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Tired of Waiting

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Posts posted by Tired of Waiting

  1. Rural communities are dying, either from lack of jobs, young people moving away or because of second home owners.

    All of these factors are caused by our planning system.

    At some point those living in villages are going to be stuck there when they can't drive and there is no bus service. No one will want to buy their house as there will be no community.

    The greenbelts will have to either be loosened or done away with at some point as long as the population is growing.

    The retired boomers don't care about the original local community. These villages are turning into posh retirement communities, and that suits them just fine. They then join the CPRE and National Trust, and lobby the country. They even manage to convince the left wing media with pseudo "green" arguments.

  2. See below a recent tweet from the worst NIMBY lobby group, the CPRE - Campaign to Protect Rural England, campaigning for a Guardian poll re. "green" belt:

    ____________________________________________

    CPRE ‏@CPRE 4m

    Should green belt land be used to meet housing need? Have your say in this poll via @guardian http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/poll/2013/aug/30/green-belt-land-housing-poll?CMP=twt_gu

    ___________________________________________

    I think we should vote too, and campaign as well. The new generations need houses as well!

    .

  3. I don't buy the shortage.

    The last two villages we've lived in were 30% and 50% occupied. Many of those second homes were only used for a couple of weekends in the year.

    Around the villages are reasonable family homes with 0.25 - 1 acre. Almost all of these, that are occupied fulltime, are occupied by boomers - using only one of the 4 or 5 bedrooms.

    Any tiny boxes (which usually come in rows) are fully occupied with families - often with extended family living in them too.

    So I'd say - only about 15% of bedrooms have anyone sleeping in them regularly.

    You don't need to build on greenbelt, you just need to tax assets like income is taxed.

    Then the bedblockers would downsize quicker and the earners who's taxes are paying for the current circus would be able to get a property with a garden the kids can play in.

    I agree 100% that we have a very serious distributional problem, both generational and geographical, with young southerners suffering the most.

    And I also agree that if we taxed properties properly, say 1%/year, with no ceiling (unlike our regressive and caped Council Tax), or, even better a LVT, we would solve most of this distributional problem. But I think the political barriers against this are even stronger than against planning liberalisation.

    But we also have a shortage. See below. We should copy Germany.

  4. It amazes me how many girls/women around here in the 15-35 age group have horses. Not rich girls either, just ones in near min wage jobs. Whats wrong with a bloody gerbil?

    Grazing land is dirty cheap, some £10k to £15k/acre, and from that very cheap base the whole business becomes very cost effective.

    That is the exact opposite to what happens to humans, and from our very expensive base... well, see my sig. and all that...

  5. Yes this is the point. Forex is irrelevant so long as you aren't interested in importing anything.

    That probably explains the governments willingness to start fracking, although I am amazed the Tories have taken the risk. The benefits aren't going to show until after 2015.

    I think the rock and hard place is fast approaching...

    +1

    I remember reading in the Telegraph some years ago that around 40% of British households' expenses are set in foreign currencies, mainly Dollars and Euro (energy, food, etc.).

    .

  6. Well cows are needed (for milk and meat) and they take a lot of space. Whether that needs to be within the M25 is antother question.

    But horses are basically a leisure persuit for the wealthy.

    We allocate as much land for this as housing pretty much every person in the country.

    IE the poor live in sheds so the rich can ride horse

    Insane.

    + 1

    (Yes, of course I was talking about having cows grazing within the M25.)

  7. Opening two lines:

    "After three years, this Government has failed to get a grip on the growing housing crisis.Now the Bank of England Governor Mark Carney is warning of a new housing bubble"

    So the housing crisis was nothing to do with Labour? And when exactly has Mark Carney issued a warning of a new housing bubble coming?

    That was as far as I got...

    Unbelievable, isn't it?

    Also incredible is how he completely ignores the problem of over-restricted planning and the consequent high cost of building land.

  8. http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/08/planning-policy

    Blighty

    Britain

    Planning policy

    Getting horse

    Aug 29th 2013, 14:47 by D.K

    HORSES are, I am reliably told, wonderful creatures. Intelligent, beautiful animals and the rest of it. I offer that as a proviso merely because of what is about to follow. This week, we have published a story on Britain’s housing market and its problems. The short answer, inevitably, is the shortage of good land on which to build, thanks to Britain’s tight planning law.

    Most of the demand for housing is in places such as north and west London, Oxford and Cambridge, where prices are extremely high. Sadly, most of what’s available to builders is grotty ex-industrial land on floodplains in places like the Thames estuary. Since convincing people to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to live in such areas is not particularly easy—especially when they have no money—that means that Britain doesn’t build very much.

    Some people think that this is a good thing—we ought to be protecting the beautiful British countryside from the bulldozers. Newspaper articles about building on green fields tend to be illustrated with pictures of gorgeous rolling hills in somewhere like Devon. The CPRE, a pressure group which in effect wants to force poor people to pay vast amounts of money to live on grim ex-industrial land, argues that we need all of our green fields for farming.

    Yet what actually is the land that we are so desperate to protect really being used for? Well, this piece in Inside Housing by Colin Wiles makes an interesting point. One of the biggest uses of the green belt, around London at least, is grazing horses. He estimates that around 600,000 hectares of land in Britain is occupied by the country’s 1m or so horses. To put that in perspective, the amount of land that is built on is roughly double that. So horses probably use up almost as much space as we do.

    The reality of the green belt is that it is an enormous subsidy for any activity which doesn’t involve changing the land use from green fields. People who want big pony paddocks within a short drive (or ride?) of their suburban houses in north London can easily get them. People who would rather like suburban houses within a short train journey of their job in central London are instead forced to go and live in places like the Thames estuary.

    And for all that I like horses—magical beasts, I’m absolutely sure, and definitely not pointless grass-munching anachronisms—I have to wonder, is this really a useful way of using scarce resources?

  9. I don't know if it's already been mentioned on this thread, but for those on Twitter, it might be good to send a tweet to Faisal to tell him what a good read his housing related articles are (and perhaps ask him a short question about where we are headed)

    People in the media are used to getting complaints and abuse via twitter, but it can also be good for actually connecting with people too. I reckon it'd be good to let him know that this sort of article is what we want to see more of, and that he has support in airing these views in the mainstream media.

    His twitter address is @faisalislam

    And you can be sure he is more likely to read tweets sent to him directly than he is to read the hundreds of comments under the articles. (I can vouch for this as I sent him one the other day and he responded.)

    Good idea.

    We should support the few competent people trying to do the right thing.

  10. The point is that it is people with high levels of mortgage debt against overvalued property who are the ones that will need to be convinced that lower house prices are a good thing and the UK Government are doing their best with H2B to make sure that there remain enough of them to keep the balance in favour rather than against higher house prices.

    As I said earlier older people with paid for houses are not the enemy of lower house prices, they may have money tied up in bricks and mortar that they never had but those with mortgages have already spent the money they never had.

    I read up-thread that the author has just turned 30. Very few Londoners or even southerners around this age have already bought down here.

    And many property owners, in all age cohorts, have MEWed constantly, to buy a car, or to "consolidate" credit cards, etc.

    Many approaching retirement plan to sell a city house and downsize or move to a cheaper location, freeing up the capital.

    Many older owners like to have this capital in case they need expensive care.

    Many heirs of these older owners also like the size of their future inheritance.

    The sad fact is, the vast majority of voters like high property prices. That is the deepest root of all this mess.

  11. If you have a look at the technical note I put up in post #1897 you'll understand why the UK headline 10-year yield is misleading.

    In the same way that the BoE calculates an interpolated or 'true' 10-year yield, the Federal Reserve computes a '10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Rate'.

    On the latest known values for both (16 Aug) the US 10-year yield was 2.84% and the UK 2.98%, i.e. the UK yield is actually the higher of the two.

    Wow, the UK manages to fiddle even that?! Geeez.

    I had noticed before that a similar fiddle happens with the debt/GDP ratio. There is quite a discrepancy between the "methodology" used by the UK and by the EU, over 10% if I recall correctly, or around 80% and 90% respectively.

    .

  12. All it will take is Labour to grow some balls and announce they're reintroducing the landlord register they had planned, and are diverting the money earmarked for HS2 and HTB2 into a mass social housing programme, and they'll hoover up the under-40 vote.

    Can't see it happening though. They're all bigger rentiers than the Tories.

    Modern political parties do have researches about these things, and if these researches show that the party would lose more older voters than gain younger ones, they will not go for it.

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