UK has a chronic shortage of houses, as in, if you count the people in the country and how many houses you need, that's a bigger number than what you've got.
Building in the UK is also hard. England, which is like 90% of the population, is very densely inhabited. Cities are sprawling, their road and transit infrastructure barely support their current size, never mind bigger population. Plus, with the housing bubble, people who barely could afford their homes in the first place feel understandably terrified of anything that drops these prices down.
What the UK did post-WWII and is proposing to do now feels quite bold, but also smart: build new cities. Milton Keynes, for example, was built from scratch. In fact Bletchley, of Bletchley Park fame and now a small suburb, used to be the train stop.
It was built from scratch with adequate infrastructure, parks, high and low density zones, schools and fire stations, on land which I can only imagine was much cheaper than the equivalent in London zone 7. It hugged an existing train line so was connected to the rest of the country "for free".
Is that a way forward? Bootstrapping whole towns, instead of trying to keep fighting market forces to squeeze more people into existing towns.
I'm not saying you force people to live there, or displace the homeless there. No, simply provide a cheaper decent place to live, and people will come.
A lot of the issue in the UK is getting permission to build anything. My dad had a 160 acre farm near london, you can get nordic type cabins for ~£50k (https://www.quick-garden.co.uk/log-cabins/homes/) and you could stick loads there for little money but can you get permission? On no.
I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and develop it. Also they could maybe actually make something attractive? People tend to hate new development because it's so ugly. Maybe we could build like Cambridge or Venice rather than endless boxes.
The cost goes beyond the mere material cost of the house itself but if you have a sizable new development how does it fit within the infrastructure where it would be built. Everything from providing services to having adequate road infrastructure. No doubt there is some wonky things in planning but it's also not a case of YOLO'ing up a bunch of cabins. Not to mention that small single homes aren't a very efficient use of new builds.
I built my house for materials cost. You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. My community is also all private roads with easements, so no public development costs of roads. I built mine with an axe and a shovel. As always the solution is to remove the government from the situation -- with private roads, private water, private septic, and private power there is no one to screech their deranged ramblings on why we need 1,000,000 safety regulations and $30,000 worth of paperwork and permitting to break ground because their precious public resources will be impacted.
$60k for a house, near jobs, USA. Anybody with half a brain and a little brawn can do what I did, if they can come up with what would be a down-payment on a house in a coastal area. Although I admit, it would be much easier for most just to whine on the internet while watching others do what they say is impossible .
Private water works well until the well dries up. It's hitting a lot of homesteaders in the Coachella Valley (CA) and in Arizona right now.
And people discover why CA's building codes are so onerous after the first earthquake knocks over their self-built house. Homes and offices built to current codes are designed to survive a Ritcher 7.0 earthquake with minimal to no damage. People don't even get out of bed for anything below a Ritcher 5. According to Caltech's earthquake tracker (https://scedc.caltech.edu/recent/Maps/Los_Angeles.html, L.A. has had almost 3 dozen earthquakes in the last 3 days alone (the biggest was a 2.8)...and nobody noticed. (For comparison, a 5.x earthquake caused several billions in damage in Washington D.C.; comparable earthquakes have caused so little damage in SoCal it's impossible to find numbers. Fracking-related 2.x earthquakes have caused hundreds of millions in damage in the Midwest, but in L.A., even pets sleep through something that weak.)
Have you done research and found that the majority of the excess cost of constructing California homes is due to the specific regulations dealing with earthquakes? Are you sure there aren't other regulations and/or building codes there that have nothing to do with earthquakes or health/safety, yet massively impact the cost of homes in California?
People love to blame regulations. I live in a bushfire, cyclone and flood prone part of Australia. We have lots of regulations. For example a category 5 cyclone recent hit us, but no one overly concerned because it is a new area, and if you live in a cyclone area your house must be able to withstand 300 km/h winds. If you live in a bushfire area, you are required to have 20,000 litres of water on hand at all times. If you live in near a freeway, you are required to have 14mm glass to dampen the sound.
As it happens, I am building a house now, and an subject to all those regulations. It added maybe 10% to the total. But in real terms housing price has gone up far that that more since the 1970's.
Why? The reason is fairly mundane really: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s... Combine that with modern houses being air-conditioned, need to garage 2 cars, have stone benches and multiple TV's (none of which are mandated by regulation), and you get to the real reason.
It has nothing to do with the regulations, yet people blame it anyway.
We just need to build affordable housing. You would think given there is a demand for it, capitalism would make it happen. Yet it isn't happening. If you want to blame the government for something, not putting the regulations in place to create a market place to ensure it does happen would where I'd be looking. I doubt they would have much to do with reducing building safety, or opening up unsuitable land, and more to do with somehow arranging the financing so that it becomes attractive to build smaller, plain, boring looking cookie cutter houses.
"If you want to blame the government for something..."
* 88% of California jurisdictions have a minimum lot size of 5,000 sq ft or more
* Prior to 2024, jurisdictions in California required a minimum of two spots per single family home, or one to two spots per unit in a multifamily. California created a law to address this in 2024, but jurisdictions in most states still have similar requirements.
* Most jurisdictions in the US have restrictions around density - many only allowing single family homes or strictly limiting the number of multifamily units.
Other countries, including Australia, have similar restrictions. Google says the cost of adding central AC to a home is between $7k and $12k, so likely not a primary driver of the increase in cost of housing. "Multiple TVs" are definitely not a significant driver in increased housing costs.
Those figures aren't useful without more background information. For example, 88% of California jurisdictions have a minimum lot size of 5,000 sq ft (which sounds small to me, so that's a good thing?). For the 5,000 sq ft to be a limitation California would need a lot of inner city jurisdictions. In US and Australian suburbia a 5,000 sq ft lot is small, and there is lots of land outside of the cities. On the other hand, if we are talking high density inner-city housing whether everything is accessible via public transport then 5,000 sq ft is far too large as you say. It would not fly in a European city. But most of California isn't like that, so the 88% sounds fine.
And two parking spots per single family home sounds in line with a California household having close to 2 cars. Again, 2 cars is overkill in the city, but in suburbs with both parents working it's almost a necessity.
Your final point has no figures to back it up at all.
While TV's, AC, plantation blinds, stone bench tops, multiple shower roses, 2 dish washers, plumbed in fridge, and so on each don't add much individually the a modern house today is downright opulent compared to the one I grew up in decades ago. Add that to them doubling in floor area per person housed, and you get to the real reason why costs have more than doubled.
All of that follows from one thing - only rich people have the money to build homes, and they build homes rich people like. Those houses are big. They sit on large green lots. They are fenced. They can garage at least 2 cars. They are expensive, and they want similar houses around them, so they, the people who live there, petition for laws like the ones you mention. And they get them, reasonably enough.
To me it looks like you're blaming the government for delivering what the constituents asked for. Blaming a democratically elected government for passing laws the majority wants isn't going to stop the majority from re-electing them next year. You need to do something more constructive - like come up with reasons why it's in everyones interest (rich and poor alike) to ensure a single mother with 2 can be housed, and them work on solutions for that.
This infatuation in the USA for blaming the government they elected for all their woes is downright odd. Blame generally doesn't get you very far.
> You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost.
> $60k for a house
Where did you build the house? Presuming it's on land you own, how did you come to own the land? If you purchased it, the purchase amount should be included in the cost. If you did not purchase it, consider how lucky you are.
Edit to reply to the dead reply:
I do see the context of this being on already-owned land so my point is moot. Apologies for that. (For what it's worth, I'm not really convinced by the fact that you can get free land where nobody wants to live but that's another matter.)
I agree there is a lot of red tape and planning issues, but I suspect a lot of it comes down to the problems I listed above. Eg. green belts are there to prevent infinite sprawl of cities, which don't have the infrastructure to support continued growth. For local homeowners, nearby developments are a problem, for selfish but logical reasons.
There's not really an issue with planning. The actual problem is that developers will then sit on that land rather than build on it, as this is more valuable long term. See "land banks"
Building new, isolated, towns is hard for that reason. But if you build a town on a train or bus line that connects to places people work you don't need to bootstrap self sufficiency. Building near a highway works too.
Is that a new town? Or sprawl of an existing city? There's only so far out you can reasonably go before the commute stops making sense. Many cities have already hit that limit. For example, there really isn't any space outside Toronto for a new community to have a tolerable commute with the current infrastructure.
Terrible infrastructure is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy here. If you've only ever built it out to places that already have density, there won't be places without density almost by definition unless something like Detroit has happened in the meantime.
There's certainly land within close proximity to Toronto that could be used if there were political will. Georgetown is closer than Bletchley Park and already has a (terrible) train connection. Nobleton is like 10km from Vaughan, well within easy reach.
If you look at other Canadian cities there are even easier wins. Calgary has empty land (not parks, not reservation) within 8km of downtown. Winnipeg is practically a model city for this kind of treatment. Vancouver and Montreal are the only obviously difficult ones due to their geography.
But it's still sprawl. Yes, there's cities that can still sprawl more, but building sprawl is not the same thing as building a new city. You're just building a place for people to sleep while they work somewhere else.
You have to build something self sustaining and that requires jobs in the new city. You can't just have a connection to an existing city. You need an industry or institution or something there to attract workers and the workers to support those workers.
I think the key thing is to frame the new city as a city, and not just an extension. As part of that you'd need to keep enough space to let business pop up, etc. I think part of the problem extensions run into is that they don't want to be a city.
I mean, yes to both. Depending on local political boundary systems, it might be part of the main city or not.
Reasonable commute has a different definition for different people. Some people don't commute for work, so two hours to city center is fine if they only go a few times a year. Some only commute for work a couple times a week and an hour and a half sucks, but is doable if the housing is better enough on whatever dimension. Some will be able to move their job to the new location.
If the new town has appropriate zoning and desires, a handful of companies in the city center may setup offices there to reduce office costs and attract workers that are in the periphery, instead of making everyone go into the city center.
This definitely happens around Toronto, just from looking at the density of roads on Google Maps. There's plenty of pockets of density in lines out from Toronto, and there's also several named places where there's no clear boundary between the names (there probably is at other levels of detail).
Near a highway there is so much noise for homes though, I'm always shocked people find that acceptable. I checked a home near a highway and I couldn't even open the window due to the noise
Depends on what you count as 'near'. Adjacent to, yeah, it's noisy. Highway noise travels, but not that far. Textured walls and trees and bushes help reduce the distance that noise travels as well.
Oh sure, the places I'm talking about were maybe 100m from two highways. It was insane.
I can't even imagine the amount of dust and air pollution you get in your home by opening the window
> Building new towns is hard because you need jobs nearby and there's no guarantee they'll materialize to a large enough degree to support the town.
There's an Australian quote from the 80s I can't recall the source of right now, but it's something along the lines of "we're a country of people serving each other flat whites", indicating that the primary spend in economy is local service based.
I suspect that's true in most western countries - cafes, supermarkets, dog grooming services, dentists, hairdressers, etc. Many jobs exist where people are, and if a new suburb or city were to crop up, commercial areas would be planned and a smart council could incentivise by discounting rent for the first X years or similar programs.
There will be people living in plastic tents in inner cities regardless of whether the government does or does not infringe upon the basic right to private property. You're not proposing the solution to injustice you think you're posing, you're just proposing an argument for more injustice.
These towns often have a bit of a reputation for being full of, well, 1960s architecture and being a bit dated and unexciting, but frankly that's just a lot of the UK. Functionally, I have been to a few of them and they are just fine, if a little boring, places to live.
> [is it] okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?
I mean, happens all the time with infrastructure projects - roads, railroads, power plants.
That, and reduce the immigration ffs. Importing a city-sized population (500k+) every year? - Sorry mate, you just won't be able to build a new city every year.
In the 1950s the UK was adding about 260k babies per year with a population of about 50 million, or about 0.52% per year
Net migration (immigrants - emigrants) in 2024 was about 0.63%.
I would hope the productivity advances in the last 75(!) years would allow the Uk to build enough homes for 0.63% growth, when our 1950s tools and technology allowed them to accommodate a 0.52% growth
Housing demand caused by births and immigration are different. A baby generally calls for an additional bedroom (easier away from the city), an adult migrant generally calls for their own residence near other migrants (easier in the city).
In the past, the population was growing even while net migration was negative. This means people were having babies. This trend reversed in the '80s and migration has made up somewhere between 37% and 128% of annual population growth since then.[1]
There'd have to be some incredible innovation to overcome increased regulation around zoning and dwelling construction generally, NIMBYism, financialization of everything, and a preference shift towards living in land-scarce cities (urban population up ~145% since 1950).
Unless you plan for children to never leave the parental home, wouldn't housing demand caused by births just be identical to that caused by immigration, only phase shifted 20 years or so?
Meanwhile the baby is essentially a net drain on productivity, whereas an immigrant is not.
My point was to illustrate that not all population growth is fungible, so comparing birth-driven growth from the '50s to migration-driven growth since the '80s will miss things.
To your point about phase-shifting though, I think that's a definite possibility, but relies on preferences of each community, and how they change by generation.
Urbanization is not solely driven by immigrants, but how likely are immigrants to move into lower density housing when they have kids? What about their kids? And their kids, etc? And compare that to non-immigrant (or non-recently immigrated) preferences.
The relative productivity of babies and immigrants is not of interest to me in talking about housing preference, but you're correct that babies don't directly add much to GDP for the first two decades.
Immigrants can immediately provide labor for building more housing, babies not so much.
The next false argument is saying ”by the time the 50s babies were moving out, the population was higher so the ratio of new homes needed was not as dire”, as if the infants of the 1970s could provide construction labor
That's what investor money will do; in western Europe, the same thing has happened with office buildings. At one point, 40% of all office space in the Netherlands was vacant. Investors prefer to invest in office space over housing because it's less parties to interact with, higher rent, 10 year lease contracts, and 100 year lifespan.
They are very different societies, sure. I don't think anyone would argue that point. But China has 1.4 billion people, and yet they have an overabundance of housing. If we are trying to find effective strategies for ending homelessness, that seems like a great situation to study.
Great, immigrants build as much or more housing than they occupy, as a whole. Good news everyone - problem solved! There's no housing shortage after all!
Building in the UK is also hard. England, which is like 90% of the population, is very densely inhabited. Cities are sprawling, their road and transit infrastructure barely support their current size, never mind bigger population. Plus, with the housing bubble, people who barely could afford their homes in the first place feel understandably terrified of anything that drops these prices down.
What the UK did post-WWII and is proposing to do now feels quite bold, but also smart: build new cities. Milton Keynes, for example, was built from scratch. In fact Bletchley, of Bletchley Park fame and now a small suburb, used to be the train stop.
It was built from scratch with adequate infrastructure, parks, high and low density zones, schools and fire stations, on land which I can only imagine was much cheaper than the equivalent in London zone 7. It hugged an existing train line so was connected to the rest of the country "for free".
Is that a way forward? Bootstrapping whole towns, instead of trying to keep fighting market forces to squeeze more people into existing towns.
I'm not saying you force people to live there, or displace the homeless there. No, simply provide a cheaper decent place to live, and people will come.