Council tenants keep social housing for life – even if they earn £100k - "A Labour-run local authority has brought back lifetime tenancies for council house residents after a botched Tory crackdown. Westminster City Council has announced it is bringing back lifetime contracts for all its new and existing tenants, and scrapping fixed-term five-year tenancies. It means council house residents will have an automatic right to keep their home regardless of how much they go on to earn... After the death of a council house tenant, a property can be passed down to the council by their spouse, child or another member of the family. Paul Swaddle, the Conservative leader of Westminster council’s opposition, warned that the move “risks turning council homes into a permanent asset for the few, rather than a vital safety net for those who need them”... “Westminster has some of the longest housing waiting lists in the country. “We should be helping those most in need [and] not creating a system where high earners can hold onto council homes for life, regardless of changing circumstances while others wait for years in temporary accommodation.”... Meanwhile, the borough – which Labour won control of for the first time in 2022 – is embarking on a radical shake-up of its housing policy."
An Urban Density-Based Runoff Simulation Framework to Envisage Flood Resilience of Cities
Explainer: Why storm overflows exist and how to minimise spills - "As the UK population grows and the density of housing increases, more and more permeable surfaces are being paved over. This factor, along with changing rainfall patterns and the growing ingress of groundwater into the ageing network, means that ever more water is entering the combined sewer system. This, in turn, is resulting in huge numbers of spills from outfall pipes. In 2022 alone, there were more than 300,000 recorded spills in England, 83,000 in Wales and 14,000 in Scotland. There is growing public concern that all these discharges are causing excessive ecological damage in the affected rivers and coastal waters."
I was told that there was no downside to allowing housing of any density to be built anywhere, and also that having any regulations about what kind of housing you can build in an area where you can build housing is "commie horseshit" and "a deliberate attempt to keep housing expensive for Boomer NIMBYs and racists". Presumably, government regulation is to blame for higher density housing contributing to flooding risk or sewage overflow
The Folk Economics of Housing - "Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said to lobby against development to protect their property values. The fragmentation hypothesis emphasizes that development's negative externalities are borne locally while most of the benefits accrue regionally or nationally, leading localities to block housing. This paper offers another explanation: ordinary people simply do not believe that adding more housing to the regional stock would reduce housing prices. Across three original surveys of urban and suburban residents, only a minority of respondents say that a large, positive, regional housing supply shock would reduce prices or rents. These beliefs are weakly held and unstable (suggesting people have given the issue little thought), but respondents do have stable views about who is to blame for high housing prices: developers and landlords. Large, bipartisan supermajorities support price controls, demand subsidies, and restrictions on putative bad actors, policies which they believe would be more effective than supply liberalization for widespread affordability. We discuss the implications of these findings for efforts to expand the supply of housing."
Radical call to tax Aussie family homes per spare bedroom to solve housing crisis - "A new tax on spare bedrooms has been proposed as a bold solution to fix Australia's crippling housing shortage. As the federal government struggles with its goal to build 1.2 million new dwellings within the next four years, property researchers have warned that the right homes may not be being built. New data has revealed more than 60 per cent of Aussie households consist of just one or two people, yet the majority of dwellings are being built for families, with three or more bedrooms."
But if smaller houses are built, left wingers will bitch that they're too small, and that this is why people are not starting families (of course, their anti-natalism has nothing to do with it, and is good, because the earth is overpopulated)
New Zealand’s house prices are finally falling. Could this happen elsewhere? - "According to government-owned property valuer QV, national averages have fallen 13% since 2021, while Auckland has dropped nearly 20% and Wellington 30% - prompting questions about whether New Zealand has finally managed to turn around its housing crisis, and what it could mean for other overheated markets around the world... Multiple factors are driving the downward trend, Rush said. The incredibly low pandemic-era interest rates had increased from roughly 2% to as high as 7-8% in recent years, making borrowing “incredibly difficult”. High unemployment in New Zealand, and record numbers of New Zealanders moving overseas has also reshaped the landscape, Rush said. Meanwhile, policies to promote intensification are starting to bear fruit, says Dr Michael Rehm, a senior lecturer in property at the University of Auckland. “At all levels of government, they want to promote housing supply,” Rehm said, adding that as demand slows and supply increases, the perception that housing is a safe investment has slipped... Like New Zealand, Australia does not have many institutional investors in the market."
This can't have anything to do with the population growth rate falling, and must be due to less greed
Fears as new homes set to be built on edge of Bristol... 'soon we will have no green land at all'
Damn greedy corporations and landlords keeping housing expensive!
The little-known quango choking off Britain’s housebuilding - "Britain is not building homes quickly enough. Housebuilding has fallen to the lowest level in almost a decade, and the number of housing starts dropped by 26pc between July and September compared to the previous three-month period, according to industry analyst Glenigan. The picture is especially dire in the capital. “It’s disastrous. The number of new starts in London has fallen by over 70pc in the past year. Only 4,170 homes were started during the last financial year,” says Ben Hopkinson, of the Centre for Policy Studies think tank. “A huge reason for that is the Building Safety Regulator.” The BSR was established in 2022, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster to raise safety standards across all buildings, setting out rules for their construction and design. The strictest rules apply to residential blocks over 18m or with seven or more storeys. These buildings must go through a new three-stage approval process overseen by the regulator before, during and after construction."
REtipster with Seth Williams | Facebook - "Blue states talk about affordable housing. Red states just build it. This graph says it all: Southern states like South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Georgia build homes at more than twice the rate of coastal blue states. You can argue policy all day, but at the end of the day, permits tell the truth. You either make it easier to build… or you make it harder to live."
Solving the housing crisis isn’t easy – just ask New Zealand - The Globe and Mail - "New Zealand has been a pioneer in working to alleviate the housing crisis affecting much of the Western world. Some of their measures have worked, others have been an abject failure. But in introducing some of the braver measures designed to increase supply and bring down prices, they have also provided policy makers with some cautionary tales. In 2020, the New Zealand Labour Party government of then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern brought in a bill that forced municipalities to “up-zone” residential areas in the country’s major cities. It required population centres to raise building-height limits around mass-rapid-transit stops in urban areas. It also introduced the Medium Density Residential Standards, which allowed for buildings of up to three storeys and three dwellings on all existing residential parcels of land in the country. This did not go over especially well, in part because the government kept the bill a secret until the last minute. City councils felt blindsided. The bill would eventually pass into law, but not without significant political damage being incurred. Moral of the story? Don’t be dishonest or sneaky about your intentions. Have the courage of your convictions... KiwiBuild was a highly-touted endeavour of Ms. Ardern’s administration. Launched in 2018, the government set out to build 100,000 affordable homes in 10 years. By the time the program wound down last year, just 2,389 housing units were completed... Why was KiwiBuild such a failure? The authors of the MEI study suggest it was partly because of the government’s overreliance on prefabricated homes. The study found that shipping in a prefab home in some instances was far more expensive than just building on-site."
Of course, left wingers just dismiss this with ad hominem as usual
Medium-Run Impacts of Immigration on the Housing Market: Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Shift-Share Instrument
Jonatan Pallesen on X - "The increasing cost of housing in Denmark since 1999 has been caused 88% by mass immigration! If it wasn't for mass immigration, you would be able to purchase housing and pay rent essentially at 1999 prices. This would have been a complete life-changer for many."
Clearly, the solution to expensive housing is for the mass migration of unskilled minimum wage (or lower) workers
Rent control and the supply of affordable housing - "We generate the first cross-city panel dataset of rent control reforms and estimate their effect on the supply of rental housing overall and across varying levels of affordability. To identify reforms, we use machine learning algorithms to analyze over 76,000 newspaper articles from 7000 news outlets, spanning 27 metropolitan areas and >4000 census places across the US between 2000 and April of 2021. We then manually validate identified articles to ensure accuracy and combine these data with rental unit counts by affordability level, created using Census microdata. To assess the impact of rent control reforms on rental supply, we employ a two-way fixed effects model with place specific time trends and examine the robustness of our results with a staggered treatment design. Our results provide evidence that more restrictive rent control reforms are associated with a 10-percent reduction in the total number of rental units in a city. When stratified by affordability (based on U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development definitions of affordability), these reforms lead to an increase in the availability of units affordable to extremely low-income households by about 52 % (with a lower-bound effect equal to 11 %), offset by a decline in units affordable to higher-income households of about 46 % (with a lower-bound estimate equal to 4 %). These findings highlight the complex trade-offs inherent to rent control policies, illustrating differential impacts across income groups and underscoring the nuanced nature of such interventions."
Meme - realmillennialmortgageguy: "I love this one. For all my haters on affordability and the comparison to the 80's. It's more affordable today than it was then."
"House Payments as a % of Median Income: 1967-2024
1981 - 47.5%
Housing Bubble 1 - 2006 - 38.1%
Housing Bubble 2 - 2024 - 39.4%"
Don’t blame landlords for damp – it’s almost always tenants’ fault - "96pc of owner-occupied homes do not have damp, according to the most recent English Housing Survey 2024 to 2025. Could this be because owner-occupiers look after their homes and want the best for their building? If they dry their washing inside (and let’s face it, most of us do) they know they need to crack open the window for a bit of ventilation, or they run a dehumidifier. When they have a shower, they use a squeegee afterwards. When they’re cooking, they use saucepan lids and the extractor fan. When they sleep at night, they have the window open a little, or at the bare minimum open the windows for fresh air when they wake in the morning... Humans create a huge amount of water vapour per day – almost half a litre, just through breathing. When you add in drying clothes indoors (around 2l per load), bathing/showering (up to 1.7l per person) and cooking (up to 3l per day), you’ll soon find yourself in a muggy mess unless you ventilate. Once it’s in the air, this water vapour will condense into water once it hits a cold surface, so if you’re not heating your property adequately either, you get a double-whammy of a problem... The Germans have a system called Stoßlüften, which roughly translates to “shock ventilation”. It’s also referred to as “house-burping”, and it’s very simple: you briefly open windows and doors for a few minutes every day to replace the stale, humid indoor air with fresh, cold air. By doing this, you’re improving the property’s airflow and wicking away excess moisture, which prevents mould without losing structural heat."
Time to blame landlords but not doing maintenance and ban airing houses to combat climate change
Apparently discrimination against poor people is now legal thanks mamdani : r/circlejerknyc - "I would never put section 8 in my apartments. I know about 15 people that did and the apartments went from nice to roach infested, holes in the walls, broken kitchens and bathrooms and one apartment caught on fire because the lady was putting her clothes in the oven to dry the clothes. Can’t make this shit up. Section 8 is probably the worst of the worst. Not one person had a good experience. These tenants don’t care about anything. They think the city will fix everything for them. And a lot of hoarding situations going on too. Not sure why these people hoard everything. It’s crazy."
Damn greedy landlords!
New York Could Lose Seats in Congress Because It Won’t Build Housing - "The other states that are projected to lose multiple congressional seats and electoral votes are California and Illinois, according to the research. All three states consistently support Democrats at the statewide level and in presidential elections. On the other hand, two states are projected to gain multiple seats and electoral votes: Florida, and Texas. Both are set to add four seats, and both consistently support Republicans at the statewide level and for president... One reason why blue states are losing ground: The red states build far more housing than they do. From 2021 to 2024, Florida and Texas issued permits for over 1.7 million new homes. California, Illinois, and New York issued fewer than 700,000 total, despite having a combined population over 15 million people larger than Florida and Texas’s total... New York’s housing shortage is driving people out of the state, to places with cheaper options, according to research from the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. Even when moving to a low-tax state like Florida, middle-income people save significantly more on their rent or mortgage than they do from lower taxes, FPI’s research found... As the legislature stalls, Governor Kathy Hochul is taking on a project that could boost housing statewide: relaxing New York’s state’s environmental review law. As it stands, the law can require developers to spend years seeking approval for even minor new projects, and leaves them open to lawsuits by NIMBY communities seeking to derail new housing altogether. Hochul’s proposed change would allow small and medium-sized developments to skip the state environmental review process. This wouldn’t turn building into a free-for-all — developers would still have to follow all relevant environmental regulations and protections in New York law."
Why are There so Many Unfinished Buildings in Peru? - "Likely one of the first things you’ll notice upon landing in Peru, besides the reduced oxygen in the air, is the prevalence of unfinished homes everywhere. You think: these cities have around for centuries, is it possible that they are still expanding? A quick google search will reveal that it has looked unfinished for decades. With exception of the wealthy neighborhoods in Lima, this problem is widespread throughout Peru. But why?... In 1990, a new president, Fujimori, took office. Among his top concerns was stabilizing the economy. He enacted a series of neoliberal policies that he called Fujishock. While extreme, many of the policies were necessary to fix the devastated economy. One of his policies was aimed at the unfinished buildings. Fujimori had noticed all of the unfinished homes and that the homeowners just did not have the money to complete them. To help the homeowners, a new policy did away with property taxes while homes were being constructed. This was done to encourage construction, which would provide jobs for workers and finished homes for residents. While this might have worked in a few cases, the abundance of half-finished homes clearly demonstrates it wasn’t really successful. The law was ripe for abuse. Peruvians could finish their homes just enough to be comfortable to live in but not all the way, so they can avoid taxes. Still to this day, countless of these homes exist with inhabitants in the lower floors but incomplete upper floors. While they may look abandoned, if you go inside, you’ll see the first floor is completely furnished and decorated. Often the upper floor is used for a water tank, laundry, or just an outdoor patio – despite all the rebar hanging around or half walls."
Hunter📈🌈📊 on X - "Fun fact: when large investors, like Blackstone, enter the housing market in the suburbs, rent prices in the area decline. Levels of class and racial segregation also fall."
Diversifying the Suburbs: Rental Supply and Spatial Inequality
Alex Z on X - "There is a similar study from the Netherlands showing that banning rental homes just increases the income of the neighborhood and doesn't decrease prices."
Francke, Hans, Korevaar and van Bekkum - Buy-to-Live vs. Buy-to-Let: The Impact of Real Estate Investors on Housing Costs and Neighborhoods - "How does homeownership affect local housing markets and neighborhood composition? Exploiting the Netherlands' 2022 buy-to-let ban, which prevents investors from buying homes to rent out, we find the policy significantly reduces investor purchases and increases owner-occupancy. Despite removing investor demand, the ban does not negatively impact prices or transaction volumes as neighborhoods become more desirable to owner-occupiers. This desirability emerges through residential sorting: New homeowners have higher incomes, are more often Dutch-born, move shorter distances, and stay longer than the renters whom they replace. Thus, promoting homeownership may improve neighborhood quality but reduce mobility and housing opportunities for low-income renters."
What happened when the Netherlands banned landlords - "Properties that were part of the ban saw minimal impact on housing prices, with only a slight increase of 0.1%. In Rotterdam neighborhoods where the ban was implemented, there was a significant decrease in the availability of rental properties, resulting in a 4% increase in rents. Unfortunately, this rent rise unintentionally led to the displacement of lower-income individuals from these neighborhoods while attracting higher-income individuals to move in."
Meme - sam @sam_d_1995: "my most NIMBY take is that I don't like this building. but the real reason this happened is *because of anti-housing laws*. NYC has a floor area ratio cap rather than a height limit. as a result, developers are incentivized to build pencil-thin towers rather than maximize housing"
Micah Springut @mspringut: "It's not that they did this "to demoralize us." It's that they (the city's leaders and planners) have no taste and don't give a shit."
Why Are 50,000 New York City Apartments Vacant? - "The city now has nearly 50,000 empty units, absent from the market either because their operating costs exceed legal rents or because they require considerable renovations... In a city where 100 percent of people owned their homes, the housing stock would be in pretty good shape. Owners have an incentive to keep their properties in good order both because they live in them and because they want to increase the value of their assets. But anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to buy would find that arrangement inconvenient. Such people—students or recent arrivals, for example—would usually prefer to rent. Where there’s a renter, there’s a landlord who stands to profit—though that profit is by no means guaranteed. To profit, the landlord must make sound decisions as to maintenance, capital investment, and marketing. These costs must be paid; only after they’re met can the owner potentially make a profit. The legal environment also has to permit some return on investment. But in New York City, that’s not always how it works... One-bedroom units in the building average $3,500— except two of them, subject to the city’s rent-stabilization laws, which hold rents below $900 per month. As a result, both units have been allowed to fall into disrepair, because the cost of restoring them to habitability is greater than what they’d generate in rent. “We’re talking a minimum of $100,000 for [the studio we first visited], which requires a complete remodeling,” Michael Johnson, a vice president at the New York Apartment Association, explained. The cost: $10,000 for an architect to review the plans and obtain a permit; $50,000 for kitchen and bathroom materials and labor; $20,000 for the floors and ceilings; $6,000 for appliances; $25,000 in electricians’ fees; and a miscellany of other significant fees. These figures add up to the typical $100,000–$200,000 costs of renovating a studio apartment like the one we visited. It’s the same story upstairs in the second unit. Then there are the operating costs associated with each individual unit. As of 2023, these amount to $1,028 for a small building in Manhattan, according to the Rent Guidelines Board. Fuel, hot water, and labor costs go up with each additional unit that’s rented and must be taken into consideration. Fixed costs, like insurance, can be shifted from rent-stabilized to market-rate units, but that drives up everyone else’s rents. In order to afford to renovate the two units at the building on East 6th Street, the owner could request a rent increase from New York’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal. But the maximum rent increase allowed would be $347, bringing rents to $955 and $1,211, respectively. Any bank could see that the $100,000 investment would never be paid back. So, the units stay empty. “The owner can’t really figure out what to do with them,” Johnson said. “It’s just wasted space.” That story is, unfortunately, not an isolated one... Much of the predicament at the East 6th Street building and the apartments on Valentine Avenue can be traced back to one piece of legislation: the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA). Passed by a Democratic majority in the state legislature, HSTPA eliminated landlords’ abilities to raise rents after units were vacated, or when they exceeded $2,775 per month. In doing so, it also eliminated their ability to make improvements profitably and reset the stabilized rent. “New York is unique in its rent-control system,” Kenny Burgos, who heads the New York Apartment Association, said. “Even Los Angeles [gives landlords] an ability to reset rents after [apartments] become vacant.”... eliminate rent stabilization entirely. This would let rents rise to meet demand while also making renovations profitable again. New Yorkers whose incomes are below a certain level could get a housing voucher, thereby restoring the investment required to maintain, construct, and operate buildings. New Yorkers would gain a sustainable solution to rent burdens while also keeping the existing housing stock in good shape. Until one of these solutions is adopted, the problem of “ghost apartments” will only get worse—regulated rent increases will continue to undershoot inflation and renovation costs will continue to increase"
Clearly, the solution is for the government to seize them
Meme - Sar Haribhakti @sarthakgh: "Landlords and private equity firms mysteriously decide to be less greedy in the cities where developers can build more homes easily"
Peter Mallouk @PeterMallouk: "Rents dropping across the country..."
"Top 15 Cities - Biggest Rent Cuts since 2022"
