A time-limited right to fully develop and sell-on plots could then be auctioned-off.
This is exactly how North Sea licensing works. Oil companies bid for the right to explore specific acreage, and after a period of time, the license lapses. In that time you’ve either explored it or you haven’t but if you haven’t it’s re-auctioned. It works there; with a few tweaks it ought to work elsewhere.
I do like the idea of building in constituencies that voted for mass immigration.
This would be great if it didn’t take so long to get permissions.
Back when I had a downtown office, I often spoke with my landlord, a local commercial office property developer. He explained that he had started applying for permission on his current development (in an already non-residential zone, but needed further re-zoning for some reason) twenty years before.
The council committee would discuss it for a while, reach no conclusion, or halt because of some objection, then take a recess and re-convene in six months or even longer in some cases.
Last edited 2 years ago by Brendan O'Leary
Alastair Herd
2 years ago
Plenty of good ideas in here, but the most obvious is simply restricting private equity’s involvement in houses. New Zealand has an excellent policy restricting purchases of homes by foreign nationals, I imagine if we brought something in here London house prices would drop by a 1/3 (which is probably why they will never bring it in….)
Yet house prices rises in NZ are worse than in the UK!
William Cameron
2 years ago
Politicians need to learn to count. House prices have risen roughly 1000 (yes a thousand) per cent in the last thirty years- while the population has only increase 20%. So some of the price increase is shortage- lets be generous and say 100% – the other 900% is due to increased demand (lending) of cheap money shoving up asset prices. They cannot build to lower prices much. If you want lower house prices restrict house lending to the three times one income as it used to be.
Juenricks proposal seems to be a blatant handout for his developer donors- and will not reduce house prices one penny. But it will destroy millions of acres of countryside.
A rule like this on mortgages would primarily disadvantage the banks. Good.
However, I don’t agree that we can simply isolate the effect of ‘only’ increasing the population by 20%.
Anna Bramwell
2 years ago
I have lived through a number of property booms and.crashes. . During each boom we are told there is a shortage of houses/ land. During each depression, these problems mysteriously vanish. Since 2008 and the cheap money boom, prices have risen to an average 12 times the average salary , whereas the norm historically was 3.5 to 4 times the average salary. Thus the’real’ cost of the average house inUK today would be under £100 000.. If interest rates were to rise to a more modest 4 to 5% prices would crash, slowly becoming more,affordable, as happened between 1987 and 1997. Only today it would be ten times more painful. The obsession with increasing supply is economically wrong headed. Single house occupancy is increasing.
William Cameron
2 years ago
To those who say that increasing interest rates or restricting lending to three times one income would result in negative equity- the answer is not necessarily. The lenders have caused the price increases- so if house values fall let the mortgage debt be reduced in step. The lenders gained from the increase let them share the downside.
John Riordan
2 years ago
“Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.”
Speaking as a free-marketer, I don’t have the chutzpah to start complaining about the massively rigged, sclerotic and over-regulated market that is UK property at the point when further regulation is used to try to fix the problem.
I would, of course, prefer a free market solution instead, but that simply isn’t possible as long as supply is radically constrained the way it presently is. I may vote Tory, but my stake in this game isn’t to keep the Tories in power, it’s to make sure free market capitalism itself isn’t destroyed for want of simply allowing the younger generations to actually have a stake in the game.
Last edited 2 years ago by John Riordan
Jane Morris-Jones
2 years ago
Oddly no mention here of Steve Baker’s recent suggestion that NIMBYs be financially compensated for what is often a severe financial loss from a neighbouring new development. People will always fight to protect a vital financial interest and time is the enemy when new houses are needed NOW not after endless appeals.
This is exactly how North Sea licensing works. Oil companies bid for the right to explore specific acreage, and after a period of time, the license lapses. In that time you’ve either explored it or you haven’t but if you haven’t it’s re-auctioned.
It works there; with a few tweaks it ought to work elsewhere.
I do like the idea of building in constituencies that voted for mass immigration.
This would be great if it didn’t take so long to get permissions.
Back when I had a downtown office, I often spoke with my landlord, a local commercial office property developer. He explained that he had started applying for permission on his current development (in an already non-residential zone, but needed further re-zoning for some reason) twenty years before.
The council committee would discuss it for a while, reach no conclusion, or halt because of some objection, then take a recess and re-convene in six months or even longer in some cases.
Plenty of good ideas in here, but the most obvious is simply restricting private equity’s involvement in houses. New Zealand has an excellent policy restricting purchases of homes by foreign nationals, I imagine if we brought something in here London house prices would drop by a 1/3 (which is probably why they will never bring it in….)
Yet house prices rises in NZ are worse than in the UK!
Politicians need to learn to count. House prices have risen roughly 1000 (yes a thousand) per cent in the last thirty years- while the population has only increase 20%. So some of the price increase is shortage- lets be generous and say 100% – the other 900% is due to increased demand (lending) of cheap money shoving up asset prices. They cannot build to lower prices much. If you want lower house prices restrict house lending to the three times one income as it used to be.
Juenricks proposal seems to be a blatant handout for his developer donors- and will not reduce house prices one penny. But it will destroy millions of acres of countryside.
A rule like this on mortgages would primarily disadvantage the banks. Good.
However, I don’t agree that we can simply isolate the effect of ‘only’ increasing the population by 20%.
I have lived through a number of property booms and.crashes. . During each boom we are told there is a shortage of houses/ land. During each depression, these problems mysteriously vanish. Since 2008 and the cheap money boom, prices have risen to an average 12 times the average salary , whereas the norm historically was 3.5 to 4 times the average salary. Thus the’real’ cost of the average house inUK today would be under £100 000.. If interest rates were to rise to a more modest 4 to 5% prices would crash, slowly becoming more,affordable, as happened between 1987 and 1997. Only today it would be ten times more painful. The obsession with increasing supply is economically wrong headed. Single house occupancy is increasing.
To those who say that increasing interest rates or restricting lending to three times one income would result in negative equity- the answer is not necessarily. The lenders have caused the price increases- so if house values fall let the mortgage debt be reduced in step. The lenders gained from the increase let them share the downside.
“Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.”
Speaking as a free-marketer, I don’t have the chutzpah to start complaining about the massively rigged, sclerotic and over-regulated market that is UK property at the point when further regulation is used to try to fix the problem.
I would, of course, prefer a free market solution instead, but that simply isn’t possible as long as supply is radically constrained the way it presently is. I may vote Tory, but my stake in this game isn’t to keep the Tories in power, it’s to make sure free market capitalism itself isn’t destroyed for want of simply allowing the younger generations to actually have a stake in the game.
Oddly no mention here of Steve Baker’s recent suggestion that NIMBYs be financially compensated for what is often a severe financial loss from a neighbouring new development. People will always fight to protect a vital financial interest and time is the enemy when new houses are needed NOW not after endless appeals.