I think they mean Lancaster not Lancashire because that is one of the areas the ONS examine rather than the whole county.
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Well, I wasn’t expecting the UK to miss the top 10 (or 11) entirely, I felt like London at least would be a shoe-in, but it only made it as far as joint 13th.
For what it’s worth, I’d rather live in Glasgow than Blackpool. Sure it might be, well, Glasgow, but it’s a vibrant place with a lot going on, and you don’t have to deal with 11 months of tourists like Edinburgh.
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I briefly considered moving to Toronto roughly 12 years ago and the cheapest rental I could find in the City of Toronto proper was an illegal let of ~80sqft of unfinished useable floor space in the rafters of someone’s laneway garage in Runnymede for $750/mo.
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That line of thinking is far too common.
You start with a nice location, where people want to go and hang out. Then the owner gets all exited and thinks that their plaza is the next times square- proceeds to do everything to cram more billboards into the area, then wonders why people are complaining, "Don’t you get it, " they whine “I never cared about the entertainment, or the people who hang out there. The billboards are the point.”
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It’s not the only problem or factor by any means, but making it extremely expensive, difficult, time consuming, or illegal to build new housing does in fact drive housing prices up. Not sure how it ever wouldn’t if it’s a place people more want to live than there are homes. Hong Kong doesn’t have much choice in the matter due to geography, and others are screwed over by hard-to-change past infrastructure decisions, but a lot have just tied their own hands to forbid anything that makes the problem less bad.
SF officially takes about a year and a half to approve new housing unit permits, and so far in 2024 has approved between a few dozen and a few hundred depending on which agency you ask and how they count. By some estimates the full set of permits needed takes about 2-3 years and $500k to obtain, before construction even starts. This is not a recipe for a city with housing that people can afford to live in, no matter what number gets written down on paper as the official goal for number of new units, or affordable units, or anything else. It’s a system that guarantees you’re paying twice as much for permits to build a new home (not including land or the actual building) as most of the country pays for an actual house.
Pittsburgh, OTOH, has less than half the population it had in the 1950s. Many of its surrounding towns have had population drop more, some by 90%. There’s a lot of excess houses, so of course houses are cheap. Plenty of grad students can buy houses on their stipends, with extra bedrooms they can rent out. It’s not like they have some fantastic infrastructure that makes it easy to get around - the rivers and bridges make traffic pretty darn bad even at the current population level. And it’s not like there’s some amazing zoning or planning innovation or price controls on housing. But it’s cheap because housing is abundant relative to demand.
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Absolutely- Glasgow has its problems, but there’s a lot going on to fix them (some parts are unrecognisable compared to 10 or 20 years ago), and it has a lot of positives to it as well.
Also,I think that if someone is choosing to move to Glasgow, then they’re already at an advantage and will be able to avoid the worst of the city. Sadly, the problems in the city tend to be in areas of concentrated generational poverty, so someone moving to Glasgow for work is going to experience a different city to someone born into a bad situation there.
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Tell me you’re from Alberta without telling me you’re from Alberta.
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Study finds US does not have housing shortage, but shortage of affordable housing
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-housing-shortage.amp
Market manipulation- all the way down.
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That’s my favorite episode of 30 Rock. But… I sure hope that not too many New Yorkers decide to move in - it would ruin the place.
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I visited on a work trip (from Philly); it seemed like a nice place. But I imagine it gets quite a bit of lake effect snow?
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Obviously, supply and demand is a factor. Sclerotic bureaucracies like SF’s infamous one are a problem too. Conservatives just want to pretend that speculators, NIMBYs, and greedy developers don’t play a part in the situation. They’re more interested in “keeping people in their place”.
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Conservatives pretend many things, yes. Still, speculators, NIMBYs, and greedy developers would have a much harder time exerting pressure on the market if the sclerotic bureaucracies didn’t make it so easy for them to have outsized leverage. Or if so many parts of building codes (or at least, the ways many local governments interpret what building codes mean) weren’t out of date relative to the past several decades’ worth of innovation in construction materials and processes, or products that can make homes better and cheaper and more efficient.
Also, it’s not like the conservatives are clamoring to reduce the red tape here, either. Not in general. Reducing red tape here would mean allowing more construction of higher density housing, helping “those people” in ways they perceive as being at the expense of current homeowners.
Example: retirees in 55+ communities with restrictive HOAs
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Or provide enough quality criticism, and in some circles you will live rent-free in people’s heads. Easy-peasy.
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Cleveland can indeed get good amounts of lake-effect snow when Lake Erie hasn’t frozen over. It’s never as bad as Syracuse, NY, from what I hear.
Actually, my home is a bit east of Cleveland and at higher elevation, so we get it considerably worse most winters than the city itself.
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PE has $3.2 trillion in “dry powder”. That’s ~13% of 
GDP 2024. That’s $9,400 per U.S. citizen, waiting to be “allocated”. Put that in your municipal housing plans and smoke it…
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The politicians work slowly but sometimes get it right - the vacant property tax was a good first step that dealt with some of the multi-home owners. The various levels of government have to find a way to make these stale corporate holdings fiscally unattractive to the companies. Business tax law has a lot to do with it.
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New York - from the article (emphasis added):
Feeling priced out? The report also highlights the most affordable cities, including Pittsburgh (1), Rochester, NY (2), and St. Louis (3) in the U.S., Singapore (11) in Asia, and Blackpool, Lancanshire, and Glasgow (all tied for 12) in the U.K.
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Super interesting as a San Francisco resident! Side note: their website looks like it was built using Dreamweaver in 1997. http://www.demographia.com/
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Chicago is nice it’s probably the most expensive midwest city and the folks that live there rarely ever feel the need to drive hours in a car to experience art/culture. So in a way it’s an outlier from the other MW cities. I would drive there fairly often. Detroit is also woefully underrated and probably wishes to remain that way.
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There are photos online showing the entrance to the bunker, but I’m curious to see what it looked like inside.
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