Thursday, 7 March 2013

We know times are are tough

so if you can't give us money, we'll take land !

Peter Quinn, business development director at Lovell, said land could be used as subsidy to enable the building of more low cost housing.  He said: ‘It doesn’t have to be pounds, shillings and pence it could be the land, for housing associations and for the private sector.’

My latest blogpost: We know times are are toughTweet this! Posted by Bob E at 12:48

8 comments:

Kj said...

No problem. Take bids for what rents the landlords want to entice them to build (lowest), and hand over the land. If these are for social tenants, they get people from the list. If this is for market rents, they let them out at any price, the [public] land owner gets 90% over the rent bid.

7 March 2013 at 13:18
Anonymous said...

Kj, that will never work.

The UK government has to GIVE MONEY to landowners to ease the heavy burden of owning land and collecting rents. This enables them to generously provide housing for all the lazy people who can't be bothered to own land or building houses for themselves.

What you are suggesting sounds a bit like LVT or something mad like that.

7 March 2013 at 13:28
mombers said...

I like the idea of giving them the land for free but in return getting the lion's share of the location component of the rent back. Sort of like the utility model where a water company gets a monopoly but can only charge operating costs plus a reasonable return on capital. In this case the developer pays for maintenance out of the rent, gets a % of the build cost back, and hands the rest of the rent to the council.

The problem comes in of course when the government needs votes and arranges for them to be sold off under a right to buy scheme. The council loses the location rent income and of course when people can't afford the market rents anymore, Muggins here hands over the Housing Benefit.

That said, if we had a few schemes like this going, any attempt by a council to sell them would result in questions being asked as to how they would replace the income.

7 March 2013 at 15:07
Anonymous said...

M: "any attempt by a council to sell them would result in questions being asked as to how they would replace the income"

Do the Homeys ever worry about lost income? Did they care when council housing was given away?

And councils will easily make up the lost income by, er, paying Housing Benefit to private landlords or something. Oh hang about... that's an extra expense on top of the lost income.

Homey economics is a mystery to me.

7 March 2013 at 15:12
James Higham said...

It's enough to push people onto the water.

7 March 2013 at 19:11
Bayard said...

"Grainia Long added: “If we are going to build the homes we need to deal with our housing crisis we need a building programme on the scale of which we haven’t seen for decades."

Tell it not in Gath, Grania, but there is no housing crisis, so there is no need to build any houses to deal with it.

7 March 2013 at 21:22
Mark Wadsworth said...

JH, do you mean house boats?

B, sure, we've plenty of housing (there are plenty of homes for tenants to live in and pay rent on), the issue is the concentration of land rent collection in very few hands.

7 March 2013 at 21:26
Bayard said...

"the issue is the concentration of land rent collection in very few hands."

So it may, be even for Grania and Co, but that's not how she's putting it across, is it?

9 March 2013 at 00:39

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