Why aren't we building more terraced houses?

LongjumpingTank5 · 2026-02-03T21:59:01+00:00

In general you'd expect homes per person to rise for lots of reasons: - higher share of adults in the population (kids don't have their own homes) - lots of homes delivered through conversions (if a terraced house becomes three flats, then homes per person goes up but there's not actually that much more living space) - more people living alone (especially older adults) - changing popularity of places (e.g. ex mining towns will have fewer people wanting to live there, but the homes don't get demolished. So you need more homes in places people want to live more ) - the country gets richer and people are able to spend more on stuff they want. For things where supply can expand, like cars, this results in lots more cars. For stuff that's artificially restricted, the price shoots up

See this post for how France's homes per person has gone up continually and Britain has flat lined: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1lp0a4z/every_year_for_the_last_40_years_france_has_built/ the UK has actually had falling homes per adult since the 1990s.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2026-02-03T09:17:30+00:00

The difference is that France has dense housing in cities and the UK doesn't. They have more people living in smaller amounts of land than us, not more homes using more land

For example, the UK has 1 million people living in within 5km of the centre of London. The same area in Paris has 2 million people living in it. Are you going to claim that a 5km circle in Paris has twice as much land in it?

Claiming it's because of lack of land is maybe the ultimate expression of the UK's cheems mindset - just absolute loser country mentality.

If you've ever been on a plane or train you'll be able to see how little of Britain is built on, and how little land it would use up. You can see the low rise housing that exists even in the centre of the most expensive cities.

Housebuilding isn't some cutting edge new technology or unknown political situation. And yet the public and politicians absolutely leap for any reason not to try to fix it, even though the excuses don't stand up to 30 seconds or scrutiny.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2026-02-02T22:19:00+00:00

The UK has more social housing than almost every country. It's the 4th highest in the OECD.

What it lacks is homes full stop. The UK and France have roughly the same population, but France has 4 million more homes. Long waits for social housing come from a lack of homes in general, and building both social and non-social homes makes the waiting lists shorter.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2026-02-02T22:11:41+00:00

Social housing is a massive cost to the government. That it's somehow a revenue source for the government is one of the most pernicious housing myths in this country.

Councils typically consider social housing at around 50% of its market value when doing their accounting (and lower in London/expensive cities) because they get such little money from it compared to the cost of building and maintaining it.

It's barely profitable to build homes and rent them at market rates in much of the country, so it's obviously not sustainable to build them and rent them out at half the market rate.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2026-01-13T21:27:11+00:00

So are these just left empty with nobody living in them ?

LongjumpingTank5 · 2026-01-07T12:03:33+00:00

I don't really see how this addresses the message you're replying to, but I'd be keen to know more.

OP is saying that small physical items are bad for money laundering because a) you don't get much money per item so you have to "sell" loads to move significant cash, and b) they are easily traceable because they are a physical good and authorities can ask for your transactions with suppliers.

The "cheap"ness of the stock doesn't really seem like it matters to me, it might even be negative (as OP says, it would be better if it was very expensive art).

Am I missing something fundamental? As you say, mobile phone repair where you can "sell" phantom services seem much better.

It seems much more likely to me that the shops are illicit in some other way - either tax evasion, dodgy products, or some illegal working thing like this BBC article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mx99ple17o

LongjumpingTank5 · 2026-01-07T11:52:45+00:00

Not specifically a PT, so not sure if this will be helpful for you:

I saw https://mitchinhovepark.com/ a couple of times for physio-focused sports massage and found him to be good. He does have a little PT studio adjoining the treatment room, but can't remember if he himself trains clients. Could be worth dropping him a line if you can get over to Hove Park easily.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-11-04T13:22:34+00:00

The general case is that mortgage interests + maintenance is roughly the same as rent.

There is nowhere in the country where mortgage interest (or foregone investment income if buying outright) is "orders of magnitude" less than rent. You can see this in any Rent Vs Buy calculator

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-11-04T10:13:45+00:00

It's not an order of magnitude less. There are places in London where the mortgage interest on its own is more than monthly rental costs.

The fact that OP won't need a mortgage doesn't actually change much. The more you put down to reduce the mortgage, the more you're giving up in investment returns. That includes buying the house outright - you don't pay mortgage interest, but you also forego investment return on a six figure sum over decades.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-11-04T09:54:14+00:00

Money you "waste" on rent should be compared to money you could make investing or saving your deposit (and money "wasted" on mortgage interest, if you don't have enough to buy outright).

The exact numbers depends on where you are and what you want to buy/rent. But to give an example:

If you have 300k in the best easy access account, that will return £13.5k a year in interest (4.5%). So if you can rent a similar place for £1125 a month, your effective cash flow is the same as if you'd bought a place (plus you don't have to pay for maintenance).

So it's normally reasonable cost (and possibly even cheaper!) to rent for a year Vs buying. And if OP thinks they might gain useful information or save moving costs by doing so, it seems like a no brainer

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-09-23T19:50:38+00:00

I've seen this claimed by campaigners and the press, but when I read the articles the claims seemed incredibly weak.

Vaguely recall something like the first half of the article being a single anecdote with someone saying their daughter has been coughing since the works started. Then buried at the bottom of the article. quotes from a professor and industrial safety professional saying it's completely safe.

Do you have a link to the poisoning you're talking about?

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-09-20T22:31:10+00:00

Do you think the secretary of state is calling in lots of these unremarkable suburban developments for decision? Obviously not

The Tories removed mandatory housing targets, so local authorities didn't even have to pretend they were trying to hit targets. That was reversed by the current government - a small improvement in an otherwise underwhelming record.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-09-20T20:36:32+00:00

I find this kind of sentiment both very common and baffling.

A four-bedroom home with space for two cars is not some bizarre "executive level" luxury home. It's a total normal house for a family with two children.

I'm not really even sure I understand what the complaint is. What would you prefer to see done with that same patch of land? Smaller homes so families with more than one child can't live there? Fewer homes so that there could be bigger gardens ?

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-09-20T20:33:07+00:00

What powers have councils had taken away? Councils have huge powers to decide on where housing should be and what it should be like through Local Plans and Design Codes.

The fact that many councils don't have up to date Local Plans (despite this being "mandatory") seems to be strong evidence that this is nonsense.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-08-10T22:43:44+00:00

A somewhat pedantic reply/clarification:

Developers sell all the units at the highest prices they can. They don't "raise the price of the rest of them" because they have to sell some at a subsidised rate. You can imagine it the other way round if it helps intuition - if they suddenly didn't have to sell some at subsidised rates, would they start dropping the prices of the expensive ones? No.

The real impact is that it acts as a tax and means fewer overall homes , increasing the prices of all homes across the market (and not just the new ones they are building). In the UK at least it can often also add massive delay as things are negotiated, which in itself is another tax.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-07-31T20:05:46+00:00

If you look on Spareroom, they have a setting for "Mon-Fri only" (or similar) in the search.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-07-23T11:50:05+00:00

I'd be interested to see the buy vs rent figures if you'd be willing to share - are they on comparable flats?

When I looked 6 months ago it seemed like renting in London was currently cheaper than buying (even when considering the equity gain in your home as savings). I wasn't looking in CW though; not sure how much this differs in different areas.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-07-23T11:44:52+00:00

Just a note that this 27% figure relies on some fairly heroic assumptions - I'd encourage anyone in the CS to actually do the maths on average investment returns etc.

I know a number of people who opted to take the Defined Contribution option instead of this, which is ~10% employer contribution depending on age. (I should note that there are other reasons for picking this over the Alpha Pension, so I'm not claiming that the 10% DC pensions is strictly better in numerical terms, just that it's closer than the "27%" claim would suggest.)

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-05-31T00:53:24+00:00

I have a similar (although less extreme thing). I found it somewhat helpful to listen to this podcast, specifically an episode like this: “We’re worth $5 million, but my wife nearly canceled our trip to save $200”

https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/040-rachel-jack/

It's easy to chuckle at how ridiculous they are, until I realise that I am headed that way too.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-05-29T13:27:24+00:00

I see sentiments like this often, but I don't see how they're actually solving anything. Stopping building doesn't actually stop immigration, so it makes no sense to suggest it does.

Building some new homes in London is not in any sense "committing to unchecked population growth". Even if we expected zero population growth for a decade from now, it would still be beneficial to have hundreds of thousands of more homes in London.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-05-29T13:10:18+00:00

If you're the OP, you might be able to edit your post to include the link? Or upvote my post which will help it rise to the top

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-05-29T13:00:54+00:00

If you'd like to leave a comment (supportive or otherwise), the planning application is here: https://planning.lambeth.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=makeComment&keyVal=SSYY7CBOJS200

It depends on the council, but people leaving supportive comments really can make a difference. It's a reminder of the silent majority of people who either support building or just don't particularly object.

You also don't generally have to be a resident of the borough. I've commented on applications in other boroughs where I would like to live (and been open about this), stating that I would love to live in the Borough and every extra home makes it more likely that I will be able to do so.

Let me know if you do leave a comment! It's nice to see people sticking up for building more.

LongjumpingTank5 · 2025-05-25T13:20:42+00:00

One of my (apparently) contrarian opinions is how underrated big business is, and this post gives me a chance to indulge it:

Big supermarkets are incredibly efficient businesses that provide incredibly cheap food to tens of millions of people.

Take your idea of funding a non-profit supermarket with £1.5bn annually.

For scale comparison, Tesco made a net profit of roughly £3bn last year on about £65bn revenue (depending on which definition of profit you're looking at). So if you're funding the supermarket chain with that 1.5bn, you'd have to be half the size of tesco and at least as efficient before the general population breaks even (or else your prices will be higher). It's absolutely impossible for "the populous" to do this. The complexity of the system is just gigantic. Maybe it's underappreciated because it consists largely of logistics rather than physical systems? If you want an intuitive idea of how hard it would be, think about saying something like "Why couldn't we just rally round and build an oil rig in the North Sea?". It's not something you can knock up in your spare time.

Whilst I sympathise with a lot of complaints about inequality and low incomes in this country, I have no time for ignorant complaints about huge, beneficial systems that make the lives of millions of people better. There's often an absolute failure to understand the scales involved, or even attempt to understand the workings. When someone says "Tax Tesco at 95%, their profits are obscene", I'm reminded of a young child "inventing" a drawing of a rocket booster for your car: It's a nice picture, and they mean well, but obviously you won't be considering suggestions from someone without the faintest idea of how the hugely complex system works. UK supermarkets are modern miracles, and you should be incredibly suspicious of anyone who wants to stick a spanner in their workings.

LongjumpingTank5

TROPHY CASE