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  • In the UK and many other countries

  • 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.

In the UK and many other countries

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房屋價格昂貴的原因之一 (One Reason Homes Cost So Much)

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    VoiceTube 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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