No, our standards are too low. People just have this fatalist attitude, "oh yeah it's London, of course it's expensive". It's how they make you feel like it's you're just an uppity prole for wanting a better life. Fuck that. London was affordable within living memory, and it can be again. The problem is purely a lack of political will to allow enough good housing to be built.
>I'm sure there's flaws in those arguments, but there are definitely things the UK can do to make it less depressing to start a business here!
They're well intentioned, but they wouldn't fix the core problem because your proposals (aside from transport improvements) are all demand-side reforms, but the housing squeeze is almost purely supply-side. It's actually precisely this kind of tinkering that makes the problem worse -- all the lies they put out about "helping first-time buyers" with this or that tax cut or savings scheme -- it's all just musical chairs. It's still the same number of people competing for the same scarcity; it just a zero-sum adjustment of who wins and who loses. If you bring a bunch of tech workers to Leeds, Leeds will end up with a housing crisis, because the underlying legal/regulatory system is the same there as in London, and it encodes an inelastic supply curve into law. What those subsidies will actually do is transfer money (via taxation and debt issue) from productive areas of the economy into the bank accounts of incumbent rentiers, with renters and homebuyers as the delivery system. Prices will keep going up until the planning system is reformed to allow by-right construction, and that means depriving NIMBYs of their veto powers, which is untenable for the Tories. (And Labour will fuck it up in a different way, they're addicted to council housing)
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>But maybe our standards are high.
No, our standards are too low. People just have this fatalist attitude, "oh yeah it's London, of course it's expensive". It's how they make you feel like it's you're just an uppity prole for wanting a better life. Fuck that. London was affordable within living memory, and it can be again. The problem is purely a lack of political will to allow enough good housing to be built.
>I'm sure there's flaws in those arguments, but there are definitely things the UK can do to make it less depressing to start a business here!
They're well intentioned, but they wouldn't fix the core problem because your proposals (aside from transport improvements) are all demand-side reforms, but the housing squeeze is almost purely supply-side. It's actually precisely this kind of tinkering that makes the problem worse -- all the lies they put out about "helping first-time buyers" with this or that tax cut or savings scheme -- it's all just musical chairs. It's still the same number of people competing for the same scarcity; it just a zero-sum adjustment of who wins and who loses. If you bring a bunch of tech workers to Leeds, Leeds will end up with a housing crisis, because the underlying legal/regulatory system is the same there as in London, and it encodes an inelastic supply curve into law. What those subsidies will actually do is transfer money (via taxation and debt issue) from productive areas of the economy into the bank accounts of incumbent rentiers, with renters and homebuyers as the delivery system. Prices will keep going up until the planning system is reformed to allow by-right construction, and that means depriving NIMBYs of their veto powers, which is untenable for the Tories. (And Labour will fuck it up in a different way, they're addicted to council housing)