Wednesday, July 11, 2007

On Housing

If housing will dominate Gordon Brown's agenda, will he try to reduce demand by limiting immigration!?!

If there is a 'housing crisis', why hasn't rent increased in line with house prices in recent years!?!

3 comments:

Alfie said...

Did you see some expert on the TV at the weekend? He actually said we have to stop building houses, right now. He said that the recent floods would be as nothing if we didn't stop the building. The interviewer then asked him if it was just on flood plains that we should stop building on.

He said 'No' - Building should stop everywhere. Right now and studies conducted....

But we won't stop. We'll just carry on building. On Michael Nicholson's programme about housing, he finished up by saying that we will have to build 200 houses every day for the next 20 years to accommodate JUST the new migrants coming into this country (By 'country', I mean England, obviously). And the EU will get bigger - Turkey and Serbia will join, no guesses where most of them will head - because Germany and France and the rest of them will make certain they don't go to their countries.

Very depressing all round - and to be honest, i see real civil strife in the future.

Snafu said...

Alfie, it can only get worse...

In the meantime, it won't be long before high rise tower blocks make a come back!

Mark Wadsworth said...

"why hasn't rent increased in line with house prices in recent years?"

Exactly. Because this is a pure speculative bubble. Yes, there has been immigration, the economy is doing OK, nominal interest rates are low. But these have little to do with anything.

It's just the age-old 18 year cycle rearing its ugly head.