>>9285

Mortgage rates have been at record lows since 2008.

The problem with the housing market is simple supply and demand - the number of houses available hasn't kept pace with the number of households. The government could loosen planning restrictions and spark a massive housebuilding boom, but they don't want to because so many people are reliant on property investments for their retirement, either directly through buy-to-let or indirectly through REITs. Cheaper rents and lower house prices would be almost entirely offset by the cost of propping up pensions.

>>9286
Between April 2013 and September 2021 a total of 346,656 properties were bought using help to buy loans, with the loans accounting for £21.4bn of the £96.4bn overall properties bought with help through the scheme.

As the government is effectively buying a percentage stake in these properties until the loans are paid off they've got an incentive in keeping property prices rising.

>>9286

Record lows is all good and well, but interest is a percentage. Which means that the more the loan is worth, the more you're paying. And what do we know? House prices are higher than ever. Banks could afford to cut interest even further, because they're still making more money than ever before, record lows or not. The profit they're making is obscene and I don't know why you would even try to deny or defend that.

Supply and demand is obviously a factor in the long term overheating, but if we want short-term measures that could help more people get on the ladder, this is one of the many areas we could put slack into the system. The amount of money people get rinsed out of for no good reason is the other half of the issue.

We need to get it under control for the sake of the economy as a whole. This country's prosperity currently floats on nothing but the real estate pyramid scheme, and it's already starting to bite us in the arse. An inflexible property market makes it harder for workers to move where the jobs are. That makes it harder for businesses to recruit. It starts to strangle the economy itself.

There's a young lass at work who's jut started a job at one of the Sheffield hospitals, and she's moving down there. Decent job for a biomedical grad, she can afford to live well in that city, but she's looking at at least £900pcm for rent. Partially that's just her being a bloody idiot and spoiled middle class tart who's scared of the more affordable areas (somewhat justifiably, she wouldn't last two minutes in Manor Park) but it's still beyond absurd.

I was laughing at her about it, because after deducting the cost of housing and bills etc from her wage, she'll have less money left over than I did as an apprentice on £120 a week 7 years ago. But I suspect in a few years when her youthful optimism and naivety wears off, she is going to be very pissed off about the future she has in store for her.

>>9288

>if we want short-term measures that could help more people get on the ladder, this is one of the many areas we could put slack into the system

Mortgage rates aren't stopping people from buying a house, deposits and lending ratios are. We could relax lending criteria and give people 100% mortgages on 5.5x income, but that's how the 2008 crisis happened. Mortgages are very cheap at the moment, but they're likely to become less cheap at some point in the next 25 years; we have to lend with this in mind, otherwise we'll inevitably end up with horrible negative equity traps. It doesn't help anyone if you lend them more than they can afford to sustainably repay and set them up for failure.

We need to build more, but we can't build more. That's the fundamental problem. The only easy answer is "fuck the old", but the old outnumber and outvote the young.

>>9289
You only need a 5% deposit if you can borrow the rest. But most people don't earn enough to borrow 95% of 250 grand. Changing the multiple of your income that you can borrow would sort this out. However, everyone would try that and it would just drive prices up further unless more houses started appearing on the market. Which they don't. It's entirely an issue of supply (and the location of that supply; most people probably could save up for a house in rural Scotland, but that's no good for most people).

>>9289

If someone can afford to pay a mortgage that comes out as £300,000 in total, they can afford to buy a £300,000 house, the only difference is the bank making less profit.

Same way a rented who's comfortably paying £750 a month in rent could afford a mortgage of £750 a month, if only anyone would let them.

I don't understand where this euphemistic language about lending "more than they can afford" comes from, because the evidence is right there that they can afford it, because that's already how much they have to pay.

>ooh but we can't possibly 5.5x because the 2008

Nonsense, this is part of my point. If I earn £25k, I can get a mortgage on a house worth £112,500. Right? But the total amount payable on that mortgage, however, is nearly £200,000. So never mind 5.5x, I am actually paying 8x my income on that mortgage. Eight times. That's two fours. One fat lady. Eight (8). Do you see what I'm getting at?

I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea to give out mortgages so highly leveraged, but what I am saying is that this line of reasoning doesn't add up at all.

>We need to build more, but we can't build more. That's the fundamental problem. The only easy answer is "fuck the old", but the old outnumber and outvote the young.

Which is exactly why I'm proposing different ideas. What you're saying appears to just be "No, there's nothing to be done about it, its absolutely impossible. It's such a shame but I'm afraid there's no conceivable way it can be changed."

Are you a landlord, or just a Tory MP?

>>9291
If you borrow 112 grand and pay back 200 grand, you haven't remortgaged for a better deal later on, which you are expected to do. The numbers are still scary, but they're less scary once you shop around for better deals each time you reach the end of your fixed term.

And the rules for deposits have to screw over some people, otherwise everyone would be able to buy houses, demand would go up, supply still wouldn't, and prices would continue to skyrocket insanely like they're doing now. But even then, if we build more houses, landlords will buy them all and you'll still be fucked. A second-home tax would help with this.

>>9291
>But the total amount payable on that mortgage, however, is nearly £200,000. So never mind 5.5x, I am actually paying 8x my income on that mortgage. Eight times. That's two fours. One fat lady. Eight (8). Do you see what I'm getting at?

What exactly do you think happens when you borrow money over a 30 year period? Even low interest rates will stack up when you're talking about a three decade term.

>>9292

Naturally the stock still needs to go up, but that's a longer term problem. Houses can't be built over night, but interest rates could be slashed over night.

Lenders are already rich enough, I don't know why you lot are on their side for some reason.

>>9293

But you're not contesting it could be even lower.

>>9294
Nobody is on the bank's side, it's just that you sound incredibly naive about it.

Why is owning a property so important for you? Why aren't you instead advocating for rent controls to be more like Germany?

>>9291

>Which is exactly why I'm proposing different ideas. What you're saying appears to just be "No, there's nothing to be done about it, its absolutely impossible... Are you a landlord, or just a Tory MP?

You're proposing one absolutely terrible idea and dismissing all the reasons why it's terrible out of hand. With the current state of the economy, banks are effectively paying you to take out a mortgage because the interest rate is significantly less than the rate of inflation. Mortgages are incredibly cheap and have been for over a decade; any attempt to increase affordability through relaxing lending criteria would inevitably increase risk, because the interest rate isn't likely to remain at record lows forever.

Reducing interest costs won't make housing any more affordable, because it won't change the balance of supply and demand. If people can borrow more money more cheaply, prices will inevitably rise because the same or a greater number of buyers will be bidding against each other for the same finite pool of housing. It's like a game of musical chairs - someone will always lose if there are fewer chairs than people. You can give all the players steroids and amphetamines to make them run really fast, but it won't change how many people are sitting down when the music stops.

"Ooh but we can't possibly 5.5x because the 2008" is an incredibly glib way of dismissing the worst recession in nearly a century. The economy had only just recovered from the 2008 crash at the start of the pandemic. The consequences of that crash weren't just numbers on a screen, they were real businesses going bankrupt, real people losing their jobs, real tax going to bail out banks. We do not want to repeat that. Pumping more money into the housing market doesn't change the basic dynamics of supply and demand, but it does have a massive distorting effect on the rest of the economy.

The US effectively nationalised a large proportion of mortgage lending through FNMA and FHLMC. It has not worked out particularly well for anyone.

>>9295

If you bought a riverfront property then you would be on the bank's side.

>>9297

>You're proposing one absolutely terrible idea and dismissing all the reasons why it's terrible out of hand.

Because you haven't actually given any.

>With the current state of the economy, banks are effectively paying you to take out a mortgage because the interest rate is significantly less than the rate of inflation.

Now we're getting somewhere. This is a more sensible reason. So what you're telling me is that banks actually lose money on mortgages? Why the fuck are they doing them then?

>risk

But there is no risk. Absolutely none. If someone defaults on their mortgage, you repossess it, and sell it at more than the original value, because houses only ever go up. Unless there's a crash, in which case fuck 'em anyway, they've been asking for it for 30 years.

Maybe I am being naive about it because I'm a dirty peasant who just doesn't get why money works they way it does. But I'm also not thick, and I know lots of these cunts are making a lot of fucking money out of the situation. Stopping them from doing so would at least go some of the way to making the market more amenable to fulfilling the purpose it's supposed to.

>FNMA and FHLMC

There are a lot of other reasons that was a shower of shite, and mainly they're due to good old fashioned American corruption and lobbying and what have you. It wasn't a terrible idea in principle.

Moreover, 2008 was caused by the Yank property implosion, and had fuck all to do with ours; I can't imagine the British property market causing anything similar on a worldwide level like theirs did. Something something Bretton Woods global reserve currency innit.

>>9291
>If someone can afford to pay a mortgage that comes out as £300,000 in total, they can afford to buy a £300,000 house, the only difference is the bank making less profit.
>Same way a rented who's comfortably paying £750 a month in rent could afford a mortgage of £750 a month, if only anyone would let them.
>I don't understand where this euphemistic language about lending "more than they can afford" comes from, because the evidence is right there that they can afford it, because that's already how much they have to pay.

Because ultimately that person who can afford to pay £750 a month in rent can afford to pay that only until they retire, and that's the real affordability cap at the end of the day. The banks would be quite happy to have people in lifelong debt, but that's not an option for obvious reasons.

>>9300

What doe that have to do with it? If it's more than they'd be able to pay off by retirement then yes, it's too much, but that depends how old the person is and how much they're willing to pay. But as it stands right now, the 4.5x figure seems fairly arbitrary- nudging it up to 5 or 6 times still results in easily affordable monthly payments for anyone working full time and younger than about 40.

More to the point, how the fuck are these hypothetical retirees going to keep paying £750 a month in rent after retirement, because they were never allowed to buy a house? Which also answers >>9295's question. Having your mortgage paid off and being able to live off a few hundred quid a month is the only way most people can expect a reasonable retirement age, and a reasonable quality of life in retirement.

It's the only reason I give a shit about ownership, at least. If rents are this out of control now, imagine what they'll be like by the time I'm 68.

>>9299

>So what you're telling me is that banks actually lose money on mortgages? Why the fuck are they doing them then?

Securitisation and fees. The mortgage market is sufficiently competitive that there's almost no margin on a competitively-priced loan. The bank will make a bit of money on you if you've got a particularly crap deal, they make a bit of money on arrangement fees, but the whole business relies upon the fact that pension funds will buy up massive amounts of mortgage-backed securities.

Pension funds have truly mind-bending amounts of money and there aren't many good places to put it at the moment; the knowledge that the government will prop up the housing market make mortgage-backed securities tantamount to gilts but with better yields.

Mortgages are profitable, but the margins are incredibly thin and it just wouldn't make a meaningful difference to borrowers if they were run on a not-for-profit basis. Supermarkets are a similar example - Tesco might make large profits because the sell enormous quantities of stuff, but less than 3p of each pound you spend at the till becomes profit. Like most FTSE 100 companies, pension funds are the biggest shareholders in Tesco, so those profits ultimately end up going to someone's nan.

That's the thing you've got to get your head around. "The Banks" aren't an unknowable foreign entity and their profits don't get spunked on cocaine and superyachts. They are, like most stable assets, mostly owned by pension funds. You're not being ripped off by a shadowy cabal of billionaires, you're being slowly bled dry by millions of ordinary pensioners and soon-to-be pensioners. Taking money from big business doesn't mean taking money from a tiny elite, it means taking a bit of money from millions of pensioners. That is an immensely difficult political problem when the majority of the electorate are over 50.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pinch-Boomers-Childrens-Future-Should/dp/1848872321

>>9302
>Taking money from big business doesn't mean taking money from a tiny elite
But it can't hurt. It will encourage them to reconsider their choices. I can't fight back against pension companies, but the CEO of Santander can. This is how they play the game against us; let's make them join our team at least.

>>9301 nudging it up to 5 or 6 times still results in easily affordable monthly payments

As long as interest rates stay in this weird low state, and as long as house prices keep going up so interest only makes sense for people doing that.

If interest rates go up, a lot of people are fucked. That's what the affordability stuff is taking into account. If you have a mortgage, you don't get to tighten your belt, move in with your mates or mum. You're on the hook for repaying a huge amount. Get repossessed an you owe the difference, while still not having a house.

<old git mode>
I bought my house in 1997, right at the bottom of the dip in that graph, just before it climbs off into the top right. I had a 25% deposit, was borrowing <3x my salary. I still had to get my dad to guarantee the mortgage. Even when houses are as cheap as they get, you still can't buy the fuckers, because they're always priced to just over what most people can afford.
If house prices ever become affordable, they'll increase in price until they're not. Human nature, and people always wanting better housing, will see to that. Money's currently cheap, so houses prices are high. If money becomes expensive to borrow, houses will become cheap, and you'll still not get one. Shit, fundamentally, sucks.

>>9307

The only people doing interest-only are BTL landlords and investors, because it's usually a more short term investment and they're unlikely to lose money on it, and those people already have other property assets that can be recouped if it does go bad. They categorically will not give them to anyone who's intending to actually live in the place (and rightly so, it doesn't make any sense in that situation and never did, it was always just kicking a can down the road.)

This is why my first suggestion in the thread was banning interest-only mortgages- The problem is supply and demand, but a huge reason the demand is oversaturated is thanks to BTL.

>If interest rates go up, a lot of people are fucked.

Right, so what is it that drives this, and why? What makes The Interest Rates this omnipresent and unavoidable force of financial nature? Why can't the lender just absorb that, since as we've established, they're already selling the mortgage itself at a loss. Surely that would just make the market even more dependable, and give the real customers in these pension funds an even more stable investment?

It never really made sense to me why when you borrow money on a house, they're allowed to say "Tough shit sonny Jim, it's worth more now, so now you owe us more" and not you being able to say "Tough shit sonny Bank, you agreed to lend me this amount of money, so that's the amount of money you're getting back." I mean it makes sense in terms of they're the ones with the power so they're the ones who set the terms, but from an abstract ethical point of view it's backwards.

>>9308
I believe that other, more backwards, countries, tend towards long term fixed rates on mortgages. We're too advanced for that sort of foolishness.
Good to hear that IO is deprecated now though.
There was a spate of taking mortgages out in Euros, which got you an extra level of excitement when ERM went titsup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Exchange_Rate_Mechanism#Pound_sterling's_forced_withdrawal_from_the_ERM

>>9308
> They categorically will not give them to anyone who's intending to actually live in the place
So why do banks say on their websites that they do?

>>9309
and yes, it offends me, too, that ordinary people have to make this enormous gamble, and the downside is much lower for BTLers.
How to fix it, though, is beyond my limited brain. I'm sidelined now, plan to get old and die in this house, so I'm just an interested observer, watching this country (and some others) grind itself into a sad state.
Nah, it'll be fine. Soon, we'll have poorhouses / workhouses. They'll be called something else, but...

>>9310

They do it for investors because those investors can easily just sell the asset to repay the remaining value, and that's what they do. If it's an ordinary person, they can't do that, because they'd essentially risk becoming homeless.

They used to do it because the assumption was people would always be able to trade up for a profit, using that to repay the original value while still having enough left over to put down a deposit on somewhere new, then everybody wins; but then the 2008.

I'd imagine if you're earning six figures and have enough to put down a huge chunk of the capital down as the deposit and only mortgage half of it, they'll still take a gamble on you.

>>9313
For Natwest you need earnings of 75k and they'll do up to 75% LTV.

>>9314

Well there you are then. Comfortably out of reach of Average Joe and Jane Pleb, with their combined income of 50k. Easily affordable for John Propertyladder who's putting down fifty grand from the flat he just sold, to buy another one closer to the city centre he can charge a higher rent on.

If house prices stopped going up, would you still be desperate to buy?
The argument for not having to pay rent in retirement would still stand.

>>9315
>Easily affordable for John Propertyladder who's putting down fifty grand from the flat he just sold, to buy another one closer to the city centre he can charge a higher rent on.

That's not what you do with BTL. You wait for property prices to go up and then remortgage your BTL to release the equity you've built up and use this as a deposit to buy your next BTL. You don't sell the first one.

>>9317

That's the primary argument for me. I don't see any other way in which retirement is financially feasible, it's a ticking clock and a big source of anxiety for me. I know I'll be far too fucked to carry on working full time by my 60s. I can hardly be arsed now, never mind in another 30 years.

I remember having the realisation when I was about 25 (which I think, to my credit, is earlier than most people) and started doing responsible things like paying into a pension and an ISA for a deposit. I just want a home to live in that I can actually call mine. And Englishman' home is his castle and all that.

Improving renting with controls and protections and all that sounds nice, sure, and it would have made my 20s much more pleasant; but it's simply never going to give you the same freedom as owning your home outright does, and I would still have wanted to buy my own place by this stage of my life.

>>9318

I see. Same principle though, you know what I mean. Having assets already gives you more options in acquiring future assets.

I see a lot of "tenanted investment opportunities" up for sale on Zoopla, though, so they must have reasons to sell. I've been wondering if it would be too horrible of me to just buy one of those and then evict the current tenants.

>>9320
Help to buy and stuff like that is meant to level the playing field a bit, though?
people with a big pile of cash are always going to have advantages, that's why they go to such lengths to acquire it. Stopping that will require quite a big change.

>>9321

Help to buy basically only exists in theory.

The equity loan version of it doesn't really help someone who couldn't otherwise buy, it only helps people who could already buy get somewhere a bit more expensive. So it's really just like the suggestion of increasing LTV rates and income multiplier.

The HTB ISA scheme was fairly good, but only if you started it well in advance, an the recent spike in prices and deposits soaring has negated much of the benefit it offered. The maximum amount they pay a bonus on is £15,000, but £15,000 is about the bare minimum you'll need for a deposit a lot of places in today's market.

The other components of it are just meaningless waffle. Shared ownership is a disaster waiting to happen and any mug can see it. The "mortgage guarantee scheme" that's supposed to ensure 95% mortgages remain available is just... Well, it doesn't actually exist, as far as I've been able to tell, because I can't fucking get one.

The "First Homes" thing sounded promising at first but when you read the fine print that too sounds like a con. You get to buy at a discount, but you have to sell at the same discount, so it could well turn out to be a trap. And besides that none of them appear to have actually been built yet.

And I mean even without all of that, just look at the website, and see if you can figure out how to actually take advantage of any of it. They can't even be arsed providing links to participating builders or an overview of locations.

https://www.ownyourhome.gov.uk/scheme/first-homes/

>>9321
Help to buy has largely allowed those on above average incomes to buy above average properties by being able to use government leverage for an additional 20% deposit (40% in London).

It's helped people that would have been able to afford a property in the first place buy a nicer one than they would have otherwise.

>>9317
Yes. It's the principle of the thing. I don't even care what my house is worth if I'm not going to sell it, which I'm not if I live there.

>>9320
They'll have a contract. You can evict them when the contract expires, but you won't be able to move in until then.

I saw ground rent being sold once. Someone had a leasehold house and the ground it was on was up for sale, so you could buy it (it was about five grand if I remember correctly) and then let the ground rent roll in and make a profit after 20 years or so. I wondered if I could just increase the ground rent so much that the homeowners would be forced to move out, and they could sell me the house.

>>9325
Would you still want to buy if house prices were falling?
Would you buy now, or give it a while?
What if lenders were saying they wanted massive deposits to cover expected reductions in price?
As soon as house prices stop going up, you'll get to try to solve these questions and others, while just wanting somewhere to live. There will probably be a recession on, too, if that helps?

>>9327
If house prices were actively plummeting, then yes, I might wait to get a better deal. But they're not, nor have they been during any of the past economic crises. So it's kind of a moot point, and if they do plummet just as I buy one, then they'll still go up again maybe a year later because that's what happened in 2008. I won't have negative equity because the credit crunch only dropped prices by about 10%, and my deposit is more than that, same as anyone else looking to buy now. And my work apparently does massively well when there is a recession, so I'm not afraid of that either.

>>9327

I'd still want to buy, but I think anyone would agree it's best to do so at a time the market is stable. However, the fact is you don't really get a say in the matter, you take the chance whenever you can afford it. Most people do not have the financial luxury of making this decision based on market fluctuations, and if they did this thread would not be relevant.

That said, if I were given my choice of alternate realities that will never exist, I think I'd still take the one where everyone turns into a furry and I get to shag slutty little bunny rabbits up the arse during predator/prey roleplay. They can't resist a sharp set of teeth and a big ol' knot, you see.

House prices are being kept artificially high because land barons and foreign investors (many of whom are laundering money) have captured an extremely corrupt government. If the government changes, there's still little that can be done because the UK economy is essential dependent on the property bubble and financial malpractice and the whole house of cards would tumble down if anyone tried to clean it up, something that definitely won't happen with the Tories at the helm.

There is precisely nothing that can be done about the housing crisis by regular people, either through democratic means or collective agency. The game is completely rigged against us. Even if we get the ball rolling now, the whole thing is going to come crashing down before we can possibly fix it. It will proceed with tedious inevitability until a combination of drastic changes will force a complete overhaul of the entire legal, economic and political order.

It is possible to escape on an individual level, if you're willing to up sticks and move (especially out of the country) or luck into money.

I think it's also worth considering from an economic perspective that there are lots of people with huge deposits that they still can't buy a house with, while the news is constantly focused on the "cost of living crisis". There are reports of starving people using their free bus pass to sit on a bus and ride around all day so they don't have to use their own heating at home, and meanwhile, thousands of people have 20-30 grand in the bank that they could spend whenever they want. So for a lot of us, there is no cost-of-living crisis at all; we can absorb any price increases whatsoever with our massive savings. But the national discourse focuses on homeowners who are poor instead. Renters who are rich should surely be laughing all the way to the bank; if you trust the news, we're the City bankers of the modern age. And we can't buy derelict ex-council houses because we can't afford them. It's enough to turn a man against the media.

>>9332

Fewer people have those savings or are likely to be by able to build them with the current cost of living crisis, and those with savings are likely to soon lose them. House prices are now rising so fast that in the time it takes you to save for a deposit, the amount you need may rise faster than you can possibly save. Even if your savings accrue some interest, it doesn't matter because the interest rate on savings is going to be less than on any type of loan, including a new mortgage. It truly is a grim time to have aspirations of home ownership.

The worst thing is if you ever plan to save for anything else, the first thing you should do is get a mortgage, since your living costs will decrease thereafter. This is at a time when self-investment in training and certification is essential just to tread water in the job market. Grim grim grim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc

Some quite strong arguments.

Not sure if I agree with the lad's proposed solutions, what say you lads?

>>9401
I'm not really one for 40-minute YouTube videos, but I watched three minutes of that and I wasn't impressed.
>That bloody doomsday clock again
It's bollocks. Everyone who says it's bollocks is right. It's a pointless gimmick made up by people with no more expertise than us on the actual end of the world, choosing to arbitrarily set a time based on their own subjective feelings.
>Build more goddamn houses
Nope. Some cities in America have tried just building more houses; they make the city much more desirable to live in so people move there and the house prices go up anyway. It doesn't solve the problem at all. And besides, we already have houses; people aren't sleeping in the streets due to the housing shortage. Most people have homes, but we don't own them; we rent them from someone else. Building more houses just builds more investment opportunities for the people who own the existing houses. It might help a bit, in the same way that banning people from wearing jeans would probably help with climate change a bit. There are better solutions to these problems.

>>9402

>I watched three minutes

Classic GS.

>Some cities in America have tried just building more houses; they make the city much more desirable to live in so people move there and the house prices go up anyway.

If you're just going to do it in one or two places without any co-ordination then of course that will happen. But anyway there's a whole segment about the unique issues of America's housing market in the video you didn't watch.

>And besides, we already have houses; people aren't sleeping in the streets due to the housing shortage.

I think you'll find that was also addressed in the video you didn't watch.

>Building more houses just builds more investment opportunities for the people who own the existing houses.

Supply and demand mate. If there are loads to go around the prices are lower, the rent you can ask is lower, and the investment is nowhere near as lucrative. But this was addressed in the video you didn't watch.

>There are better solutions to these problems.

Go on then. I was asking.

If you're going to say rent controls or something like that, there's a substantial segment giving evidence why they don't work in the video you didn't watch.

>>9403

>Supply and demand mate.

Precisely. We're talking about a simple problem with a simple solution, but it has been intentionally over-complicated by people with a vested interest in the status quo.

People want affordable housing for their kids, but they also want to fund their retirement by ripping off someone else's kids. They don't want to admit that contradiction, so they pretend that housing doesn't obey the same economic laws as literally everything else in the world.

If we had a chronic shortage of shoes that was causing the price of shoes to increase much faster than inflation, we wouldn't be hemming and hawing over possible solutions, we'd just make more shoes. That problem only becomes complicated if half the population are shoe speculators or buy-to-let shoelords who actually want the price of shoes to keep rising forever.

>>9404
You can't really compare housing to shoes, though, because there isn't really a limit on how many shoes you can make. You could make a pair of shoes for everyone in the world, and everyone would have shoes. You could ask them in advance and they could even have the shoes they want. Meanwhile, if you want to buy the house that's opposite KFC so you can go to KFC every day, there is precisely one house opposite that KFC. You can't build everyone a house opposite KFC; the street would fill up and they'd have to demolish the wildly inferior Subway, and the primary school that doesn't serve breakfast at all. You can build houses elsewhere, but nobody will want them. It's like if there was a shortage of shoes but there could only be 50 pairs of shoes available in each size at any time. In that situation, the only answer would be to find the man with 15 pairs of size-8 Air Jordans and take the shoes from him.

>>9405
You see the green bits? That's where you can build more KFCs, Subways, primary schools and houses.

>>9406
River Humber looks filthy.

>>9406

If Britain had the same population density as Hong Kong, we'd have a population of 1.6 billion. This country feels crowded, but it's mostly empty. It would feel much less crowded if we built a few new towns with decent public transport.

>>9405

Nobody actually chooses between a house directly opposite KFC or homelessness. They make trade-offs based on cost, location, size, quality and a variety of idiosyncratic factors. A handful of uninhabitable houses in very poor locations do have a market value of zero, but that's an edge case. The vast majority of houses are worth more than they would cost to build even if they're inconveniently located, poorly built, unattractive or cramped, because there simply aren't enough houses for people to have a real choice.

Increasing the supply of housing gives buyers and renters more choice, while reducing the bargaining power of sellers and landlords. You might not get your dream pair of Yeezys, but you'd probably prefer something from Off-White or Balenciaga over the tatty pair of Dunlop Green Flash you're currently spending half your income to rent.

>>9405
>the primary school that doesn't serve breakfast at all

Fake News: KFC doesn't do breakfast at all but many schools offer a breakfast programme for their students.

>>9408
I reckon I'm stuck in London until hybrid working sticks and they sort out the transport network. It's all well and good getting a house out in the sticks but it becomes unaffordable if I'm having to commute on a season ticket.

>>9409
>until they sort out of the transport network
Better delay thinking about your move until retirement then.