Category: Housing

This land is your land

We are used to thinking of NIMBYism as a parameter of the housing policy debate. The survey evidence suggests that anti-development sentiment is deep rooted and hard to shift. It is a constraint that we must work within – something to work around – rather than something to […]

Rehabilitating social housing

A substantial essay by James Meek on the housing crisis, entitled Where will we live?, has appeared online today at the London Review of Books. It will appear in the print edition in the New Year. The essay roams widely across the terrain of housing policy. It focuses […]

It’s only going to get worse

It seems that with each passing week the news on the housing front gets gloomier. A week ago the NHF published its latest Home Truths report which extrapolated current trends and concluded that if things carry on as they are then affordability – or rather unaffordability – will […]

Reframing housing policy

Yesterday I spent the morning at a meeting of housing policy types. Around the table were policy-makers, practitioners, voluntary sector representatives, and a sprinkling of academics. Everyone there was, as far as I could tell, signed up to the idea that good quality, secure and affordable housing is […]

Boris’s housing plan

[This post originally appeared at The Conversation under a different (longer) title, 27/11/13] London’s population is increasing rapidly and forecasts say this growth is set to continue over the next decade and more. However, the last time the capital had enough new houses to match this rate of population […]

New towns parked?

One of the few policy proposals that has been able to gain support across the political spectrum is the idea that we need a new generation of new towns. If we are going to make a serious attempt to address England’s housing problems we are not going to […]

Careful now

If you were entertaining any idea that changes to property and land taxes could help to curb the volatility of the UK housing market then just stop it. That is the message of a new report Taxing Issues? released by the Policy Exchange this week. This is a […]

Help to Buy and the death of Keynesianism

When I first studied macroeconomics the Stagflation era of the 1970s and the death of Keynesianism were still being quite hotly debated. They were still contemporary events. Well, they were contemporary events in the way that the election of Tony Blair is a contemporary event for us today […]

Tenants uniting?

For a long time we have thought of the private rented sector as the most disorganised part of the housing market. Most properties were let by small landlords who owned one or two properties. Very few landlords belonged to any form of trade association, although around half let […]

Housing association futures

My post discussing possible housing association futures has just appeared on the HotHouse website. It is a cut down version of Housing associations and the path to 2033, the text to accompany my HotHouse talk, posted here a few days ago.