housing and land monopoly

[james armstrong]

David Cameron announced to-day  he is  halving the 
Social Housing Fund. Saving money is the excuse, the real  plan is to restart the  mad rise of house prices.

 

This is a continuation of the Gordon Brown, Bank of
England  macro-economic policy

-the only kid on the block- Which caused and burst the
inevitable housing bubble.

 

The continuing strategy is to substitute a growing UK
financial  sector for the post War
collapsed UK
trade and industrial sectors.

 

To get economic growth in UK  the method selected  is to boost  consumer spending financed by a credit
boom.  Inflated house prices are the  ‘assets’ which act as collateral for the
credit . This is  the sub prime mortgage
scandal resurrected. 

 

We are back to the beginning of  boom and bust again. 

 

Specifically   the
policy is , create a shortage of houses (everyone needs one) . -by  decreasing supply of new houses (the Big
Builders are co-operating here)  and
turning out- ejecting - council house tenants. By doing this  you swell the 
demand for buying houses.

If the supply is static or falling (down to a record low
supply of 160,000 new houses in 2009) The price inevitably increases.

 

You could think of it as another form of Quantitative Easing
-  inventing money- this time by
artificially inflating the value of houses. 

 

You can’t beat the system by building your own -  there’s monopoly control of the land for
building  on , operated (see Barker p 81)
by the plc housebuilders . Farmers are the only other group who can build-
since they own land- many houses are built on agricultural land. 

At Poundbury, the Duchy of Cornwall has built  or (currently is not building) some 2,500  permissioned houses on Poundbury Farm and
Middle farm. The Duchy’s  Fordington Farm
was built-over many years ago- but the 
farmhouse still stands forlorn amidst another 500 houses. .

 

 Farmers  account for a surprising number of self build
) facilitated because they already  own
land and have agricultural privileged permission.

 The corall gate is
closed by the planning laws which restrict building outside the areas already
designated and where the  big plc
builders have snapped up all the sites long ago to hold in landbanks and boast
about in their balance sheets.

 

The planning regime was specifically introduced to regulate
the expected boom in housebuilding after WW11 and the Council House building
boom.  When building numbers drop off,
and council houses are no longer funded and plc housebuilders have long ago
learned to snap up all the designated land,  the effects of the planning regime go into
reverse . Planning laws now support the monopoly instead of regulating the  boom. 

 

 

Farmers are also rewarded big time and secretly with C.A.P.
payments annually. The Duchy gets a cheque from C.A.P. for £417,000 and rising
each year. They exploit the land monopoly in this way too.   

 

Publicising and ending the The Land monopoly and its malign
effects on housing and farming and politics is 
the key to beating the system.

Exploiting the people through monopolizing land  is the common theme of history ,so should not
be surprising.  Property qualification
for voting was the rule until 1875.  Bulk
property owning was the qualification for membership of the oldest House of
Parliament- the Lords – until 2000 and for membership of both Houses and for
voting till well into the eighteenth century.

The land monopoly and rigging the housing market is a breach
of human rights. 

We should  support a
test case contesting a repossession on these grounds.  James  

  

          

 		 	   		  
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