Build more houses!
Good Martin Wolf article in the FT arguing that Britain has some of the most rigid and least market-oriented markets in the EU... in land. The consquences are as the textbooks would suggest: that house prices are both very expensive and volatile, and British housing is generally small and poor.The solution is to free it up and build more houses. Will this cover our green and pleasant land in urban sprawl? Almost certainly not, only 8% of land in the UK is urban, and in the S.East only 17%. The proportion under agricultural use, 78%, is the highest in the EU15. Do we need the farms? Seems unlikely, given their contribution to GDP is less than 2%. Can't we use Brownfield sites? Not enough of them, and most people want to live somewhere better.
So the last argument is it will reduce house prices, and high house prices are what much of the population are, almost literally, banking on. Luckily Wolf has a plan to get more houses and avoid disaster - we have to wait two weeks.
posted by Matthew @ 9/23/2005 03:27:00 PM
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