…it’s now illegal to build reasonable sized houses on a decent garden. Minimum density rules mean you just can’t. What was considered a “Home for Heroes” in the 1920s is illegal to build in the 2020s. Sorry, but that really is it.
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Samizdata quote of the day – the housing crisis is entirely created by governmentJanuary 2nd, 2025 |
 21 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – the housing crisis is entirely created by governmentLeave a Reply |
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Decades ago, I used to help the uncles as they bought up trashed houses and “rebuilt” them. (Mostly teardown and build.)
Most common complaint from permit people – “you can’t build that here, it’s too big!”
Later I kept my hand in it with my son. Most common complaint from permit people – “you can’t build that here, it’s too small!”
Jobsworth people. May they ever marry bitter spouses.
Is there any possibility you can elect Reform and just repeal virtually everything that’s been enacted since Thatcher? In a Parliamentary system it ought to be easily done, shouldn’t it? Something along the lines everything after 1991 is null and void. Even better are bills of attainder still available in your system?
I visited the UK recently and I was reminded of how different British and American houses are. In comparison American houses are ridiculously bigger and ridiculously more fragile. British houses are generally speaking build of bricks and stone and American houses of wood frame and plasterboard. I never really understood this given that the weather is so dramatically more extreme in the USA. (Last year a tornado totally wiped out a house three miles from where I live — it was reduced to toothpicks in an instant.) And as to size, I mean it is ridiculous. I live in a house that has several rooms that I rarely even go in. The house I grew up in in Scotland could fit in my basement.
But for Americans that idea that there is a housing shortage is laughable. We have massive amounts of land that is basically unused, the place is carpeted with forests to provide the wooden frame, and right now in the housing market prices are sky high. Under any free market economic system business would be building houses so fast you couldn’t keep track. But of course the government has its fingers in the market and so everything is crappier and in much shorter supply.
BTW, to contradict everything I have ever said, I actually found an example of a patent that worked for the little guy, and that largely violates everything I have ever said about patents. And that is the gang plate, a tiny thing that transformed the house building market and the guy who invented it, John Jureit, used it to start a company that made him very rich. I watched a documentary about it — it was pretty interesting — it allowed houses (and roofs in particular) to be build much more quickly, and much more strongly and in a factory for mass production. It is amazing that such a simple idea could have such a profound impact.
(Of course, regarding patents, I hope I don’t need to say that data is not the plural of anecdote. Oh wait, looks like I did say it anyway 😊)
Yes, I mentioned nail plates a few weeks ago on here. They make roofs essentially a prefabricated item, like windows and frames became in the 19th century. Build loads of identical A or M frames in a factory, truck them “flat packed” to site, less than 10% of the construction left to do to attach cross members.
But . . . Data is the plural of datum, and an anecdote is surely one point of datum!
(Cool story. I never thought much about truss plates before.)
Regarding the “gang plate”, while it looks like a simple thing, and the basic description is easy to understand, you only really appreciate just how effective it is when you have tried to remove one. Dynamite is the quickest way. Because the magic of the “gang plate”, one of the cores of the patentable invention, was that the tooling for punching out the individual prongs of the plate was deliberately made with larger-than-normal clearances and unusual geometry so as to form a sharp, protruding burr along the edge of the prong – completely at-odds with ‘normal’ sheet-metal tooling – which allowed it to slide easily into the wood but made it almost-impossible to slide back out. Try to take one of these things off sometime – you’ll often destroy the wood before the “gang plate” will let go. Of such trivial items is great progress often made, and (at the risk of going, where angels fear to tread) it is a perfect example of the patent system functioning as it should. Without the limited monopoly, there would have been no business case for Jureit to develop and produce his invention, since its obvious utility and laughable ease of manufacture would mean it would be instantly copied and all his work would have been for naught.
llater,
llamas
I’m of the opinion we as a people should be trying to make our lives better. The basic requirements of food, shelter and reproduction need to be paid attention. Mothers should be raising children. Fathers should be providing. Good houses should be affordable to such families. We shouldn’t be living in rabbit hutches.
Instead, large corporate interests dominate. We have mass immigration. That leads to expensive houses, poor public services, over crowding, excess subscription for practically every resource including leasure. Increased requirements for water etc.
Maybe this is an opportunity in the US: some enterprising contractor could start building houses for the young, first time buyer. Build them small, like we did in the baby boom of the 1950s where a 3 bedroom house was a bit over 1000SF. 2 stories tall with basements (where digging is cheap, no boulders) and small lots. Leverage design principles from the “Tiny House” boom, that is, use all space, including vertical (3D design). Instead of a new house selling for $400-500K (typical around here…double that in Seattle), you might keep it under $300K. I built a very nice backyard office for about $50/SF. No plumbing, appliances, just basic power, can lights, and a mini-split. That cost is just materials, not labor.
FWIW, where I live, Eastern Washington State, there is still a lot of housing being built, mostly apartment buildings. $700-800/month per bedroom for a 2-3 BR apartment. We own and rent a townhouse, 3 BR, 3000SF on three levels, very nice deck looking out onto the nicest nice golf course in town, for $2250/month which I’m told is the middle of this market. Still I feel guilty collecting that much!
And housing prices have gone up as in the UK: 30-50% in the last 5 years or so. I don’t quite see why? The house I grew up in, my parents paid $10,000 for in 1965. They sold it for $80K in 1986. It’s now valued at $600K. And it’s not the most expensive on the block! Again, most of that increase has been in just the last few (5?) years.
Labor costs have driven up the cost of new builds, materials too, but not double. Building codes are I’m sure responsible for a lot of this; everyone swinging a hammer is now a “professional”. Shortage of units driving up prices? Not sure about that. It does feel like we’re being played.
A bit off topic: and now Trump is going to deport the cheap labor underpinning a lot of this…which I fully support. Kick the illegals out, then set up a worker-visa program to let some of them back in on a temp basis. But that will take time and will disrupt markets such as housing. The true test of Trump supporters will be when they have to cut their own grass! 🙂
the housing crisis is entirely created by government
True but the main reason by a country mile is successive governments facilitating if not positively encouraging immigration by what will inevitably be life-long recipients of state housing. A pattern that’s not even going to slow down over the next four and a half years following which we can at least pray for a miracle.
Worrying about the planning regime is about as relevant as pontificating about people smuggling gangs while ignoring the diamond encrusted carrot of limitless free stuff that draws the world over here.
@GregWA
The true test of Trump supporters will be when they have to cut their own grass!
I think you will find that most Trump supporters already cut their own grass. In my experience people who have other people cut their grass usually vote for democrats.
Much of the political establishment, for want if a better term, hates suburbia: on the crusty Right (snobbery) and postmodern Left (environmentalism, dislike of cars, the nuclear family, and a sentimental view of living in a big city centre).
You can tell a lot about someone I’d they ever use the word suburban with a hint of a sneer. If you do, it’s a mark of a wanker.
Much as I hate government overreach, NIMBY accounts for a lot of extra housing expense, and is what keeps new housing out of many areas.
Minimum lot size is a killer, but that’s what the neighbors demand. Minimum square footage is another – don’t want those small houses making our area look cheaper. Locally-approved design – keep those simple boxy designs out of our neighborhood!
Government takes its huge bite with the sewer-and-roads requirements. It’s expensive to run sewer and water and roads out to now-open areas – so they don’t, and then deny building in those areas because of it.
Every ten or twenty years, our regional authority will slightly increase the area of the buildable bubble around the metropolitan area – slowly, so that the infrastructure can be built, but so slowly that the demand, and the bid prices for the new land, are huge, and then you have to build huge housing on it to make back the inflated land price.
And every little permitting reg and rule sounds like it makes sense when you discuss it alone – minimum space between outlets, check valves in plumbing, 2×6 construction for insulating purposes, etc. – but the combination of ten thousand such regs makes the $100k house into a $400k house.
It isn’t illegal to build big houses with big gardens.
Lots of them are built in my area every year.
@bobby b
Much as I hate government overreach, NIMBY accounts for a lot of extra housing expense, and is what keeps new housing out of many areas.
But NIMBY only matters when the NIMBY-ers can wield the power of government. You can say “not in my backyard” till you are blue in the face but can only stop me from building there if you have the force of government behind you.
FWIW, I am not opposed to some zoning and local regulation, it is just that it goes way to far in general. “You can’t build a toxic waste processing facility next to a school or residential area” makes sense. “You can only paint your front door one of these three shades of blue” does not. Though in fairness the most specific regulations usually come from HOAs, or in historic preservation zones, organizations which I kind of hate, but I’ll defend your right to subject yourself to them whenever you want.
How do you stop it going to far? — that is difficult, but the advantage of local government over central government is that it is a lot easier to move to a different town or county than it is to move to a different country, and, in truth, local democracy can be effective against the most egregious of regulators gone wild.
But . . . Data is the plural of datum, and an anecdote is surely one point of datum!
“One swallow doth not a summer make”. Does that work better? I wonder what other clichés I can come up with. 😊
Agreed. I guess I distinguish between the gov drones who tell you the rules and say no, and the meetings where you have to talk nice to the old ladies who like that lot being vacant. Seems like the power flows from different sources.
(Regulatory state vs. political state?)
Not true. Housing supply in UK was not keeping up with demand long before immigration went crazy, all entirely due to planning laws.
NIMBY only adds to costs because they can use state planning laws to restrict things they don’t like, so once again it is government. Without those planning regs, developers could tell NIMBYs to go rotate.
Re bobby b’s NIMBY comment and replies to it, I suspect the “government” involved in a lot of the local regs and problems are actually the local real estate agents and their companies. They sit on the zoning commissions and city councils who make the local regs.
Also, Realtors have a lock on the market because they own the market, the “Multiple Listing Service” (MLS) is what it’s called in the US. You can advertise “For Sale by Owner” any way you like and there are a lot of places to advertise, but if you really want to see the whole market, do a thorough search, it’s the MLS.
And there’s no reason for the MLS to be the only such database. Every County government has an assessor’s office that keeps a database of property in the County. It’s online and searchable, usually with a horrible search engine. That data could be harnessed to create a public “Multiple Listing Service” to compete with the Realtors. The County should NOT be the one to do this; the County should just open up the database to private companies who can build the search engine. And everyone is still free to hire a Realtor…certainly some deals have complexities requiring someone with more knowledge than the average homeowner.
Breaking up this monopoly won’t solve the housing problem, but it might help and it couldn’t hurt. But again, at least in the US, ask any member of the State’s legislature or Congress if any of their close relatives are Realtors…I suspect the answer is “a lot” so there’s no interest in reform from those in government.
WRT NIMBYism: part of the problem (a large part) must be that local residents get all the advantages from it, while the disadvantages are spread thin over the tax base.
Make that tax base shrink geographically to approximate the local residents, and the latter will better be able to weigh costs vs benefits.
(This is not my original idea, but don’t ask me where i got it because i don’t remember.)
One aspect that I think has not been fully-explored is the changing face of local government funding, ie, property taxes.
Used-to-was, a larger home (more square feet, more bedrooms, more bathrooms) meant more residents and thus more services to be provided – more schools, more water-and-sewer, more hospitals, and so on. But now, with plummeting birth-rates, shrinking families and below-replacement demographics, a larger home usually means higher property-tax income, but with no associated demand for more services – local government dreams come true.
On top of that, I think there are less-overt commercial pressures. Local businesses will always want larger, more expensive homes because that means higher-income homeowners, which in turn means that they sell more luxury cars, more fancy restaurant meals, more lawn service, and the 101 other things that rich people spend more dollars on than poor people. And I’m sure that when councillors and selectmen attend the annual dinners of the local Rotary or the Chamber of Commerce, that those preferences are made quite plain over the canapés.
llater,
llamas
“It isn’t illegal to build big houses with big gardens.
Lots of them are built in my area every year.”
Yes, but only because lots of rabbit hutches are built somewhere close by. A large housing development will have a minimum density requirement, set by the planning authority in its Local Plan. You can have X many 4 bed detached with big gardens, as long as you build 2 or 3X terraces and blocks of flats. If the developer put in an application for a whole development of detached houses with big gardens it would get thrown out by the planners. Local authorities have housing targets set by Central Government to meet, they don’t want large areas of land ‘wasted’ on small numbers of houses.