The UK doesn’t have a housing shortage

System

Heh. Problem solved, 2 families per house! It seems so simple now.

System

Persuade rich pensioners with large homes to sell up, probably to foreigners, and downsize to small homes in competition with first time buyers?

Oh, hang on, have I got it the wrong way round? What about persuading people to buy the largest houses they can afford, so freeing up more smaller houses at the bottom of the ladder?

PasturesNew

I had to buy a 2 bed as there simply weren't any 1-bed houses....well, for every 100 2-beds there's one 1-bed, so it's not a choice - and, quite often, by spending the extra £10-20k on a 2-bed you get at least 50% more house.

So, the problem is poor value for money in smaller houses - and rubbish design of houses - and lack of smaller houses being available at all - and smaller houses being, well, smaller in all the wrong ways.

Poor design because the builders are looking to maximise profit and not maximise flow/layout/design/storage.

I could redesign my current house to occupy 2/3rds of the space and give me a better house, but it won't have cost 2/3rds of what this one did.

antrobus

MFW_ASAP wrote: »

Lots of second homes in France...

And in France, the dwelling stock figure includes hotels, caravans, and ships. I have no idea how much of the French dwelling stock is made up of hotels, caravans, and ships, but it is one factor that makes it difficult to draw comparisons.

Loughton_Monkey

Well I've just had the biggest slapping round the head I've had in a long time when I just ran this past Mrs LM.

Perhaps a Polish family with 2 kids in one spare bedroom (at the cost of some cheap IKEA bunk beds.)

Similar for Romanians in another spare bedroom.

Third bedroom - in which I am writing this - could arguably squeeze a couple of Syrian refugees - provided I am able to re-locate 100% to the laptop in my downstairs bar to do all my financial wizardry on the monkey fortune - soon to expand rapidly with all that rental income.

Sorry, but Mrs LM simply won't go for it.

To summarise, I think her view was that we have a perfectly good house. Hence there is no housing shortage. Therefore no need to do anything at all. Problem solved.

.... large gin & tonics all round.... :rotfl:

jjlandlord

In France most people live in flats, and housing in general is therefore denser.
Paris houses roughly the same population as London on half the land.

cells

Its more than a housing shortage it's a neutering of a whole industry.

if the UK built 400,000 homes a year (like France) instead of 120,000 a year and they were on average ~120sqm that would be at least £80B onto our GDP and a perhaps £20-£30B off the deficit and at least a million more jobs

Loughton_Monkey

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Holy cow.....

Speechless.

I bet you feel a right numpty now. Having banged on about a housing shortage for years, when you're presented with a compelling argument that there simply is no housing shortage.

I'm sure someone from Devon will be along in a minute with another bright idea. People say we have "poverty" in UK. Well apparently it's just caused by the wrong sort of wealth. Some have lots of it. Some have very little of it. Take it away from the rich, and throw it at the poor. Simple.

He presumably thinks it will work and is doing his bit to make sure this happens. He's going to vote Labour you know.

cells

Eurostat records for the EU28 nations something they call...Gross fixed residential capital formation in housing at current prices (% of GDP)

for the year 2009 (the most recent data point on the report i am looking at) shows the uk 2.8% of GDP on new housing vs 6.4% for france and 5.6% for germany


We are in 26th position, which means of the EU 28 we spend the least on building new homes.......... only Slovak Republic and Luxembourg spend less.

cells

cells wrote: »

Eurostat records for the EU28 nations something they call...Gross fixed residential capital formation in housing at current prices (% of GDP)

for the year 2009 (the most recent data point on the report i am looking at) shows the uk 2.8% of GDP on new housing vs 6.4% for france and 5.6% for germany


We are in 26th position, which means of the EU 28 we spend the least on building new homes.......... only Slovak Republic and Luxembourg spend less.

the same report also shows Only Romania and Italy build smaller new builds than the UK