houses are expensive

very expensive

prices have been rising consistently for many decades

In England, prices rose by 4255% between 1971 and 2011

If the price of a supermarket chicken had inflated by the same rate,

It would cost 51 pounds and 18 pence by now

Around 1950, you could get a 3 bedroom house in northwest London

on the northern line, between West Finchley and Woodside Park

for just £1050

This was 2.5 times the average wage of £400 a year

The head teacher of the local school could very comfortably have bought this kind of house

with a total mortgage somewhere around twice their annual salary

Today, a similar house, in the same area, would cost close to one million pounds,

forty times the average income.

It's nearly ten times the salary of the local head teacher

house prices in the UK haven't just increased, they have skyrocketed

But why is housing so expensive?

The cost of houses has very little to do with the building materials

The value is almost all in the land on which the house sits

So why does land cost so much?

One reason is that demand for housing keeps growing.

The UK population increases by between 300 and 400 thousand people a year

And also, the number of people in each household is getting smaller

More people live alone or just as couples without children

So the demand for accommodation is growing all the time

In order to keep up with the demand the UK would need about 240 thousand new flats and houses a year

It's building less than half of this

That's not just a UK problem. France is building only 330 of the 500 thousand new homes needed per annum

Major cities fair worse

London will face a shortfall of over 700 thousand homes by 2031

In response to the cost of housing crisis

governments have tried to intervene to help people to buy their own home

In the US there are schemes like the federal home loan banks

and the community reinvestment act

In the UK, there is "Help to Buy" and there are interest-free loans in France

The underlying idea is that the people would buy houses if only they had the money

But really, most governments are just crying crocodile tears about high property prices.

They know that the bulk of their voters actually like expensive houses a lot

The number of people who want new houses at any time is very small, only 10% or so.

In relation to the huge numbers who already have a home.

And therefore, the property-owning side of society has a vested interest in seeing the value of homes go up

Creating easy credit doesn't actually make housing more affordable,

the real issue is one of supply

if we simply ease credit without increasing supply,

you'll just stoke house inflation, which is precisely what's happened

It's the same with the big expansion of mortgage lending

You may be able to borrow more, but so can other people

You're all chasing the same limited number of homes

so this just pushes prices up and up

So why is building houses so difficult?

Well, because there is enormous opposition to the building of new homes

and great restrictions on the use of land

There are lots of immediate answers to do with planning regulations and zoning, but dig deeper

and what we have really are society-wide fears of new housing

For one large reason above all others, because almost all new housing development are very, very ugly

And no one in their right mind wants a new development anywhere near them

Most of the large housing developments built in the southeast of england in the last 25 years

share one common, generally undiscussed feature

they're very ugly.

Or, to be more precise, they're far uglier than the countryside that they've replaced

In the mid 18th century,

people looked on without dismay,

as the hills around the little town of Bath were given up to Queens Square, the Royal Crescent

and Somerset Place

Likewise, a little further back,

when the wetlands, scrubby weed beds and sandy islands at the mouth of the river Po

were sacrificed to urban expansion,

few people were likely to have raised protests,

given what would come to replace them, the city of Venice

History shows us that people don't object to new housing per se,

They object when the houses are less beautiful

than the natural landscape they have devoured.

This starts to isolate the cause of expensive houses,

as well as point the way to a solution to the issue

It is, literally, ugliness, that is largely to blame for the current social catastrophe of high house prices

What seems like negative and entrenched nimbyism (not in my back yard)

is at heart an inarticulated, disguised

but understandable plea for grace, elegance and a touch of grandeur in architecture

We love towns and cities,

when they're attractive.

But we've no confidence we can make today the kinds of places we actually really like.

And the reason for that has nothing to do with prices

The argument isn't that we should build replicas of Georgian crescents

let alone rows of canal-sided gothic palaces

anymore than it would be an idea for someone who loves the english language

to begin addressing strangers in shakespearean dialect

The answer is to create housing developments in the best architectural idiom of our times

Places like, for example, the exceptional Accordia housing scheme in the suburbs of Cambridge

to which, unsurprisingly, no one objected

Solving the housing crisis requires that we get better at grasping the nature of the problem we're facing

The issue isn't stopping selfishness

it's a longing that we shouldn't build unless we can build beautifully

Crack that and no one will mind a fell trees to much, and mortgages will come down too

So, what's the solution?

It's to stop thinking that creating credit for house purchases does anything: it just stokes house inflation

What we should be doing is creating not-for-profit housing corporations that are incentivised by volumes,

rather than prices reached

And most importantly,

we should build so beautifully that no one minds a patch of land near them being developed

Tantalizingly,

all this,

could be done.