Robin Smith again, on Can we stop bashing the developers, please?:
I'm not sure if you have seen the point I made... Enough housing already gets built and is already built. (a) NIMBY's just get it moved as far from them as possible. (b)
1) On "demand" how can there be a real demand when the developer is calling the larger number of shots? The only demand is for the housing the developer wants to build at the cheapest price and then walk away with all the planning gain. This is called a monopoly position. We get shit and have to live in it. No one else is building non-shit. That is not demand. That is monopoly power. (c)
2) Cars are consumed wealth. Land is not wealth. It is neither consumed nor made. Surprised at you here! A classic mistake in the false battle between labour and capital. Do me a comparison with say another natural opportunity such as fossil fuels and I'll think about it. (d)
5) Yes lets have a free market for housing. Single Tax would do that. (e)
6) But do we actually need more homes as you state above? We need to free up the existing ones being kept out of use (about a million at the last count) Single tax would do it. (f)
a) That may or may not be true. But as a matter of fact, we're building half as many now as we did in the 1950s or 1960s when we were poorer, had a smaller population and much larger (and hence fewer) households.
b) True.
c) The construction industry is simultaneously victim and beneficiary of restrictive planning laws (depending on whether you look at construction workers or home-builders with large land-banks).
But demand is demand. Under the Prohibition, there was no doubt 'demand' for a few reasonably priced, cool beers of an evening. But instead, people had to pay for inferior quality at higher prices and watch their politicians disappear into bootleggers' pockets. Exactly the same logic applies here. The 'shit' quality of which you speak is because the supply curve has been shifted, not the demand curve.
d) Land is very much 'consumed'. The fact that it is not physically depleted by being so consumed is a separate topic. And buildings and improvements are very much 'wealth' and are also 'consumed', albeit at a very, very slow rate so that to all intents and purposes they last for ever. Or can a tenant argue that he owes no rent as he has not 'consumed' anything?
e) Agreed, of course.
f) I alluded to that in the original post.
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Can we stop bashing the developers, please? (2)
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9 comments:
"Or can a tenant argue that he owes no rent as he has not 'consumed' anything?"
I'm emailing that to my landlord post haste
Quite. The poor quality of a lot of modern housing is precisely because of the amount building societies will lend and how much land costs. The effect is that the amount that can be put into construction is squeezed to a minimum.
"a) That may or may not be true. But as a matter of fact, we're building half as many now as we did in the 1950s or 1960s when we were poorer, had a smaller population and much larger households."
That's a complete non sequitur. How many homes need to be built a year depends on the population growth and the variation in size of households. The '50s and '60s were a time of very fast population growth, much more so than today, with both people and houses needing to be replaced after the war. I'd guess also that the size of households had already started to fall in the 60's.
@JT Throughout history, poor quality housing has been built to satisfy the demand for cheap housing. It's just that most of the crap housing put up in the C18th ,C19th and early C20th has fallen down or been pulled down by now.
DS, best of luck with that.
JT, ta.
B, so what? Nowadays we are wealthier, there are more of us and we live in smaller households. So we own, and replace more TVs, cars, washing machines than we did in the 1950s and 1960s. Why not more housing as well?
Well, unless you think it's a good idea to build more houses so that more people can own more than one, the rate at which we need to build houses is dependent on the rate at which extra households are created. The rate at which houses were being built 60 or 70 years ago has no bearing on that. Also when we replace TVs, cars and washing machines the old ones are largely scrapped (not so much cars, but even they don't last that long). When we replace our houses, the old ones are largely kept standing and owned by someone else, so you're not comparing eggs with eggs. A million new houses is damn nearly a million extra houses in the country. A million new washing machines is damn nearly no extra washing machines in the country.
1) On "demand" how can there be a real demand when the developer is calling the larger number of shots? The only demand is for the housing the developer wants to build at the cheapest price and then walk away with all the planning gain. This is called a monopoly position. We get shit and have to live in it. No one else is building non-shit. That is not demand. That is monopoly power. (c)
So what's the solution then?
B, of course TVs get used up. But there are more TVs in use in the UK than thirty or forty or fifty years ago. As to you second question, sod it, let's keep building until everybody with a reasonably steady income can own at least one. I don't mind if people have two or three houses as long as nobody has none.
JH, what's the solution? Liberalise planning laws, tighten building reg's, replace as many taxes as possible with land or property value tax and supervise banks properly. Like in the 1950s or 1960s. It's not rocket science.
B, if I can rephrase that, so what if some rich guy owns three Ferraris, that does not in any way prevent yer average family buying a Ford or a Volkswagen. And it will be average guy working in the factory making the Ferraris, so what goes around comes around.
> so what if some rich guy owns three Ferraris, that does not in any way prevent yer average family buying a Ford or a Volkswagen.
On the contrary it makes it more likely that the average family car of the future will include Ferrari standard parts at a current price.
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