Just zis Guy, you know? wrote:
> On Thu, 19 May 2005 16:17:36 +0100, Nick Kew
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
OK, we are now moving into extreme OT territory here but, what the hell,
it's a subject I am deeply interested in.
>
>>Too late now, but what's really needed is much higher stamp duty.
>>If we'd had that in the past, property wouldn't be quite such a
>>uniquely tax-efficient investment, and we wouldn't have such a
>>huge boom-and-bust market, nor house price rises that dwarf earned
>>(and highly taxed) income.
>
> That is a seriously bad idea, IMO. The cause of the problem where I
> live is partly buy-to-let,
Has buy-to-let fundamentally altered the housing market or will it
simply magnify the swings? I don't know and I haven't had enough idle
hours to come up with a theory.
OTOH, maybe the availability of quality rental stock acts to create a
culture where rental is seen as acceptable - after all, in today's
climate of a mobile workforce renting has its attractions.
OTOH, when prices start to turn down, as they always do in a cycle, will
the stretched buy-to-letters rush to leave the market, flooding it with
properties and ensuring that the crash they have prophecised is
fulfilled? Guy's view is that buy-to-letters have emphasised the price
/rise/ so, if he's right, they'll have the same effect when the fall comes.
> but mostly lack of available building land.
Depends on your scale. Nationally, there is no shortage of building
land. Trouble is the glut of building land happens not to be where
people want to live. And land is a bugger of a resource to ship around
the Kingdom.
> And that is down to politics, plain and simple.
Yes. And, largely with good reason.
> There is no shortage
> of level ground, no shortage of farmers who would be perfectly happy
> to sell off a few acres for development, no shortage of builders and
> developers willing to build - but planning controls are such that it
> is not allowed to happen. Oxfordshire are still in a huff about
> Berkshire's last "land grab", which became Caversham Park Village.
>
> With people living longer and the decline of the traditional family,
> the number of houses required per head of the population is growing.
> There is only one real way to fix that, and that's to build more
> houses.
Agreed. But this doesn't necessarily require vast acreages of green fields.
> And build them where people want to live.
We can argue against this in a hundred and one different ways but, let's
settle on sustainability and transport as a starter.
What people would like is to live in intensely low density developments.
That means suburban sprawl; long travel distances and car dependance.
And that's discounting any loss of biodiversity. Although I believe that
given today's industrial agriculture, good urban development is likely
to enhance rather than reduce biodiversity.
Planning rules force sustainable high density development where it would
otherwise not arise. This is a Good Thing IMO, speaking both as a
cyclist and an environmentalist.
Being more subjective, I also place value on retaining a distinction
between rural and urban landscapes. A total free market approach would
result in low density, suburban sprawl between the South Coast and
Peterborough. I would not enjoy this but accept this is a personal
viewpoint without much of objective substance to back it up.
> All taxes do is
> further distort the market.
>
> Blimey! Free market thinking from me! Who'd have thought it?
Blimey! Central control economy thinking from me! Who'd have thought it?
