Has it sustained itself?
We've got increasing homelessness (which is also linked to increase in population) but most importantly the cost of housing as a percentage of earnings is going up and a major factor in the cost of living crisis.
Part of that will be due to poor wages and wage stagnation but the fact people are buying properties as investments and income generators increases the cost as those people offer more than people wanting a house to live in as it's a business investment and then recoup that (plus profit) in rent is a huge factor as well.
Increasing supply by building houses is undoubtedly an important factor in sorting out the cost of housing, but if you added in big restrictions on the private rental market in terms of number of properties allowed to be owned and not allowing for profit companies to own residential property this would also have a huge impact.
Homelessness is a political choice. I was in the Netherlands which has similar housing issues and saw a single homeless person across three major cities and serval small towns, and he was a guy wandering around Amsterdam.
The cost of housing has gone up because we haven’t built enough houses. It really is that simple. Everything else is noise. If there’s high demand for something like housing in the south east, then without sufficient supply prices will rise. If you want prices to fall you increase supply. The contortions people will do to try and get around this very simple and very obvious fact amaze me. We gave people a veto on new houses in their area and surprise surprise they used it to stop new houses being built (and anything else).
The rental market is shit because there aren’t enough houses so even shit landlords can make a killing. If there was a steady supply of high quality housing on the market then people wouldn’t be forced to stick with shitty landlords. And every c**t wants to be a shit landlord cos it’s seen as easy money, sufficient housing supply stops that too.
If you add restrictions to the rental market in one place you increase costs elsewhere. There’s no examples of good rent control systems anywhere. Just places like Berlin and NYC where some lucky lottery winners get cheap rent and everyone else gets screwed because their house came onto the market later. So you get even more power for landlords as you’ve made their place even more desirable and those you haven’t you’re just lining their pockets.
Just build more houses where people want to live. It really is that straightforward.
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