On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, lonelytraveller wrote:

On Mar 25, 9:53 am, "Grumpy Old Man"
wrote:
The Real Doctor wrote:

On 24 Mar, 23:10, Adrian wrote:

You have clearly never lived in a city where good spacious (1,000 sq
ft per person) affordable housing is available to middle class
workers. Or, enjoyed one where a normal comfortable journey to work
is 40 minutes or less.

And how many people do you think will find good, spacious, affordable
housing as a result of this line. It'll knock quarter of an hour,
tops, off the journey onto London - are those fifteen minutes really
deterring millions from moving to good, spacious, affordable housing?

The only way to get good, spacious, affordable housing in Britain is to have a
smaller population. It's gone up 50% in the past hundred years.

The housing crisis is more about the fact that everyone wants to live in
their own home now, while before people were content to have their
entire family live in the upstairs floor of a standard victorian terrace
house.

I don't think that's true. I don't remember people living like that in the
80s, when we didn't have a housing crisis. My understanding is that it's
largely about people leaving home earlier, and getting married later (and
less, and divorced more), which increases the ratio of households to
people, and so drives up demand for housing, and thus its price.

The advent of buy-to-let hasn't helped, particularly in hotspots like
London, where a fair chunk of the supply of housing has been taken off the
market and transferred to the rental market. Hence why rents are now 'so
cheap', as people, who are conspicuously not paying my rent, tell me.

tom

--
Change happens with ball-flattening speed. -- Thomas Edison