Sorry, but this is the purest cobblers. If anything, the influential special interests in local councils are the anti-building interests of greens and existing property owners. There opposition to development has dominated loads of local elections, I’ve never once seen one where the reverse is true.
If it were as you suggest, building would be going up all over the place!
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Labour tried this with the Regional Spatial Strategies. About as politically unpopular as it was possible to be. It would take a big push for any government to go down that route again in a hurry. This Government’s approach of bribing local councils may be more effective, particularly when coupled with austerity…
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OK, so you pack poor people off to places like Middlesbrough where rents are lower.
Slight problem - there are no jobs there, and the cost of transport (public or otherwise) makes commuting unrealistic ; that’s why rents are lower in such places.
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Unfortunately, domination by builders in the councils doesn’t guarantee buildings going up all over the place. As was pointed out earlier, the Tory councils, who in popular thought would appear pro-development, actually turned out to be even more restrictive. The reason is that only a small handful of people are elected to the council and it is their specific builder interests, not builders or developers as a whole, that get represented. Often those interests are best served by blocking competition, which against ends up in a situation where growth is slow. Cui bono?
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They are going up all over the place, come and visit any central London Borough such as Hackney or even Chelsea and Kensington, around here unfettered building boom is the name of the game. Even Prince Charles is struggling to effect any restrain e.g. Smithfield Market (City of London) development. It is also interesting to note that non of these new buildings will provide affordable housing for anyone actually working / living in London ensuring essential services. I know hospital consultants who can’t afford to live anywhere near (I mean an hour travel) from the hospitals they are working in. These are of course the silly ones who stick to the NHS and don’t do private work.
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I’m sorry, but this idea that local councils are run by builders, who have spent the last 20 years not building houses as part of a plan to thwart other local builders just isn’t really very plausible, and its not something I’ve come across in local government. Can you show evidence to back this assertion up?
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That is a temporary situation. Relatively soon, all the lower-income jobs will be automated out of existence.
And then we get Marshall Brain’s “Manna” scenario. . . without the “Australia Project” escape hatch. . .
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Compare to what? Desperate to hang onto a job, or go on welfare and get other people’s money?
Welfare is welfare, for those that need it not as a life style choice.
The reason for the cost of housing is supply and demand. If you allow in 5-6 million migrants and dependants, without building lots more houses, then its economics 101, prices will rise.
If you cut interest rates so that the annual cost of buying a property falls, then the capital cost of the house will rise.
Economics 101.
Migration was a choice politicians made.
Interest rates are control by politicians.
Just as all roads lead to Rome, most of the ills in society point to governments.
Just add on the pensions mess and the amount they owe, hidden off the books, and its truly dire.
As usual, those that suffer the most are the poor.
Ha, the housing boom (at least in U.S.) shows the exact opposite. I spent the boom years in Chicago which had a ton of shoddy condos and conversions built. Pretty looking granite and steel kitchens, but peel back the veneer of these places and every single corner was cut in the name of quick profit. There are still tons of unfortunate buyers in crumbling condos trying to track down developers who fled town when the bubble bust. Not to mention a bunch of half built, or just started developments rotting on empty lots.
It’s also important to remember that those private developers don’t build affordable housing either, which kind of undermines the “let the market work” suggestions of many posters above. So yeah, the developers had it their way and we got crumbling luxury condos, boarded up houses, and declining properties that banks don’t seem to be turning into affordable housing…
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And it’s not just entire cities, either - part of the problem with SF is that housing in the entire Bay Area has become unreasonably expensive. “What’s that? You expect to be able to work without a 5 hour commute? How unreasonable!”
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Raise rates, build more social housing–mediates a chunk of the problem.
Of course, I’ll be quite unpopular economist or politician. But hey, hiring Mark Carney as your central banker, what did you expect him to do with his track record?
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REVERSE Google bus. Bus in the poors to clean the toilets of the techies, and bus them out by evening so they don’t have to see them when they come home to their invisibly gated community. The unfortunates will have to get up at 4am for the commute, but that’s their lot…
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Ha, yes. God bless the banking elite and property owners. The true saviors of the poor. Always thwarted by governments instead of using their wealth to corrupt them.
I think “it’s economics 101” is the “I’m not racist, BUT” of political discourse… You pretty much know what you’re dealing with when ever it gets tossed out.
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Neo-liberal gets thrown around as an epithet in American politics, which no doubt helps my confusion. “Neoconservative” is similar inasmuch as I’m no longer sure what exactly it means either :). Originally it referred to Republicans who favored aggressive and interventionist American foreign policy a la the Project for the New American Century, while remaining somewhere between relaxed and mercenary on social and economic issues. Now it seems mainly used as “conservative politicians and policies I don’t like”.
New Labour = Thatcherite Conservative.
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I can try - pick a local council and I’ll look at it. Not living there, though, means it’s unlikely that I’ll understand the social network behind the local council, which would limit my ability to track who is friends with who and how the council is influenced. But every place I’ve never looked at in detail has the same issues, because local councils (and city councils, county governments, etc in the U.S.) are where developers are focused politically, because those are the people who control whether or not they can build and how much its going to cost And don’t get me wrong, houses are being built - just not enough to keep up with market demand.
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Well, at least 5.5 million Britons live abroad. So what would have happened if Britain hadn’t allowed any immigration? Other countries would have reciprocated, those 5.5 million Britons couldn’t have left Britain. Net effect: zero.
Really, this is the one thing that all those blame-the-immigrants folks choose to ignore: there is one heck of a British diaspora that still holds British passports, roughly equal to the number of foreign nationals in Britain. Making life harder for immigrants just invites tit-for-tat action, which would harm overseas Britons and would therefore be monumentally stupid.
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Not at all. You’ve just fallen into the standard left wing, if you’re not agreeing with me you must be scum, racist, … type of argument.
In the UK its very clear. Lots of migrants have arrived over a short term, and during that time, not as many have died or migrated out. Pure and simply factual statement. That’s white black, yellow, green, muslim jewish, christian or agnostic. The race, religion or sex doesn’t change what the truth is about large influxes of migrants. You can’t even blame it on the poor breeding out of control either.
So the question that follows, have large numbers of houses been built in the UK? Nope. Not the case.
So what’s the reason for that?
- Planning laws.
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Funnily enough it holds both meanings for me.
That said, we have what can only be called a ‘neoconservative’ government here in Canada. Wholly beholden to monied interests - most specifically oil companies in Alberta - but built on the support of ‘social conservative’ useful idiots. They do everything in their power to transform us into a modern version of Pinochet’s Chile while tossing the occasional ‘tough on crime’ or abortion debate bone to their base.
We are also still in a massive housing bubble - right now Vancouver real estate is in the stratosphere. Eventually it will pop, and I’m not sure how the debris will fall. But we can be fairly sure that it will be used as justification for further evisceration of social programs and expansion of military procurement (for some reason).
