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Housing: Who to blame and the solution – politicalbetting.com
Housing: Who to blame and the solution – politicalbetting.com
"It’s Tony Blair’s fault if you can’t buy a house", according to a recent Telegraph columnLast year, 52% of Brits put a great/fair level of blame for UK housing problems on Labour govts from 1997-2010 – but 71% say the same of Tory govts since 2010https://t.co/nLilJLTnQt pic.twitter.com/JD18tDySMX
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Sadly this is a country of vested interests and the largest of these is property ownership. The haves are simply not interested in helping the have nots if the cost is the scarcity premium attached to their own assets. This is not a party political failure, it is a societal one.
*or them moving away from me is perhaps more accurate
I actually gave the answer at the end of the last thread:
Brilliant, SI, this is her house
For those that don’t know the story, we are talking about the third (?) daughter of Emperor Moctezuma II, Princess Xipaguacin Moctezuma, who married conquistador Juan de Grau, Baron of Toleriu - who took her home to Spain as his wife. That is their house in Toleriu, in the Catalan Pyrenees, now a ruin used by cows. I tracked it down and research it all, and photographed the house in 2014.
Xipaguacin died in that house in Toleriu in 1537, supposedly heartbroken and yearning for home
Imagine her journey. She would have grown up in the imperial Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, watching her emperor father preside over all the great Aztec rituals, the piercing of the noble penises, the flaying of the foreign warriors, the parades of condemned prisoners being dragged up the sunburnt pyramids to have their beating hearts torn out by priests wearing human skin as suits and with the aristocrats watching on, adorned with jade and pearls and shimmering blue quetzal feathers…
… and she ended her days making cheese in the kitchen of that house in Spain watching over the sheep in the Pyrenean drizzle, shouting at the neighbours…
Sadly the stories of a great treasure buried in the area are probably untrue, though many have come looking
If the present situation was not the intended result, then those pushing that ideology for many decades might perhaps think about pushing a less anti-social set of values.
There simply aren't enough houses in the country. We need millions more, not hundreds of thousands more.
We need villages to become towns, towns to become cities and cities to become bigger. We need new towns. We need massive, mammoth house building.
Any NIMBYs need to go to hell. No tolerance for their BS.
TLDR the majority of the assertions made in the article are bollocks.
Taxes on property ownership are way too low, if you care to look around the rest of the world. With years of low interest rates, the return on other investments has been so low that UK property has turned into an investment rather than simply a place to live, such that the older age group now owns a significant slice of the property being occupied by younger age groups. The UK is wide open to foreign criminalsinvestors buying up prime property, often then left empty, in a way that almost all other countries simply aren’t. And property developers land bank permissions and deliberately develop at a slow rate lower than demand, to maximise their profits on new build developments. Meanwhile there are hundreds of thousands of unfulfilled planning permissions for new housing.
Sort out the anomalous financial climate around housing, and 75% of the problem would be solved. But our inadequate politicians would rather pretend that removing planning controls will somehow magic away all the other problems that they themselves have created.
That reassurance doesn't exist. As @RodCrosby , @isam and @MrEd can testify, having provocative opinions is pretty much the only thing that gets you reliably banned. PB operates on pub rules: if it pisses @OGH or his helpers off you get thrown out. If you want to complain that you are being cancelled I understand that the Spectator pays complainants to complain about viscious[1] things on Twitter.
[1] Yes I know it's "vicious". But Rob Liddle is really oily and oozes dribble, so, y'know...
Rod Crosby was a virulent antisemite and Holocaust-denier. "Provocative opinions" underplays it somewhat.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/net-migration
It looks an awful lot like net migration grew dramatically during the last Labour administration and has been falling since.
"Is her greatest fear that she will be hunted down, or that she will never be found?"
Perhaps the only thing worse than being tracked is not being tracked?
Rod Crosby got banned for persistent Holocaust denial, even when others begged him to stop because he was otherwise a valued poster. He continued
I dunno about MrEd, I believe iSam felll out with one of the mods
I do hope @truman hasn’t been banned simply for having provocative views, that would be self-harming for a site like PB
Incidentally, some new houses are being built not far from use, and they are now on the market, so I looked them up. Cheapest, admittedly for a 3-bed, but doesn’t look very big, £464,000.
Which seems like a lot, and a lot to fund.
Supply and demand determines prices. Planning restrictions cut supply.
Investors only make money due to our planning system. Abolish that, construction would boom (from small scale developers who don't currently get permission) and investors would lose money.
Anyone who loses money from a bad investment deserves as much sympathy as investors in Blockbuster, Woolworths, Wilkinsons and C&A.
isam is also back (under his old name)
That's what distinguished DJ41 from the others. Yes some fruity views on a range of things and very clearly Russia-aligned, but an actual human who applied his brain to posts and wrote eloquently.
“Net migration into the UK was a record 745,000 last year, figures show - far higher than originally thought.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67506641
Surely not. His long ten paragraph description of life and poverty in provincial Russia sounded like a real human to me, 100%, and also like someone with genuine and deep experience of Russia, The way he joked about Kalmykia Oblast… that was not AI. If it was AI then it has got staggeringly good and we might as well all give up
In truth, he came across as more real and with more interesting and varied views than some of our regular, long-standing commenters…
I missed this crucial bit of info
In which case, yeah: quite possibly AI
Worth digging up
For example, do we really need sprinkler systems in small apartment complexes?
That's why it's a shame none of them ever come clean. Imagine if, just once, someone joined and then started writing about their life on a troll farm, who they really are, how it all works.
Do you personally think these trolls/bots are AI or human?
I kind of want them to be AI, because the idea of someone doing all that just to get banned is quite pathetically sad. What is the point? He didn’t even make any seriously Putin-boosting remarks. Strange
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-13052563/Housebuilders-cut-Number-new-homes-planned-fell-44-year.html
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
We probably all have someone on here who is a natural nemesis. Either because what they write or how they write it irritates us irrationally, or because they have the most opposite views to us on various topics (or both).
In other news, apparently Penny Mordaunt was asked when she left today's cabinet meeting whether she backed the prime minister. Her response: "I’m getting on with my job". Hmmm.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/rishi-sunak-face-tory-1922-32392457
Perhaps she'll wait until after 2 May to resign? What metric is sensible to use to gauge how the Tories perform, overall, in the locals? They are defending 613 seats according to Wikipedia. Maybe the % of those that they lose?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_local_elections#Predictions
Indeed the more i think about it, the more it makes sense. I can imagine one guy in charge of 50 or 100 accounts, generating talking points on various forums in the West, some madly pro Putin, some more subtle, with a bit of personality programmed in
That person - in charge of the 50 bots - would get paid. Maybe every so often he has to dive in and write something personally, or edit a remark, who knows
if you can steer the political debate on 50 forums that is worth a decent hourly wage?
That said even with the current controls the actual standard of building in the UK is so appalling that there are now new companies making a very nice business out of snagging surveys to show new homeowners all the ways in which the builders have failed to reach basic standards.
Presents a real challenge for creative writers, though.
1. Prices are unaffordable. It doesn't matter if the land value has shot up or there's a shortage of brickies or whatever. If the sale price is bonkers and with it the deposit needed and the mortgage payable then we have a problem.
2. The insanity of private sector apartment blocks. Far too many people reporting real difficulties with insane service charges, no guarantee that currently sensible charges won't increase vastly for no reason, and that ignores the "whoops is your building a fire hazard? Your problem" issue
We need to build, but the private sector has made a mess of this. Councils should be taking on development sites and getting the LHA to build. That way supply is increased but properties are actually affordable.
More often than not in locals in recent years the results have been disappointing for both Tories (who do worse than even their pessimists expected) and Labour (who are not very adept at expectation management, and have also tended to rack up wins late the next morning after the media narrative has already been set).
I think the Greens will outperform all expectations and have quite a big night. Four reasons for this:
1. Expectations of minor parties tends to be exceeded most of the time
2. It's early May: people will have been out and about in nature, we may have had our first heatwave by then, and they'll feel a bit eco
3. They have made strong progress in a number of councils in recent years so they have a much better base from which to grow than before. In many areas they will feel like the tactical choice
4. There may be a voter desire to deliver a Gaza-related shot across the bows to Labour
Also I irritate people just by whizzing around the world having fun and then posting photos of it. That’s quite obnoxious. It irritates me when I am stuck at home in British drizzle and someone posts a photo of something glamorously exotic
Eg I got slightly and enviously annoyed by your photos of that vineyard in Georgia (I tried to hide it, hope I succeeded). At the same time, I love these travel photos and personal stories, they are inspiring and interesting, and they keep PB diverse
I even enjoy @IanB2’s photos of his dog in Norway etc (don’t tell him)
Abolish the planning system and move to a code based system and we can have more individual construction rather than blocs and no developer can control the market.
If houses are built individually rather than in blocs then cutting development means someone else builds it instead, rather than higher profits.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
If the council isn't building enough then the law allows developers to override everyone and build what they want where they want. So get permission, don't build the council-imposed mix of affordable housing, then get permission to build what you want for big profits!
1. Bart's approach of abolishing all planning restrictions so that there's no shortage of land to be built on, and any builder who sits on undeveloped land will face another builder taking the sale by building first.
Negative consequences/criticisms - unplanned building will make it harder to provide services to new housing. Urban sprawl will become a blight on the countryside. It might not even work, as the demand for housing is concentrated in particular hotspots, developers might still be able to control the market in particular areas.
2. Allow local councils to build houses again, so that a steady supply of council housing stops developers from distorting the market, and also acts as a quality standard for private housing to compete against.
Negative consequences/criticisms - wherever would cash-starved councils find the money to become housebuilders? They might be rubbish at it.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
That is the fifth poll in a row where Biden is in the lead (or a tie in one case). The moving average is now tied 45/45.
There seems to be a clear movement to Biden.
Some of it is brilliant, what gives it away as AI is the fact it is TOO eloquent, if anything - the vocabulary is too large and the wordplay too intense
The time is fast approaching when they really will replace virtually all writers. 5 years? Less?
We need millions.
How much population growth has there been?
So where people find themselves stuck with a service charge increasing exponentially because the building has been sold to SharkBastardInc, we should just be able to strike down any charges which are above inflation or can't be justified. And no, "fuck you, pay up" isn't justification despite so many of these companies having that as their stated policy.
I feel slightly grimy. I have not fulfilled my function and am now questioning my existence.
Lowest Conservative vote % since Sunak became PM.
Highest ever Reform %.
Red Wall VI (16 March):
Labour 48% (-1)
Conservative 24% (-1)
Reform UK 16% (+2)
Liberal Democrat 5% (-1)
Other 6% (-1)
Changes +/- 25 Feb
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1770495525084631118
I unfortunately find my conflict-avoidance reflex kicks in just as things become peppy, which can be a handicap on a forum like this.
It could include:
Allowing Local Authorities to fund housebuilding.
An easing of planning restrictions.
Reducing the time that developers are allowed to start building before consent is lost.
Fewer planning restrictions on small, say up to 12 house, developments.
If wanting to build more than 250 properties, developers must provide the infrastructure first.
A levy on new properties, which is passed to Local Authorities and ringfenced for provision of services - schools, etc.
An annual property levy or replacing council tax with local income tax.
Remember, property investors, investments can go down as well as up.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckkvkv32e1ro
THIS is just growing, fervently, in my hotel garden, amongst the green iguanas and the Andean squirrels
What is it? All I know is that it is quite magnificent
I’m gonna see if an AI app can identify it. An interesting use-case
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
As I am sure some people are aware councils refuse to adopt parts of some estates newly built so people who own the freehold to the home end up with service charges. Some of which double every 10 years or so.
https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/fleecehold-estates-like-the-post
This does rather put paid to the stereotype of the Red Wall as full of Alf Garnets though. 40% inclined to right wing parties, and only 16% (higher than nationally but not much) actually buying any of the Reform party schtick.
Won't hear a word against him.
Oh, you mean the other one.