Why can't the UK build 240,000 houses a year?

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Quasar wrote: »

Meanwhile, six houses down my road there is a 5-flat house owned by a Housing Association. Two of the flats have been unoccupied for over a year. In another part of my area, an entire house has been allowed to fall into major disrepair by remaining vacant for at least two decades. It is large enough to make 4 flats out of it. This situation is not uncommon here in London, while new soulless apartment blocks are being built out of plastic, glass and metal, taking over ever more precious spaces that leave no greens or gardens.

I lived in a modern flat development of approx 40 spacious flats that failed to sell when the market crashed in 2008. I stayed there for a while and saw what happened.... Some of the flats sold to owner occupiers, the remaining 85% were kept by the developing company who rented them all out... eventually they went bust, so the job lot of flats would need to be sold as a single purchase to another large company. The interesting bit is.... larger scale purchasers do not want to buy the lump of properties together with the old tenants.... so they stopped renewing contracts and only gave 3 mth extensions, and eventually people moved out one by one... so for a long time many of the flats were empty... the flats were easier to sell as vacant. Eventually a company did buy the whole lot, and they are rented out again now.

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cells wrote: »

Why is it that the end 'cost' in the SE is higher than the end cost in say Scotland if as you say the materials and labour costs are about the same?

the reason is clear the market is operating not on supply and demand cost and profit but on quotas.

only it fails to address the need for a falling occupancy rate which is critical and it fails to understand the fact that not all planning stamps will proceed to development. Take those into account and the uk needs to have a quota of 500k stamps a year so 400k homes can be build annually....which is v.close to what happens in france

The answer is probably in who funds the political parties.... the quotas is a system that has supported poisonous house price inflation over the years.

It is within political party's power to link funding given by central government to local authorities to how close they get to their quota.... and the quota should be high enough to stop the insane high price inflation.

It is simple.... there has been a social suppression agenda

J_i_m

There's a fair bit of building going on in my locality, has been for the past few years, mostly on unused industrial ground.

The annoying thing though is the attitude on the existing surrounding estates who seem to adopt an "not on my doorstep" attitude when new housing estates are proposed.

But new houses have to go somewhere...