Let's lift the restrictions and see if that holds true, shall we?
I think you vastly underestimate the suffering millions of people in the UK are enduring as a result of the housing crisis, and the range of alternatives that would be considered an improvement for those people.
So yes if we opened up the green belt it would be built on but it wouldn't achieve anything to alleviate the housing crisis.
And before you say anything I am a late 20s person living in London without any hope of owning my own house.
Finally sprawl is a massive issue and encouraging sprawl over densification will only make the situation worse.
It would be more accurate to say:
> I'm just realistic about what the government will do. If you look at the long running trend in the granting of planning permissions since the second world war, the government has allowed roughly 200,000 units a year to be built.
The private sector builds as many houses as it is legally allowed to do so. This is, as you note, an insufficient number. And yes of course, when they're not allowed to build enough houses to meet demand, they will prioritize building the most profitable ones.
> The private sector will only ever build for the top end of the market and never in the quantities actually needed to reduce house prices.
Yes, we've passed laws to make damn sure of that.
> So yes if we opened up the green belt it would be built on but it wouldn't achieve anything to alleviate the housing crisis.
It's quite possibly true that focusing on denser, brownfield developments is a better idea. But it's rather absurd to suggest that building more houses isn't going to help with the problem of there not being enough houses.
I'd rather live centrally. If height restrictions were eliminated and councils started building pretty much everybody who wanted to, could. The housing crisis was entirely a deliberate creation of both the Tories (and to an extent, New Labour).
>I think you vastly underestimate the suffering millions of people in the UK are enduring
I think you're vastly overestimating the effect this would have on alleviating that.
Corbyn's approach (let councils start building again) is a far more rational approach than this.
Leaving aside the question of where the money and land comes from (both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last few GEs, and nobody's even come close to hitting them), doesn't this run afoul of parliamentary sovereignty?
If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give them all away again as electoral bribes?
My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment. That's certainly not the only problem, but it's addressable relatively cheaply via macroprudential measures and tax law, so I'd like to see uk.gov start there and then see what further action is needed.
The money would come from "people's QE" and lifting the housing revenue account cap.
Building UP, as I mentioned before, is a better way of packing more people in than creating sprawling suburbs in the green belt. For a city its size London's density has been ridiculously restrained.
>both main parties have announced impressive housebuilding targets at the last few GEs, and nobody's even come close to hitting them
Neither Blair's government nor the Tories have ever had any intention of building council housing, instead setting targets for the private sector.
>If "no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change", then even if under the current government councils manage to build a zillion new homes, won't the next Osbornean Tory or Blairite Labour government just give them all away again as electoral bribes
Would you prefer people didn't have homes? Just say it if that's what you want.
>My gut feeling is that the #1 problem is excessive lending on housing and way too much tolerance for housing as a speculative investment.
The financialization of housing exacerbated the problems caused by the shortage of housing, they obviously didn't create them.
Does this mean you think that supply is adequate and the only issue is that? We have been running a deficit of 200,000 units of housing a year for over 30 years. The shortfall has been made up, in London at least, by turning flat living rooms into bedrooms and splitting up housing into smaller and smaller units.
Also 200,000 units over 5 years is not impressive it's downright pathetic. We used to build 200,000 units of council housing a year as well as 200,000 units of private housing a year.
I don't care if a party gives away the housing as an electoral bribe down the line I just want the housing to be built now and continue to be built to keep house prices from ever going up.
High-rise buildings are a hugely inefficient use of land and energy. 5-6 storey mansion blocks would be the optimum.
But it is not height restrictions that preclude that kind of development in central London. The foremost problem is a lack of available land.
We could build millions and millions of houses in the green belt. In a country of ~20m homes, that will necessarily have a huge effect.
If we can break free of the notion of UK property as an ever-appreciating safe investment, we may also deter some speculators and crater prices entirely.
High rise buildings are MORE efficient, not less. The more dense the city, the more energy efficient it is: http://www.citylab.com/work/2012/04/why-bigger-cities-are-gr...
>But it is not height restrictions that preclude that kind of development in central London. The foremost problem is a lack of available land.
You just have to look at the number of people packed into a smaller area in Manhattan to see that that isn't true.
>We could build millions and millions of houses in the green belt.
You could also build millions of apartments inside it and then maybe people wouldn't have to live in Uxbridge and Barnet AND you wouldn't have to make air quality in London even worse.
