Uk needs to double house buildng rate

[madd0ct0r]

following on from the various threads we've had about homeless people being shipped north and other people renting sheds in london:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/ ... omes-built

Randeep Ramesh
The Guardian, Thursday 17 May 2012

A report by leading housing experts has found that not enough new homes are being built, leading to rising rental levels and growing homelessness and overcrowding. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Ministers are failing to tackle the housing crisis and not enough new homes are being built, leading to rising rental levels and growing homelessness and overcrowding, according to a report by leading housing experts.

The report by the National Housing Federation, Shelter and the Chartered Institute of Housing highlights areas where the coalition is in charge of deteriorating housing conditions. It points out that while there has been a small increase in new builds, the 109,020 completed homes in 2011 is almost 40% below the 2007 peak of 175,560 – and less than half the number the government admits would be required annually to meet demand.

The knock-on effects are that poorer people will find it harder to pay for a roof over their head as the combination of rising rents and falling benefits make housing less affordable.

Homelessness is also increasing. The number of councils' "acceptances" of homeless households reached 12,830 in the final quarter of 2011 – up 27% from the period during which the government came to power.

The report also says that overcrowding is becoming an issue - with more families squeezed into ever smaller spaces. The report, for the first time, says the number of households living in overcrowded conditions continues to rise, from 630,000 in 2009-10 to 655,000 in 2010-11.

The authors argue that building more homes would also boost the economy – crucial at a time when the country has entered a double dip recession. Grainia Long, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, said the "government needs to step up its efforts in response and be more ambitious in its strategy to boost housing supply and activity in the wider housing sector. Addressing the housing crisis in this way would also be a much-needed and powerful stimulus to economic growth."

Charities that backed the report were more critical of government strategy. Kay Boycott, director of communications, policy and campaigns at Shelter, said: "Every day we see families up and down the country whose lives are being torn apart by the shortage of affordable homes. This government has had two years to start delivering on housing, yet this report paints a pretty bleak picture of its current record on housing in all its forms."

Jack Dromey MP, Labour's shadow housing minister, pointed out the report said the government is failing to deliver or making no progress on eight out of 10 key housing indicators. He said: "The report paints a bleak picture … housebuilding is down, homelessness is up and rents are increasingly unaffordable.

"The deterioration in outcomes outlined in this report show this out of touch government still isn't listening. They're failing to help the young couples who can't get on the housing ladder. They're failing those families struggling with high rents in the private sector and the millions on waiting lists. And they're failing the increasing number of people sleeping on our streets.

[someone_else]

they could send their surplus people to Italy, here the houses grew at double the rate of population growth since 2000.

There is a completely ludicrous amount of brand new houses and random commercial spaces left to rot unoccupied, and you keep seeing construction cranes at work all around. There is at least a couple million houses/flats/whatever that none is going to use atm. We can house all your homeless and overcrowded.

Although the prices remain well outside what should be basic market logic (they are starting now to decrease their rise).

Anyway, they can learn from us.

[HMS Conqueror]

Homeless should be shipped North; it's ludicrously cheaper to rent there. I don't understand why so many people want to live in London. Unless you are literally in the top 1% of earners, you're just pissing your money away on cost of living.

That said, the real problem is the artificial restrictions on new building. We have the ludicrous situation where half the population is crammed into a few areas that have planning permission, while entire counties like Lincolnshire, Norfolk and North Yorkshire are vast areas of essentially empty flat land.

[Zaune]

Homeless should be shipped North; it's ludicrously cheaper to rent there.

That's because all the jobs are in the south.

[Broomstick]

Homeless should be shipped North; it's ludicrously cheaper to rent there. I don't understand why so many people want to live in London. Unless you are literally in the top 1% of earners, you're just pissing your money away on cost of living.

So... what's the job situation up north? Because if there aren't jobs for the people you ship north (nevermind the morality of forced relocation, which is what you're talking about) you're not solving many problems and likely generating more.

People these days gravitate towards big cities because they believe the likelihood of finding a job there is greater than where they currently are. Then there are the people who live in London because they were born there, often there families have been there for generations.

Even so - you're proposing that the homeless simply be rounded up and sent elsewhere? You don't see any potential problems with that either on an ethical or practical level?

[HMS Conqueror]

There are, believe it or not, cities in the North, and while they offer nowhere near the opportunities for skilled professionals, those are not the people we're talking about.

It's also not "forced relocation", it's rather that these people are better off there. It's instead immoral to pay for people to rent Islington townhouses out of funds intended for the relief of hardship.

[Broomstick]

What's stopping those people from re-locating now?

Unless you're persuading people to move of their own free will there's some coercion involved. Don't pretend otherwise.

[HMS Conqueror]

Housing benefit and council houses are assigned on a local authority basis, not a national basis. The "coercion" is no longer paying people free money equivalent to greater than the average wage, because they choose to live somewhere very expensive. This is just as coercive as the government not buying me a speedboat is coercing me to stop my speed-boating hobby.

[Keevan_Colton]

I'm curious, are you actually a Dickensian villain or just too stupid to realise that people exist independently of their economic status?

[Keevan_Colton]

Housing benefit and council houses are assigned on a local authority basis, not a national basis. The "coercion" is no longer paying people free money equivalent to greater than the average wage, because they choose to live somewhere very expensive. This is just as coercive as the government not buying me a speedboat is coercing me to stop my speed-boating hobby.

Considering that you don't need a speedboat to live that falls flat you fuckwit.

Also, the amount that will be paid for housing is in fact capped on a local basis with no regards to the actual rent you pay, so you can go get fucked. Also, you are only eligible for council housing moving into an area if you have a connection to that area, such as a job or family or having been born there.

Do you make it a point to spout off inane shit without actually checking details?

[HMS Conqueror]

You don't need the most expensive possible house in the most desirable area to live either, but presumably you knew that. The cap (which, btw, the example I gave was of the new cap, previously it wasn't capped) is new this year, and idiots like you made hysterical complaints about that too.

Requiring people eligible for supposedly emergency temporary aid live in the most cost-effective areas is not equivalent to Nazi Germany, it's just the howlings of a lot of people who are upset they can no longer game the system. There are plenty of people who actually have jobs who live in cheap houses in the North; I don't see why people who do nothing should get rent paid on houses the vast majority of working people can't afford because they have some sort of hereditary entitlement to it.

[Keevan_Colton]

It isnt new, there has been a cap on the amount that will be paid for housing benefit for more than a decade...seriously, where the fuck are you getting this shit from?

Try a little empathy perhaps? How would you feel if you were told that you were being sent to live hundreds of miles away from everyone you've ever known, all your friends and family because it's more cost effective to have you live unemployed somewhere else?

Do you know what else would work too for cheap housing? Seizing properties and replacing them with cheap housing...but, that would be doing nasty shit to rich people so that's out of the question isnt it?

Perhaps you might like to consider a world view that would not include phrases such as "then they had best die quickly and reduce the surplus population."

[madd0ct0r]

actually, i'm with HMS on this one - the BBC was looking at relocating a bunch of offices to the north, and there's huge numbers of civil service jobs that are in London because that's where the office was a 100 years ago, rather then them needing to be there.

Unless there's a job waiting for you though - most of the north is decidely worse off then london in the job stakes. Still, the new houses shouldn't be built in the SE. the infrastructure there is groaning already.

[Keevan_Colton]

The BBC has been looking at relocating jobs, but has also been forced due to budget cuts to axe a massive number of jobs and cut down the hours on a lot more. I've been keeping track of it myself since my degree is in journalism and I'm a member of the NUJ. They really aren't doing much hiring at the moment. I agree that there needs to be more investment in jobs in the north, which if you follow it through would result in more people choosing to move there.

But, since the government is just cutting money on everything (except the 9 billion or so that's being dropped on london for the olympics...gee, I wonder how more they could have got for that up north eh?) there's little chance of that...

[Zaune]

Even if the BBC and various government offices do decentralise a bit, the public sector can't support a regional economy all by itself. The only long-term solution I can see is to write the last few decades as a "post-industrial" service sector economy as a failed experiment and start rebuilding our manufacturing industry; the up-front costs are going to be eye-watering but anything's got to be better than going through all this again next time some bunch of glorified professional gamblers run their banks into the ground.

[Tribun]

Even if the BBC and various government offices do decentralise a bit, the public sector can't support a regional economy all by itself. The only long-term solution I can see is to write the last few decades as a "post-industrial" service sector economy as a failed experiment and start rebuilding our manufacturing industry; the up-front costs are going to be eye-watering but anything's got to be better than going through all this again next time some bunch of glorified professional gamblers run their banks into the ground.

Something I don't get is, how it got that bad in the UK. In Germany, despite the difficulties after re-unification, the industrial sector for the last 20 years is stable at contributing about 1/3 of the economy (things connected to it not included). In the UK, industry has been shrinking constantly over the same time to a pitiful amount.

What went wrong?

[Zaune]

Several things, I suppose. A lot of our heavy industry was heavily subsidised or outright state-owned until the 1980s, and the transition to private ownership was not terribly orderly, to say the least. We always had a problem with a highly adversarial relationship between unions and employers, for which there's blame on both sides, and several years of small-government "greed is good" libertarianism from Mrs Thatcher's Conservatives just made things worse.

[HMS Conqueror]

It isnt new, there has been a cap on the amount that will be paid for housing benefit for more than a decade...seriously, where the fuck are you getting this shit from?

Try a little empathy perhaps? How would you feel if you were told that you were being sent to live hundreds of miles away from everyone you've ever known, all your friends and family because it's more cost effective to have you live unemployed somewhere else?

Do you know what else would work too for cheap housing? Seizing properties and replacing them with cheap housing...but, that would be doing nasty shit to rich people so that's out of the question isnt it?

Perhaps you might like to consider a world view that would not include phrases such as "then they had best die quickly and reduce the surplus population."

A lot of my family live in cheap houses in the North. idk why you think it is so terrible there. Should I take it as an insult? I would live there myself if there were jobs in my industry.

Now I don't blame people who take advantage of unfair arrangements the state presents them, but nor do I think there's anything justifiable in people living at public expense in houses most working people cannot afford. To equate eliminating that with letting people starve to death is insane.

[Simon_Jester]

The social situation in London is, from what I can tell, inherently unstable because the wage that the rulers of London are willing to pay the people who clean their toilets is too low for anyone to live in the city to clean toilets.

Driving out the working class of London in favor of a city of "skilled professionals" isn't going to work very well- and I'm perversely happy that the greenbelt legislation is in place, because it just might force the government of a Western nation to come to terms with this problem for a change. The usual responses are:

One, move the white collar professionals of the middle and upper middle class out to the suburbs and leave the city to rot, or

Two, leave the upper middle class in the city and move the workers out into the suburbs where their unsightly poorness and brownness don't besmirch Galt's Gulch the business district.

I find it very interesting to think about the Western upper class having to figure out a third long-term solution to this problem, one that actually involves them having to live and work in fairly close proximity to manual laborers who live on the wages they set.

[Surlethe]

In general, how easy is it to build new houses in the UK? Does it even make sense to ask "in general", or is there very large regional variation?

[Zaune]

In general, how easy is it to build new houses in the UK? Does it even make sense to ask "in general", or is there very large regional variation?

Depends. How many county officials can you afford to bribe?

There's about half a dozen big housing developers who seem to be able to slap down between six and thirty jerrybuilt cookie-cutter McMansions anywhere in the country without a second thought, the same way Tesco can get a big-box megastore nodded through without even a token objection. Impact on the local environment? Plenty of loopholes in the greenbelt law to abuse. Impact on the local infrastructure? No problem; my home county council knocked down a secondary school to make way for a new housing development back in the 90s.

Contrast the plight of an individual wanting to have a small family home built from scratch, or even perform alterations to an existing property. They have to fight their way through a bewildering tangle of rules and regulations and can expect to have have their application lost, found, queried, subjected to public inquiry, lost again and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. Possibly several times.

It's slightly easier in urban areas in some ways, but it's still a seller's market and the private sector has no incentive to increase the supply. County and municipal council Housing Associations are about the only rentiers still commissioning one and two-bedroom apartments suitable for a single person or young couple, or renting out larger properties at rates a blue-collar family can afford, and they're horribly over-subscribed; if you're young, able-bodied and have no kids you'll be stuck on the waiting list for years.

[Surlethe]

Wow, that sounds like a nightmare. I bet those big developers also work to oppose regulatory reform so they don't face any local competition. No wonder there's a burgeoning black market in rental housing.

[HMS Conqueror]

In general, how easy is it to build new houses in the UK? Does it even make sense to ask "in general", or is there very large regional variation?

Land with planning permission trades at several orders of magnitude more than otherwise identical agricultural land. It's a licence raj that tends to result in horrendous identikit houses crammed into small lots where it's permissible to build.

It's also had the presumably unintended effect of totally separating residential areas from commercial or industrial areas. You can always tell post-1950s development because there are no shops, no pubs, no restaurants, no businesses and no factories, just a web of identical streets lined with identical houses that go nowhere.

[Tribun]

In general, how easy is it to build new houses in the UK? Does it even make sense to ask "in general", or is there very large regional variation?

Land with planning permission trades at several orders of magnitude more than otherwise identical agricultural land. It's a licence raj that tends to result in horrendous identikit houses crammed into small lots where it's permissible to build.

It's also had the presumably unintended effect of totally separating residential areas from commercial or industrial areas. You can always tell post-1950s development because there are no shops, no pubs, no restaurants, no businesses and no factories, just a web of identical streets lined with identical houses that go nowhere.

Holy shit, even our bureaucrats didn't go that far. Here it's actually desirable that residential areas don't get completely isolated from everything else. Who in all names came up with that glorious idea in the UK? Proponents of the car as the center-piece of civilization?

[Simon_Jester]

It's also had the presumably unintended effect of totally separating residential areas from commercial or industrial areas. You can always tell post-1950s development because there are no shops, no pubs, no restaurants, no businesses and no factories, just a web of identical streets lined with identical houses that go nowhere.

This is also true to a large extent in the US.