London considers lowering affordable homes target to spur house building

11 comments

1. Hard to imagine they stop giving massive housing subsidies to their base

2. So who will live in them if they’re not affordable? Lol. Oh right, the rich. Tbh, in London you need to be on a fairly good salary to be able to rent/buy on your own.

3. Smart move. If you want houses built you gotta make it viable

4. The current affordable homes act is based on UNITS built. 35% of units must be affordable homes. So, developers are encouraged to build the most expensive properties possible.

   This way, if a 100 properties were 1m each, the 35% units wouldn’t hit as hard. If the 100 property were £200k each, it’s literally not possible to have 35% units as affordable.

   And we wonder why all new builds effectively have to be as expensive as possible. It’s not the developers fault. They have literally no choice. Thank the government.

5. Holy fuck are we getting the point yet?

   Increase supply. Make the prices go down. Reduce speculation. Force investors into other assets.

6. Yes! Build top quality houses for top price! The middle moves up, the bottom gets a house!

7. Affordable homes are a scam and should be binned. Just pushes everyone else’s house prices up, meaning that net affordability is worse. Basically yet another policy to artificially boost house prices beyond reasonable levels (while handing out free stuff to mostly unproductive people).

8. The target is stupid in the first place, it’s a fairly simple supply and demand situation, building more houses and reducing immigration will both push the market in the right direction.

9. Good it should be zero, the entire notion behind affordable is stupid as fuck, ironically or un-ironically the best way to build yourself out of a housing crisis is through high end construction not through affordable homes.

   If you build more, and it doesn’t matter if it’s mansions or “affordable homes” you increase supply which results in lower prices regardless of the price tag attached to those homes. And when you actually build more and better high end homes you effectively have those with means funding that additional supply.

   Rich people want better homes, they want bigger homes, so build those so they can move upwards returning existing their properties back into the supply pool. And for those who’ll yell well buh buh buh but the rich would just rent their old homes….. that is also just as good – more supply of rental properties means lower rent prices also.

   There can be no circumstance in which supply is increased and prices do not go down as long as demand is the same.

   Affordable homes add nothing of value, they disincentivize development overall and reduce the quality of the new housing stock either directly through lower grade construction and finishes or indirectly through higher prices for those who are not on the affordable homes lottery.

   The only way to solve a housing crisis is to build yourself out of it, and you aren’t going to be building yourself out of it by focusing on affordable housing which is less attractive to developers, not to mention arguably impossible to do well because new homes will always have a premium.

   New homes cost more and should do so, building science improved, standards improve and the best people to pay for that premium are those who have the money already, there is no need to drag housing standards down so you can hit affordability targets and this is what has been happening. Anyone who’ve seen a house over on the continent lately knows how shit UK homes are.

10. Good policy. “Affordable homes” is just another bullshit fee builders have to pay in order to build.

11. There’s a lot of guff about luxury housing and rich people. But the current affordability criteria makes development of normal housing far less financially enticing than high end. The goal of setting a high-ish affordability quota is laudable but it’s had the reverse effect on actual dwelling numbers.

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