If the government makes policy to allow huge immigration, it should make corresponding policy to ensure these people are housed. The housing crisis is not from organic population growth.
The government's goal is to use the population growth to prop up real estate while suppressing real wages. They were never ignorant. They were intentional.
What you are suggesting is the opposite what they are trying to do
Where is this goal documented? I’ve seen some very counter productive immigration policies in the EU, but using migrants as a way to preserve asset prices and suppress real wages is as creative as thinking the earth is flat.
Politically, there are a lot of promised benefits that need to be delivered to old people and fewer and fewer working hands, meaning higher costs to deliver those benefits since labor prices rise.
This would necessitate larger than desired tax increases on the politically influential.
Solution: Reduce the quantity and quality of benefits as much as politically possible, but also import more working hands to reduce labor prices. That it helps support asset price increases is just an added benefit.
That is always the goal with unskilled immigration. It’s not a coincidence, for example, that in the US the Koch brothers and some conservative think tanks opposed closing the border as Trump was clamping down on it. They too like labor to be cheap - their wealth depends on it.
Exactly. Immigration has been a massive wealth generator - but only for a subset of people who own businesses, land, and real estate. That wealth hasn’t been fed back into the NHS or public transport, it went into their pockets.
Is it rapidly increasing? First two links in google show it grows about 0.33% per year now, which doesn't look too much and lower than peak in 2010 around 0.84% A bigger issue IMHO is an internal migration from former industrial areas to the London commuter belt and South England more broadly without adequate supply of housing (which is a huge boon for real estate investors and hard to believe they don't lobby for red taping). Houses up north are cheaper but equally unaffordable because wages there are low and declining if adjusted to inflation.
How can you look after an older population that doesn’t work and whose pensions increase every year at least as much as salaries, without either increasing taxes or increasing the working population?
The problem like many problems, is that it benefits someone, somewhere. In this case it's a good problem to have if you're looking to sell or get a return on an existing investment.
Immigration is exacerbating Australian housing problems.
Australia also has an obsession with property speculation as a tax efficient investment with capital gains discounts and negative gearing.
Property in Australia isn’t about owning a home, it’s about having an investment.
Pretty much all houses in Australia are sold at auction. It’s impossible to get an accurate guide price. Every dark pattern is used to maximise sale price at auction. The auctions them selves are something of a spectacle with real estate agents acting as minor celebrities.
So much wealth in Australia is now in property, anything that reduces property value such as building more homes, increasing supply, abolishing negative gearing and capital gains discounts is political suicide. Prosperity owners in Australia have become dependent on the next owner paying more than the current owner to cover negative gearing and make a profit via capital gains. Text book definition of a pyramid scheme.
Builders are land banking drip feeding supply. Why increase supply selling for less when they can maximise value by artificially limit supply.
Then current own homers are a bunch of middle class NIMBYS. I live in a suburb the NSW government announced has a high priority suburb to build high density as it is along a rail route. Perfect place to build along a rail route with access to the city, central coast etc. The locals don’t want it.
Sydney is now the second most expensive place to live in the world. It’s property problems has a lot more to it than immigration.
> Property in Australia isn’t about owning a home, it’s about having an investment.
I'm old, I benefit from this .. not that I want to.
I'm interested in more housing, available and affordable housing - it's difficult to say the least to move policy in that direction; people agree that it's desirable but somehow every attempt to to take action forwards gets blocked or otherwise shutdown in councils that have been captured by real estate lobby groups and builders that are profiting from upper middle class estates, etc.
> I'm old, I benefit from this .. not that I want to.
Are you planning on selling and downsizing to a vastly overpriced apartment? One that would probably end up costing as much as a house because the bottom end has been squeezed?
Because that's the only way you'll realise the price increase, and you'll mostly lose it due to everything else being overpriced. Unless you don't actually mean "not that I want to".
By "not that I want to" I pretty much mean that I never bought land or housing as a financial investment but it turned out to have a substantial increase in value; likely to be realised by children | grandchildren if they sell.
The value to me is a rear granny flat I can stay in for free | lend out to friends in the capital on a block with a house I got a kick out of rebuilding and now rent out at discount rates to students, etc. and rural land about the state, some near the ocean, that pays it's own way and can be lived on as I move about.
Seems weird that so many of the comments are complaining about immigration (the depletion of which has fucked the NHS, for example) in an article which is talking about the UK not keeping up with building housing for 5 decades, and even if they’d kept pace with many peer European countries they would have had a London’s worth more housing.
Not weird but expected, if you understand the British population and in particular the media. They're xenophobic and down right racist in their commentary, everything is zero-sum, they see other people doing well and think they must have stolen it from them. Brexit was driven largely by this toxic mix of misinformation and people craving to believe the narrative.
what a load of nonsense, most international polls determine it to be one of the least xenophobic and most racially tolerant nations, variously coming in at anywhere from third to fifteenth.
Unless, of course, you're Gypsy, Traveller, Jewish, Irish, Caribbean in the UK (outside of London) .. then recent survey's agree the xenophobia is pretty damn high .. oh, and being Pakistani doesn't help.
Although if you're Idris Elba post fame you'll be fine .. just don't ask him what it was like growing up.
oh I don't deny that there absolutely is racism and xenophobia, I'm not deluded.
The ethnicities you listed experience racism and xenophobia across europe, the UK is not exceptional in this regard (the nationality perhaps a little more casual xenophobia than they do on the continent but then most brits are at least part Irish).
I'm not sure the guardian or a youtube video count as references, the WVS might be a better place to start but there is no shortage of empirical (albeit this is a socially scientific topic) sources.
My feeling is Britain is both paradoxically tolerant (I live in Germany, and the difference is stark), but also omnidirectionally hateful - for instance, British people are the only people in the world who, as a norm, hate children. It's a nation of sadists, not a nation of racists.
If the US didn't have immigrants, we would have almost no capacity to build anything. Immigrants are the backbone of the construction trade.
One of the surest signs property prices are going to get crazy high is when blue collar immigrants are no longer able live in the area. You need a plumber? They live 5 hours away. Wait in line.
Population growth is only very tangentially related to property prices. Plenty of examples of places with high population growth, but reasonable prices.
But when you don't have a strong supply of construction labor, you're in a bad, bad spot.
How reliant is the UK on immigrants for construction?
So you want to blame a Prime Minister who came to power in 1979 for something that very clearly started during the previous Labour government throughout the 1970s, and just continued afterwards? Seems to be missing a few details about the state of the British economy under Labour rule. You can also see that during the Blair years, house building declines at an even more rapid rate than during the previous Conservative government.
The only thing you can blame Maggie for in this chart is what comes after 1989, which is when Thatcher introduced policy (suggested by Viscount Monckton) that allowed people in social housing to buy their homes from government for the first time.
Inflation was caused by lockdowns and the excessive money creation that happened during that time and nothing else. In Britain, they're still trying to blame Brexit for inflation, despite every other nation that wasn't involved in Brexit seeing the same levels of inflation.
Clearly this wasn't a Biden policy, but it wasn't really a Trump policy either. It was a WHO/WEF policy that was force-fed to everyone. A major mistake that policy-makers all over the world still refuse to acknowledge. You can dig up the news articles from 2020 where they're saying "It won't cause inflation," in 2021 where they deny inflation is happening, and in 2022 where they say "it's transitory." Constant gaslighting from governments and media alike. I've described this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32645544
>So you want to blame a Prime Minister who came to power in 1979
She was the opposition leader from 1975 and was using monetarist arguments to "fix" a problem that was purely geopolitical (Oil crisis). Would you be fine with extremist parties today suggesting the inflation due to the War in Ukraine being due to bad management(and not the war)? That's what Thatcher did.
>You can also see that during the Blair years, house building declines at an even more rapid rate than during the previous Conservative government.
The entire point of Blair is that he was a Thatcherite through and through on economics. The "Third Way" is Thatcher economics with "social justice" slapped on top.
Inflation is not due to the war in Ukraine, but is due to bad management of COVID and excessive money creation. It may be exacerbated by the war, but that is certainly not the cause. The same is of course true for the 1970s because we know what happened in 1971. We can't really blame Labour or Conservative governments for that, as it came from the US.
I keep hearing this, and it doesn't make sense. We don't have a london-sized tent city anywhere. But we have generations that can't afford to buy a home, and the rental market is brutal, but we have piles of london 'investment properties' sold offshore and then left empty as speculation (and other market distortions). We have enough houses, but we distribute them badly.
was talking about this with a friend who knows more. He did point out we need to replace old housing stock, which we also don't do, so just have cold, mouldy old houses. But that's not what's being talked about here.
I also had a twitter conv with a housing charity once, who agreed but pointed out that the financialization of property is hard to overturn, and it's easier to just advocate for more building. Problem I see here is that the new buildings will just be more stock for existing portfolios, and actual prices don't seem to reduce.
we don't have a london sized tent city, but we do have people in their 40s living with multiple other people, as rent is so expensive in most cities. why is rent so expensive that young people are having to live like students far past their early 20s? because there is not enough housing.
i myself am 29 and live with two other guys in london, our rent is collectively over £3k for a shoddy built-to-rent flat. looking at house prices in the uk, it's hard to think i'll ever own my own home.
Eh, the per-capita housing situation in the UK is 1 house per three people, per gov.uk statistics[0]. A third of a house is plenty for most people. The problem is that these houses are very unevenly distributed, so a large majority are under-inhabited, then a minority are packed to the gills. Building more houses will not solve this - it will just result in yet more empty houses that most people can't afford to live in.
http://archive.today/2024.06.25-155719/https://www.bloomberg...
Also posted 14 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835727
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