Nah.And football pitches.
Tennis courts.Nah.
That's all true, but the wider point is that prioritising any land use above another leads to misallocation and inefficiency.Golf clubs are much much bigger, expensive and elitist. Football pitches and tennis courts are none of the above and often free.
You can't eat houses.London has about ten times as much farmland as golf courses. We should build on that too.
We already import about 48% of our food. A tiny increase in food imports won't make much difference.You can't eat houses.![]()
If we're overriding things then lets just override maths too! We can say that the two ten pound notes in my pocket add up to a million pounds.I know what economics is
But I also know if we actually care about a service we can override it
Commodity means something which can be traded for money. So saying that housing shouldn't be a commodity is to say that housing can't be bought or sold. Even if you could get existing homeowners to give up owning their properties, what you're suggesting is communism and it's failed everywhere it's been tried costing millions of lives.If something is essential it shouldn't be a commodity
How? If you can't buy or sell property how can you get it? From the government? How will they get it?Being essential means you should be able to have it
They're not apples either. The point of money is that it enables us to compare the price of different things, otherwise barter would still be a thing.Coffee and alcohol are not essential and so it's price is not an apple's to apples comparison
You would be better directing you anger at the cause of the high price of housing, which is a lack of supply.Being angry about the state of housing is justifiable and to most people appropriate.
This is irrelevant. I never assumed that you were arguing from a position of self-interest.I'm saying that as someone from a family who has/had landlords in it.
You are a person that I am satisfied can cope and function reasonably well with ‘day to day’ living and this would, I believe, still be the case if you were to become homeless or to remain homeless.
“I’m a woman of 56," [Ms Dodson] said. "To say ‘you’ll be all right on the streets, you’ll be ok sleeping rough’ - I was completely and utterly lost for words.
“To think that I’d be sleeping on a bench or standing in a doorway...
"I’ve lost so much weight from the stress.
"I’m having to ask friends that I’ve lost touch with if they can help me out, lend me a bit of money so I can put all my stuff into storage.”
Big fancy blocks of flats near me were built by private sector property developers who were subsidised by cheap loans from a regional development agency.No matter how housing is built and paid for we just need more of it. I'm glad to hear Manchester is thriving. It sounds like they need lots more housing too. The fact remains that the only way to reduce the price of housing for everyone, is to build more of it. Different interventions may increase or decrease demand or supply or both, but any theory which ignores the basic concept of demand and supply is flawed.
About 90 per cent of the 118 properties at Forset Court, a block next to Hyde Park, were being used for holiday stays, Westminster investigators found.
Residents at the Park West apartment block opposite have complained of loud parties and overcrowding “shattering their peace” as revellers rent out flats almost every night of the week. Both blocks are said to be accommodating more tourists than the Ritz each week.
An analysis of 2,800 short-term lets available in the capital over the past three years found that more than a fifth had previously had longer-term tenants.
One view, held by the homelessness lobby and many on the left, is that a huge programme of subsidised housing, to be let at ‘social’ and ‘affordable’ rents, is needed to fill the gap that was left by Right to Buy and decades of failure to replace lost council houses. The other view is that it doesn’t matter what kind of houses are built – mansions, luxury flats, council houses – as long as they get built. Make it easier to build them. Loosen planning, loosen the regulations. The market will provide. Once the build rate reaches the ‘right’ level, everything resolves itself, the range of prices widens downwards, and everyone gets housed.
As things stand, partly because the government hasn’t supported an alternative and partly through choice, Manchester has gone down the second route. If it’s working, it’s not clear how. There’s a popular perception that the skyscrapers and lower-rise developments in the centre are disconnected from the local market. The reductive logic that if you build a stack of luxury flats in a relatively well-off area where there isn’t enough housing, everyone shuffles up a notch – the rich move into the luxury flats, the slightly less rich move into their old flats and so on until the poorest find space in the homes nobody else wants – isn’t playing out. One reason – and this is what everyone I spoke to believed, despite a lack of hard evidence – might be that if you build ritzy accommodation in a city that is significantly cheaper than a not dissimilar city only a few hours away, you end up drawing in new people from that city rather than expanding the housing choice for local people. ‘You walked around Manchester ten years ago, you wouldn’t hear that many London accents,’ the industry insider said. ‘Now you hear them absolutely everywhere. You know, these towers, apart from overseas students ... there’s a lot of, you know, influencers from down south.’
‘So why are they here?’
‘Because London’s too expensive. Manchester’s got everything that London has, just on a smaller scale, and it’s much cheaper – for people coming. For people who are here, it’s getting more and more expensive.’