UK Housing Crisis Can Be Solved By Rich Land Owners

[chris morton]

I am really getting pissed off with this being called a crisis

It is not a sudden ‘crisis’, it has been recognised as a problem since the Health of Towns Commission of 1844 and its cause quickly identified:

The lowest quartile of the working population do not earn enough to pay for decent housing. That has not changed and until it does, most ‘solutions’ just produce slightly sub-standard housing whose lfe could have been greatly enhanced by being slightly more thoughtfully and genererously built.

For just nearly 100 years the problem was circumvented by solid, if unimaginative, council housing. Sometimes also over authoritarianly managed. Thanks Maggie for pissing that up as well as so many other things

The only solution is a structural rejigging of the income structure of society. That has many other benefits as enumerated recently in “The Spirit Level”. This can never be done by either ‘growth’ or ‘trickle-down’. It needs an admission that free-market economy not only doesn’t work very well, but has also pissed up the whole panet past a point of no-return. Though if we started using our ‘sapiens’ it might  just be salvaged