Corbyn promises 'radical reboot' of council house building to tackle housing crisis

cells

MS1950 wrote: »

Well here's an apparently 'prize winning' alternative view published by the Adam Smith Institute promoting 'sweeping deregulation'......

But I'm not entirely sure whether it's intended to be satire or not....?

http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/planning-transport/britain-needs-more-slums/

I think the writer expects the reader to use some of thier own reasoning and deduction.

Its true that regulations add a lot of extra costs. For example the house I live in is quite a nice house and its been around for over a hundred years. However if I wanted to build a replica the cost of doing so would be much higher than the cost of rebuilding this house as it stands. For a start the foundations would need to be aboit twice as deep and wider too. The walls would have to go from solid to about 35cm thick with insulation between two solid walls. The ceiling and floors would need to be thicker to support the new regs. Over all I reckon to meet the higher standards would add at least £30k cost and its not really needed. A true evidence based regulations is needed not regulations to meet max need.

personally I think solid walls should be allowed again. Sure they are energy inefficient but I would wager a lot of people with solod walls do what I do which is just heat the living room in winter rather than the whole house in which case my house probably uses less energy

cells

martinsurrey wrote: »

so again, where is the cash going to come from? unfunded borrowing? and how will the cash be repaid, if all of the houses are used as social housing?

In an indirect route this already happens, a housing association gets its funds from the government, and uses them to buy affordable housing from the developers with the developer funding the build (generally 60% is paid on completion of the units), will this reduce the funds available to HA's?

and this doesn't reduce the main bottle neck, land and planning.

A nice headline, but not thought out very well.

Could be easy.

Council comp purchase agri land or disused land. Fairly cheap to do at about £15k an acre. Zones it at X density per acre. For example 20 homea an acre for this plot. Then puts it up for tender. Lets the builders do all the design and finance etc. Builder A says ok ill build you the 20 homes on that plot but ill keep 14. Builder B says ok ill build you 20 homes but keep 12. Builder C says ok ill build the 20 homes but keep 11.

Council goes with builder C who builds the 20 homes. 9 become council owned 11 become the builders who sells it on. A part council part private estate.

Of course depending on local conditions the buoldrrs might only offer to build the 20 homes if they can keep 18 or even 19 of them. Eg in areas that are cheap. Whereas in other areas where prices are really high builders might be willing to build 20 homes abd just keep 2.

cells

CLAPTON wrote: »

If social housing is going to be built, then it should be directly publicly funded rather than buyers of new builds having to fund both their own house plus social housing.

Corbyn is on record as saying he is willing to borrow more and tax more.

He has made no announcement of private sector building as far as I know.

There is no need for council housing above maybe 5% of the stock

if anything council homes need to be sold off to get tpwards that 5% figure

especially in London the ~850,000 social homes should be sold off down towards ~200,000. The £200B raised from the sales should be used to put in place infrastructure to allow London to expand towards 15 million. One of the big projects would be to add some 100 or so additional tube stations

cells

martinsurrey wrote: »

you keep saying this "FTB has to pay both for their own house as well as a council house too"

but it is manifestly wrong.

I have just looked at a historic development and the HA paid (in cash) £292 per sq ft for its units and the average Open market unit on the same site sold for £349 per Sq ft. meaning the HA got a 17% discount, given that HA is about 25% on a site that 17% discount is only about 3-4% of each OM units price.

however, land was over 30%

This depends entirely in the project and mostly that means the local market

its true to say that without s106 homes would not be cheaper instead land values would go up but that is because of how limited stamps are

if stamps were more in quantity then s106 costs would fall onto the the home purchasers


but there are also multiple feedback loops.
For example if I own a strech if land in london. Lets pretend its got some low density homes on it. If s106 was abolished I would probably be more willing to knock them down and build at abhigher density as suddenly the prpfit of doing so has gone up fairly markedly. So s106 is probably holding back some redevelopment.

Effectively a lot of marginal projects are on hold until prices improve or s106 is reduced. If you are to build 100 homes in london and have to sell 50 at cost of £100k and the other 50 at market price of £500k gives you total revenue of £30m whereas without s106 you woupd have revenue of £50m. So any project that costs more thab £30m and less than £50m does not come forward as it would be unviable currently.

also there is an argument to say the who project is devalued due to the social homes on the estate (or within the flat) as private buyers are aware of this and it is priced as such.


anyway the main problem is that we are in a quota based system. Stalin would be proud

cells

martinsurrey wrote: »

that's the lowest discount I found, they range from there to up around 35%

building 100,000 houses a year at £292 a sq ft and 700 sq ft per 2 bed (about average) is £20billion a year, hardly trivial, in fact you'd have to shut the NHS down for almost 2 months a year to pay for it.

In london alone if you sold off the council homes as they became vacant (about 40k units a year) you would get ~£10B a year in proceeds.

Use that to expand Londons transport and expand it closer to the m25.
Build a hundred extra tube stations and a few big underground car tunnels

Would create about 270,000 jobs. Improve londons transport considerably and allow the city to grow towards 15 million in a good sustainable way (where transport improves first and then population grows rather than the other way
Hell you could even build 40,000 replacement flats and do all of the above

cells

stator wrote: »

"Market forces" have never been able to build enough houses in this country.
"Market forces" result in big builders only building the number of houses they want (about 200,000 per year max). If they build enough houses, prices would stop going up.
To get back up to 400,000 per year we need to bring back council lead building.

How many councils owned and ran building companies?

Close to none?

in which case there was never council house building

they just commissioned work and the evil private builders built it

cells

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Its not as simple as that. Builders, like any company, are not going to flood the market win th their product and force the price of their product down..

That would be true if the sector was run by a monopoly but there are hundreds maybe thousands of builders of all sizes In the UK so unless they all belong to some secret lodge....like the mortar masons ..... it wont work

howeber as things stand it is a 'monopoly' market as supply is restricted not by a monopoly builder but the monopoly council who limits quotas