In the UK and many other countries
houses are expensive
very expensive
prices have been rising consistently for many decades
In England, prices rose by 4255% between 1971 and 2011
If the price of a supermarket chicken had inflated by the same rate,
It would cost 51 pounds and 18 pence by now
Around 1950, you could get a 3 bedroom house in northwest London
on the northern line, between West Finchley and Woodside Park
for just £1050
This was 2.5 times the average wage of £400 a year
The head teacher of the local school could very comfortably have bought this kind of house
with a total mortgage somewhere around twice their annual salary
Today, a similar house, in the same area, would cost close to one million pounds,
forty times the average income.
It's nearly ten times the salary of the local head teacher
house prices in the UK haven't just increased, they have skyrocketed
But why is housing so expensive?
The cost of houses has very little to do with the building materials
The value is almost all in the land on which the house sits
So why does land cost so much?
One reason is that demand for housing keeps growing.
The UK population increases by between 300 and 400 thousand people a year
And also, the number of people in each household is getting smaller
More people live alone or just as couples without children
So the demand for accommodation is growing all the time
In order to keep up with the demand the UK would need about 240 thousand new flats and houses a year
It's building less than half of this
That's not just a UK problem. France is building only 330 of the 500 thousand new homes needed per annum
Major cities fair worse
London will face a shortfall of over 700 thousand homes by 2031
In response to the cost of housing crisis
governments have tried to intervene to help people to buy their own home
In the US there are schemes like the federal home loan banks
and the community reinvestment act
In the UK, there is "Help to Buy" and there are interest-free loans in France
The underlying idea is that the people would buy houses if only they had the money
But really, most governments are just crying crocodile tears about high property prices.
They know that the bulk of their voters actually like expensive houses a lot
The number of people who want new houses at any time is very small, only 10% or so.
In relation to the huge numbers who already have a home.
And therefore, the property-owning side of society has a vested interest in seeing the value of homes go up
Creating easy credit doesn't actually make housing more affordable,
the real issue is one of supply
if we simply ease credit without increasing supply,
you'll just stoke house inflation, which is precisely what's happened
It's the same with the big expansion of mortgage lending
You may be able to borrow more, but so can other people
You're all chasing the same limited number of homes
so this just pushes prices up and up
So why is building houses so difficult?
Well, because there is enormous opposition to the building of new homes
and great restrictions on the use of land
There are lots of immediate answers to do with planning regulations and zoning, but dig deeper
and what we have really are society-wide fears of new housing
For one large reason above all others, because almost all new housing development are very, very ugly
And no one in their right mind wants a new development anywhere near them
Most of the large housing developments built in the southeast of england in the last 25 years
share one common, generally undiscussed feature
they're very ugly.
Or, to be more precise, they're far uglier than the countryside that they've replaced
In the mid 18th century,
people looked on without dismay,
as the hills around the little town of Bath were given up to Queens Square, the Royal Crescent
and Somerset Place
Likewise, a little further back,
when the wetlands, scrubby weed beds and sandy islands at the mouth of the river Po
were sacrificed to urban expansion,
few people were likely to have raised protests,
given what would come to replace them, the city of Venice
History shows us that people don't object to new housing per se,
They object when the houses are less beautiful
than the natural landscape they have devoured.
This starts to isolate the cause of expensive houses,
as well as point the way to a solution to the issue
It is, literally, ugliness, that is largely to blame for the current social catastrophe of high house prices
What seems like negative and entrenched nimbyism (not in my back yard)
is at heart an inarticulated, disguised
but understandable plea for grace, elegance and a touch of grandeur in architecture
We love towns and cities,
when they're attractive.
But we've no confidence we can make today the kinds of places we actually really like.
And the reason for that has nothing to do with prices
The argument isn't that we should build replicas of Georgian crescents
let alone rows of canal-sided gothic palaces
anymore than it would be an idea for someone who loves the english language
to begin addressing strangers in shakespearean dialect
The answer is to create housing developments in the best architectural idiom of our times
Places like, for example, the exceptional Accordia housing scheme in the suburbs of Cambridge
to which, unsurprisingly, no one objected
Solving the housing crisis requires that we get better at grasping the nature of the problem we're facing
The issue isn't stopping selfishness
it's a longing that we shouldn't build unless we can build beautifully
Crack that and no one will mind a fell trees to much, and mortgages will come down too
So, what's the solution?
It's to stop thinking that creating credit for house purchases does anything: it just stokes house inflation
What we should be doing is creating not-for-profit housing corporations that are incentivised by volumes,
rather than prices reached
And most importantly,
we should build so beautifully that no one minds a patch of land near them being developed
Tantalizingly,
all this,
could be done.