The silver bullet to fix the housing market

chewmylegoff

alberty wrote: »

I don't believe given a choice anyone would prefer a shoebox size flat to a traditional house.

Between the ages of 18 and 34 I lived in flats in London except a 3 year period where I lived in a spacious 4 bed semi detached house in kent. I hated the latter and would much rather have been living in a more centrally located flat - looking after a big house and garden was expensive and a big drain on my time, I had loads of space I didn't need and it was boring. I would have been far happier in a shoebox and indeed moved back into one as soon as I could.

chucknorris

Bantex wrote: »

I could be up for adoption.

I'm afraid what's left (we obviously will not manage to time the spending of it perfectly) will be going to friends, the dogs trust and the last chance rescue centre. That's assuming we do manage some spending and avoid getting knocked down by a bus (or similar early demise), which reminds me I/we really must prepare a will.

alberty

CLAPTON wrote: »

well, if you do the simply arithmetic required, you will see there is plenty of opportunity to build larger shoeboxes and houses in the London area.
We don't because of the mad government restrictions.

Having recently been to Wales I was appalled by the shoe box sized houses and so don't see that as a solution to London's solvable housing problems.

Yeah you're probably right. They could build the Shard on every street corner in London and it still wouldn't be enough, even just for the Romanian contingent.

CLAPTON

alberty wrote: »

Yeah you're probably right. They could build the Shard on every street corner in London and it still wouldn't be enough, even just for the Romanian contingent.

Is that a gut feel or have you worked that out using simple GCSE arithmetic?


And on the matter of maths, Romanians aren't a large numeric London community.

Cornucopia

We should be looking at building eco-villages of sustainable pre-fabricated homes.

Then if the population subsides, they can easily be removed and the land returned to farming.

Thrugelmir

alberty wrote: »

Yeah you're probably right. They could build the Shard on every street corner in London and it still wouldn't be enough, even just for the Romanian contingent.

The Shard isn't even fully let yet.

antrobus

Cornucopia wrote: »

We should be looking at building eco-villages of sustainable pre-fabricated homes.

Then if the population subsides, they can easily be removed and the land returned to farming.

Apart from the roads, the water, sewerage, electricity and telephone networks, and so forth.

P.S. Inserting 'sexy' words such as "eco" and "sustainable" into a sentence doesn't really change the meaning.

cells

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Mortgage availability has increased significantly over the last year, thanks to a concerted effort from the BOE and Treasury to repair the dysfunctional lending market.

New housing starts are up nearly 40% Year on Year as a result, and now at the highest level in 6 years.

So obviously I have no need to revise the theory, as it's correct.

Its somewhat unfair for you to use recession time frames.

Building is at its lowest level ever excluding the recession while proces are high

why haven't we seen french type 400k a year why are we still stuck at sub 150k?

cells

alberty wrote: »

I don't believe given a choice anyone would prefer a shoebox size flat to a traditional house. London prices are based on the idea that we all have to stuff into a small economic area because noone will ever invent a way for us to move large distances quickly and cheaply. That's probably not true, although it probably is true in our lifetimes.

High speed rail doesn't work that well in a small country like England.

The two biggest cities are separated by only 100 miles and you will have stops in between so you will be spending more time stationary or decelerating or accelerating than at fill speed.

plus it is irrelevant the speed of the train unless you sleep on the platform under some seats and you happen to work on your destination platform. Whay matters is door to door times and high speed rail does birtually nothing to improve the overall door to door time

plus even if someone invented a star treck type teleport devise for instant travel it wouldn't be free. If this faster than light devise cost a mere £100 each way you would still very much like to live close to qhere yoy work to avoid what would bea huge weekly cost of travil.

overall high speed rail is a huge subsidy so a very few commuters can wake up ten minutes later

cells

Cornucopia wrote: »

We should be looking at building eco-villages of sustainable pre-fabricated homes.

Then if the population subsides, they can easily be removed and the land returned to farming.

falling population doesn't mean you need fewer homes. In the 1970s for 4 years the population fell. Homes were not knocked down. The building industry didn't grind to a halt. What happened was even though the population fell another 1.2 million homes were built. People lived less dense the occupancy rate fell.

Looking years down the road the occupancy rate may need to fall as low as 1.8
So if the uk stays at 65million the uk would need close to 36m homes we currently have 27.5m so even with a static population the uk housing stock needs to expand by nearly 10 m units