Ever since Theresa May’s clarion address of the UK’s housing shortage (and how many successive PMs have embarked on the same brave heave-ho?) countless comment pieces have addressed the real problem that drives the disjunction between supply and demand. Nimbyism. Complex, protracted planning permission. Developer land banking. Rich Chinese and Russians investing in unoccupied properties as three-dimensional bank accounts. Excessive protection of green belts. Second homeowners. Empty properties the state should confiscate. The catastrophic sell-off of social housing. A wilful confusion about what the word ‘affordable’ means.
Yet when two statistics are out of whack, it behoves us to look at them both. All the above dysfunctions regard supply. Which suggests there’s something awkward about looking instead at demand.
At a Radio 3 Free Thinking event last weekend, I all but came to blows with my panel’s ‘rational optimist’, who believes that continued human population growth will be both modest and benign.
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