From City AM:
Housebuilders have added to the call for the government to firmly commit to Crossrail 2, saying it will be crucial in helping address the capital's housing crisis.
Some 66 homebuilding and property figures, including representatives from Taylor Wimpey, Berkeley, British Land and Derwent have written to the government saying the infrastructure project will help unlock new homes, as well as commercial space...
In the letter, the homebuilding and property representatives, argue the new railway will transform transport capacity, as well as connectivity, for underdeveloped areas of the capital like the Upper Lea Valley. Housebuilders said it would give them the certainty to accelerate the development of up to 200,000 new homes.
Tony Pidgley, chairman at Berkeley, said: “Crossrail 2 is a fantastic opportunity to improve London and the South East’s infrastructure, and will help us build the homes this region desperately needs."
Could they be any more blatant when they are holding out the begging bowl?
City AM makes the fundamental error of believing its own propaganda, it is so hard-core Home-Owner-Ist that it somehow thinks this is normal, that the point of spending taxpayers' money on railways etc is to generate bigger profits for land bankers.
The other point being that all these lovely new roads and railways will do naff-all do "address the capital's housing crisis", it will merely stoke demand and attract yet more people/businesses and rents and prices will not fall in the slightest, they might even go up on the whole. To put it crudely, if they really wanted to do something about "affordability", they could just shut down London transport and rents and prices would plummet.
Tuesday, 4 April 2017
Rail-powered rent-seeking
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7 comments:
Tried to explain this to a local recently. There are plans to build a bridge over the Wet Dock (in Ipswich):-https://www.suffolk.gov.uk/assets/Roads-and-transport/public-transport-and-transport-planning/Ipswich-Wet-Dock-Crossing-Business-Case-Final-24-12-2015.pdf
He just thought it was 'smart' that ABP and local land speculators (and the travelling public) would benefit by everyone else spending money.
L, exactly. The Georgists and the Homeys agree 100% on what drives the value of "location location location", the disagreement is on who should pay for it and who should pocket it.
L, the problem is the disconnect between the collecting and the spending of public money. Once the money has been collected, it's not your money any more; you have lost forever any control over how it is spent, so you might as well lobby for it to be spent in a way that benefits you, even if only periphraly. "Everyone else" isn't "spending money" as their taxes would be the same even if the bridge wasn't built. The money extorted from them by force would simply be spent on something else.
The alternative of course is to move oop norf.
B. Yep. It's the classic technique of concentrating benefits and distributing costs.
Any sensible government would build a modern Parliament building in Birmingham and let the Victorian building in London become a boutique hotel.
G, true, but this government would sell the Palace of Westminster at undervalue to one of their cronies than build a replacement that was a) hideous, b) hideously impractical, c) hideously over budget, e) hideously difficult to get to and d) hideously expensive to maintain.
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