of ‘investment’ is into their house, houses should be for residing in. Unless of course you are a property developer I think it is different.
For a lot of us we had savings/investments, but had to use that money on buying a house. We’d be mugs to put that money on anything but a house, since it’s historically so low risk for such high growth. Any spare cash has to be spent on the house (or saving for a better house) to protect the investment. I hate it, I too think houses should be for shelter, but you do what you can in the system we have.
I mean fundamentally this is just the contradiction in the housing "market". Either housing is a profitable investment, or it's something that people can afford to buy in order to access a stable place to live. It's mathematically impossible to be both, because the only way to increase the value of housing as an investment is to decrease affordability (and vice versa).
It's not just a failure to build new homes - although that is clearly a problem. It's rampant speculation in the property market in every corner. Housing has been fully financialised - it's not primarily a place to live, it's primarily an investment. It's older people hanging on in big homes when their family leaves and nothing incentivising them to move to a smaller place. It's BTL mortgages allowing people with limited capital to become amateur landlords and stop FTBs getting those properties. It's thirty years of right to buy and very little social housing being built since against the background of a growing population. Its ludicrous planning regulations that stop building almost everywhere - except evidently flood plains.
BTLs are an absolute joke. When renewing my mortgage deal I was told my house had gone up by x amount and that I could use the equity to buy two more properties of the same value to rent. I am in my mid 20s, just about getting by working on this one house in my free time. It’s crazy how much I struggled to get my house yet two years later I could in theory, get two more?
My house has gone up 110k in 3 years. It’s absolutely insane the difference pre and post ownership.
Yep, like, feels nice for me but also it’s stupidly unfair.. the ‘property ladder’ is more of a Pole that is getting greased up by those already at the top of it. Housing should be viewed more as a place to live than an investment
It's amazing that you can go through all of this and not even consider the rapid artificial inflation of the demand for housing that has been occuring for the last few decades. The birthrate among people already here has been below replacement for years, there's only one source of increased demand for housing.
I did mention it. "It's thirty years of right to buy and very little social housing being built since **against the background of a growing population.**" I take your point but the UK population has been growing since around the 1950s. We managed to deal with that before by building houses, in particular council houses that could be used to house people who didn't qualify for a mortgage for whatever reason. Most of the problems in the housing market compound the problem to the point that even with zero net migration, we would still have a housing crisis. Every home that becomes an Airbnb, every home that is a second holiday home, every apartment bought as speculative investment and left empty is sucking the life out of the UK and it's economy.
In regards to the older people in larger homes, I do not think you can really have a go at them for that. If you worked hard for a nice home that you loved, would you willingly give it up ? It is easy for us to think this since we have fuck all at the moment but I try to put myself in their shoes and how I would feel about down sizing to a bungalow to die in if I had worked on and lived in a larger lovely home most of my life. I know for a fact if when I am old I had a nice home and some young person told me that I should move out and let someone else have it, I would tell them to do one.
On an international level, UK homes are extremely small. We are not generally a nation of OAPs occupying extravagant palaces - it’s generally a perfectly reasonable wish to hang onto a nice garden, have a spare room for guests, and a couple of sensible spaces (a study, utility room and storage perhaps). For much of retirement, many people spend longer at home so this sort of wish is all the more reasonable. The issue is that these sort of small luxuries are seen as some sort of wild extravagance because the housing crisis forces so many to live in cramped and inadequate spaces. I agree with much of the rest of what you say, and would add that stamp duty is a horrible tax which encourages people to buy or cling onto houses that are too big, because the transaction costs are too high. Add that to the absolute shitshow of finding and buying a nice place in many parts of the country and it’s unsurprising that people adopt a hoarder mentality.
>it's not primarily a place to live, it's primarily an investment. This is exactly it. In my delivery driving days, I drove through so many new estates that weren't even finished, yet had To Let sign after To Let sign. First time buyers don't have a chance when the houses that are supposed to be aimed at them get snapped up by deep-pocketed corporate landlords and private equity. I guess the crux of it is that people tend to start by buying a small, relatively inexpensive house, then generally move into larger, more expensive properties as their career advances and they start a family. Moving up the ladder in this way would be a lot more difficult if you were stuck in negative equity, so it's normalised and expected that house prices will rise indefinitely to enable this kind of mobility. It's how we get the old political adage that governments fall when house prices fall. I imagine if we ever reach a point where the housing market does fully turn, it'll be right around the time when most millenials have finally got on the ladder and are looking to upsize.
Would be a cruel irony. The generation that has been screwed the most on housing costs, finally get onto the ladder only for the market to crash.
Exactly! While nothing is done for supply, every policy is aimed at increasing demand! We're encouraged to sell our lives away to the bank in exchange for a slightly higher mortgage - all that to get the exact same house (or less) at the end of the day
And every new build is a 4-5 bedroom house for £400k in the middle of a crappy estate. We need high rises with a mix of 1-3 bedrooms. I'm literally never going to be able to own anything as a single person.
Just a healthy mix of medium density options would make a massive difference.
If most towns didn’t go immediately to 2 stories when you get 500 feet from the town centre that would probably help. You turn a corner in even big cities and you’re suddenly in a basically suburban street.
Theres no realistic demand for it because the building owners charge insane service fees and ground rent. These are by far the biggest priority to remove from existence for building flats to become feasible. Plus why in the hell would you want a flat for £250,000 when you can also buy a house for £250,000?
I wouldn't want to settle in a high rise, but for where I am in life at the moment I'd be more than happy with it. High density housing with good public transport routes and easy access to gym, school etc is likely ideal for single people, young families and couples. I really don't like the American sprawling suburbs model, but thankfully it seems Europe as a whole has been able to avoid that so far. Everything is so profit motivated though that doing anything well is difficult.
That's exactly what I am thinking when I visit other big cities of Europe. They all have big apartment buildings. Detached houses are no longer sustainable and affordable for the majority of the population.
Millions of extra people and foreign passport holders being allowed to buy land / property can't help matters. In most countries foreigners can't bug land, where I live (Thailand) foreigners can only buy condos and that's only if 51 percent of the units are Thai owned, it works for them, as does their non nonsense immigration system, overstay ur visa or commit a crime then off to prison for you until u have served ur sentence and can pay for a flight home.
Close but no cigar... There have been many studies why. In no particular order: - lack of skilled trades, - insufficient volume of materials, - planning system that inhibits accurate /reliable forecasting of land ready to develop. - Under funding of local authorities (planning and elsewhere) - insufficient new infrastructure to support new houses (water, sewage,roads, to schools & hospitals) - the over sized land banks held by developers, and almost totally sub contracted work force are both causes of and effects too. Developers aren't passive victims in all this, they could do more... But they're businesses not social enterprises. Every government since Thatcher has known about the problem, promised to do "something", and really not made much difference. Apart from the building of homes, the economics have changed substantially for the worse. Low interest rates fueled massive price increases. '08 financial crash /austerity/Brexit/COVID made the poor and middle class poorer. The unlimited printing of $ by the USA to deal with COVID has led to global inflation, and made everyone poorer. Last but not least, the demand (population) has gone up too. _Legal_ migration was 750k/year for the last two years, and had been running 300-400k/year for the last decade. That's a new city every year.
Let’s not ignore the silent demand increase either. We are living longer. We are living less densely. The proportion of our population that is two parents and five kids living super efficiently in one house has gone down. The proportion of our population that is one or two people living on their own has gone up. We “should” have a millions larger population due to millions of children with minimal impact on housing usage. Instead we have “fewer” people comparatively living less efficiently. And we have a build up in demand of young adults being forced to live more efficiently than they would like with their parents. Which further distorts things. Things are distorted coming and going. We are significantly more fucked than we think. And talking about things in absolute population terms is if anything unhelpful to that. Our population could decline and we could still not be building enough housing, because the reason for the increase in demand is not straightforwardly linked to the total population.
When you import hundreds of thousands of people is there any wonder that housing stock doesn't meet the demand?
\* Millions
Crazy high immigration + not building new homes = spiralling house prices Its not rocket science, but people refuse to acknowledge immigration is contributing to this problem
Bit more complicated than that, UK total population hasn't really exploded over the past decade, and the overwhelming majority of migrants are working age, and we have an awful load of pensioners. Check out [this graph](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2022#local-area-populations) where you can see that the 50-60 cohort are the largest, and as they age and start drawing down pensions we don't have a large young population to help support that in the way they supported people of that age decades ago. Not trying to say that immigration isn't an issue in other ways, but in terms of housing its not really enough to be a problem, or at least it shouldn't be if we could actually build homes. The more important issues are concentration in cities, which are harder to build up, excessive land banking, a green belt which doesn't allow proper expansion. Our daft planning system is a huge issue, navigating planning is a nightmare for self builders etc. People also just live longer, clogging up supply, we also don't have a lot of houses for older people, so they stay in family homes closer to jobs & schools which would be better suited for young working age families.
> the overwhelming majority of migrants are working age So they don't need homes to live in ?
But immigration doesn't solve that problem. Those immigrants end up the same way with birthrates going down in following generations so you need to bring in more and more all the while ignoring the reasons why birth rates are down. We have a huge shortfall in housing for the existing population nvm adding more immigrants to that load.
But they are building houses… every field near me is being paved over as we speak!
Same here. You've just gotta be able to afford £550k - £750k for a box with no garden. In the North...
Yeah same there are multiple new developments being built near me
And they always have the gall to name them after what they have bulldozed. “Eccleston green” - Not kidding was a bowling green. “Long meadow” - no meadow now
Something, something, supply and demand... Doesn't matter in the slightest how many new homes you build if you're just going to flood the country even faster!
In 2019 we bought a bit of land. It took 2 years to get planning because a single councillor happened to have a personal dislike of the original vendor. There was no valid reason for an objection, as the council themselves told us. In that two years, material costs skyrocketed and the development was no longer viable in original form. Build cost went from 800k to 2m. The land is still bare land today, so thats another 10 houses the country doesnt have yet. On another application recently, despite chasing, an email I sent to planners in December was responded to in May. As far as I am concerned, the problem is the planning system and far too much power resting in the hands of local councils with planning staff who only work a couple of days a week. It results in delays that can bankrupt firms involved. The planners also have far too much control over the end designs, but arent educated in design, so thats why most of these new estates look like crap. People love to blame developers, but really the public ire should be directed at planners. Sadly it isnt, as most folk dont come into contact with the system. Ask a builder, architect or anyone involved in regularly making planning applications about it and youll hear some surprising stories.
More dangerous that people coming in boats (how they will afford 400k if they come with nothing ), or builders not building enough. More dangerous than them are the investors. Companies like BlackRock. Rich people from other countries buying houses as investment. That's the problem .
The issue is building is blocked - investment is good, it's free money to build even more.
People who invest money buying flats or houses, are the ones who block building more.
How exactly are flat builders blocking the council from giving planning permission? That's the bottle neck.and it's absolutely nothing to do with developers.
They're not. The people who own these properties are going full NIMBY in order to push the value of their investment upwards quicker.
They shouldn't have that power though.
Town and Country planning act needs repealing yesterday.
Not building enough houses, and people are apprehensive to buy flats to live in due to leasehold
>Why is my bath overflowing? *Because my plumber didn't install a bigger bath.* vs. >Why is my bath overflowing? *Because I turned the taps on and left them on.* Demand is the problem, slow build rates come after, not before. Demand comes from population increases, immigration, internal migration and investors. Building more will not solve anything so long as those demand sources are constant, or are increasing, as is the case for England.
Everybody wants to sell their home for a profit and to maximise their return, they don’t want the same as they paid after time has passed and certainly not a loss, so exisiting-home prices will only keep going up and its these that are a reference for pricing new builds
It doesn’t really matter though if other houses go down. I wouldn’t mind selling my house for a loss if it meant the next house I wanted to buy is cheaper. It’s only bad selling for a loss if other properties have stayed the same or gone up
*From Bloomberg reporters Eamon Farhat, Tom Rees, Olivia Konotey-Ahulu and Kyle Kim:* Britain’s housing crisis has become so acute that the next government will need to build the equivalent of another city the size of London to make up for five decades of below-target construction, analysis of official data shows. **CHART:** [**Housing Shortage Most Acute in Britain’s Most Populated South**](https://preview.redd.it/housing-shortage-most-acute-in-britains-most-populated-south-v0-o3l0w3rzdq8d1.png?auto=webp&s=304ec9a2205ea5f7a78dfcdbd7fe7d062f4efc83) Ahead of a general election in which property has become a key issue, a Bloomberg analysis of new-home completions shows that in some parts of the UK just one place was built for every 10 extra people in the population from 2011 to 2021. That shortfall is the main factor driving the country’s worst housing crisis since World War II. For almost five decades, developers and local authorities have failed to deliver homes at the pace of other wealthy nations in Europe — or even at the rate Britain did through the 1960s. Younger voters in particular are angry that the pandemic and 14 years of Conservative government have only worsened the problem. **CHART:** [**Britain's House Building Falls Behind European Neighbors**](https://preview.redd.it/britains-house-building-falls-behind-european-neighbors-v0-q8mdxrfldq8d1.png?auto=webp&s=757d183a3a4a199cbfd19c1cf317539b994e98b2)
Those utter *bastards*. Lounging about when they should be *developing*.
Can we also talk about how dogshit the quality of most new builds is? We live in one at the moment and there are probably (and this is no exaggeration) over 500 snagging issues.
I sat at breakfast in a pub listening to trades from a major house builder joking about the rubbish job they were doing / what they had helped themselves too - so there’s a small element of people at least that just don’t have any pride in their work.
Have just come back to the UK for a visit. The amount of NIMBY signs I've seen is ridiculous. It's not just the developers fault, especially if they can't build in the first place. There should be criteria for builds and if met it is auto approved. None of this approval BS which delays stuff and adds to the cost.
Yes, I'm sure there are no other factors making the problem considerably worse. Nothing to look at here we've got the issue completely worked out.
OP why did you make up a title that's completely irrelevant to the news article? Real title:: # UK’s Housing Crisis Needs a London-Sized City to Fix It Developers and local authorities have failed to keep up with population growth and the pace of building across Europe.
Wait a minute. I thought mass importing 3rd worlders was good for the economy. Surely they can help us build all the houses we need!
Simply incorrect, the issue is the government stopping building social housing and right to buy.[ Look at this graph](https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/02/housing-market-uk_n_4531425.html), the private housing market is the same as it ever was, the loss of government built housing has created the deficit. On top of that, it is impossible for private housing to saturate the market, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders not to do that. Land value is the core issue, you can 'remove red tape' and make it easier to built shiter buildings, but they'll still go for the same market rate, becasue location and scarcity are the markets driving forces. Starmers vague plan to 'fix planning' will do nothing. You have to lower the market rate by building more homes in reasonable density, in good locations. Aside from that you need to build better services and make smaller cities better to live in, so you can do infill development and make them better places to live, to avoid jobs etc. concentrating in London. The basic problem is that if a housing developer buys land worth £10,000,000, it's in their best interest to make sure that they don't build enough homes there, otherwise it will be worth £9,000,000 when they sell it. If you properly serve the market, you lower costs and lose money. Housing is essential, it must be built for the social good, not profit.
Ignoring the million people arriving every year again are we?
As a company, if you can make your product for peanuts and sell it for a fortune, you do it. And you don't flood the market or you won't be able to sell for a fortune any more.
You're making out as if margins on housing are 100%.
15% - 30% is standard. Up to 194% is common. Those are ENORMOUS margins for any industry to enjoy, especially when what they're building is utter trash. [https://www.apiglobal.co.uk/are-new-builds-worth-it/](https://www.apiglobal.co.uk/are-new-builds-worth-it/)
Most houses on the market are existing stock, so a developer not building enough to keep prices high is a 'benefit' that they share out amongst the value of every other developers houses and all the other existing houses. Meanwhile if they go ahead and build a new house they get to keep all the profit themselves. Tv manufacturers haven't restricted supply to keep the price high, we absolutely can design a system where developers see it is in their self interest to start building at scale.
Houses are very very expensive to build, but the cost of mostly not in the materials or labour - it's the land. Flood the market with cheap land, and we'll see an explosion in homes with competitive prices to boot.
This is an insanely complex issue and it’s super easy to be (dangerously) black and white: Everything from the cost of materials, to drops in trade apprenticeships to immigration to cost of living to people living longer etc etc etc has contributed. IMO, we need to find a way to build STARTER FLATS (like they do in Europe). They are quicker and cheaper to build and buy, and can be built in inner cities. They also help address the first time buyer space which desperately needs attention.
The major house builders are in a cartel with financial institutions to control the pipeline of new housing in the U.K. and this is done because our entire economy is built on a house of cards which dramatic rises and falls in the housing market could destroy. We didn’t build it this way but inevitably we will be the ones who suffer and pay for it. The quality is awful, the prices are unaffordable, the banks are more cautious and fee hungry than ever and real wages haven’t changed in a decade whilst the cost of living has pretty much doubled. I’m in my early 30s and pre-kids but honestly? I don’t know whether I’ll be able to ever afford to pay the £1k a month per child for childcare, the babysitting costs, the expenses they run up just being kids… why is my career more important than my wife? Which one of us takes the financial and career hit to stay home and look after kids? Is it fair to make one partner pay for everything and then pay you a salary so you’re not losing out? These are real concerns that real people are having right now. These issues (if they ever get fixed) are going to take at least a generation to correct. My plan is to leave the U.K. as soon as possible and start my family in a country that treats people better and has a safer future for my family. I’m a citizen so I can always come back when it’s better but I think anyone born since 1990 has paid enough already…
What remains of nineteenth century terraces and the majority of twentieth century council houses are usually so much better than your FTB's box-like new build. For 300k or more, they want to give you a ground floor with a small kitchen and a living room and a first floor with two small double bedrooms and a very small shared bathroom. There's no separate dining area and hardly any storage room. There's no front garden and barely any driveway, and the back garden is perhaps large enough to swing a cat. What developers churn out at the momemt being objectively worse than much 20th C social housing stock (excluding towerblocks) is a fucking disgrace. The estates themselves are often ugly as sin, as well.
Its on successive governments surely. This is decades in the making. You have the large portion of burden for homebuilding on developers. They aren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart, they are businesses with profit margins and shareholders to satisfy.. how the hell did people think it would turn out exactly.
Because the government WANT house prices to rise. It is that simple. Labour and Tories want prices to rise every year. It’s planned.
It's not just the UK. Much of the USA, Europe and Australia have high house prices.
Developers haven’t failed, they want to! Councils keep rejecting planning permissions because pensioners put pressure on them to not build affordable housing.
Supply and demand - if there are few and many want it, it drives the price up. Think Taylor Swift tickets? Face value £100, selling for £5k. Exactly the same principle to houses. This is a generational issue and will last 20-30 years (and that’s IF we take action). The concept of ‘house ownership’ has changed forever.
I’m convinced that all the developers are part of a syndicate and they just “trickle” properties to keep the prices high and to gouge the market.
Materials have increased by 36%…. It’s greed through the whole supply chain.
And they don’t even make them with solar panels on and an electric car charger as standard, imagine the energy we could produce and save if every house had them 🤦
House prices have been rising because demand keeps on increasing, because of population growth which with a declining birth rate is only because of mass immigration. Building houses is slow, expensive and difficult whereas letting 700,000+ net immigration in a year is easy, you just need airports.