A huff and a puff…

I'm reading Anna Minton's Ground Control in preparation for a lecture on urban space next week (plus lots of psychogeography and French philosophy, like Perec and Lefebvre - it'll be fun). One of her discussions is about the housing market.

It goes like this. The Tories wouldn't let councils invest money in building new council housing. The private sector was meant to provide. But they didn't because markets don't work. The developers limited supply rather than meeting it, because that increased house prices, making more money for them. The millions of people who are homeless or trapped in bedsits suffer, but who cares.

So the situation is this: New Labour and the current Tories knew very well that there are enough planning permits out there to house everybody. But they know that the developers don't want to use them. So they've… weakened the planning laws even more so that the few bits of the environment protected currently will be opened up for development. The greedy, stupid bastards.

So. I have an idea. Firstly, make planning permission time-limited, like local currencies that expire after a period, to stimulate demand. That way, housing speculators and supermarkets (who buy land to prevent rivals building shops - leaving two massive plots derelict for a decade and counting here in the Land of Pork Scratchings) either build, or lose their permits. Secondly: tax the unused land progressively higher until it's built on. Thirdly: if building isn't under way by the time the permit expires, take the land into public ownership. Compulsory Purchase Orders refer to 'public benefit', so that's really easy.

Of course, I know one MP who'd be horrified by the prospect, one Paul Uppal MP. But then (though he doesn't like to talk about it), he's a multimillionaire property speculator. (By the way, it's two weeks since I asked him what he meant by Liam Fox's 'sterling work in Sri Lanka'. No reply yet!).

Readers: can you see any flaw here?

Facts, schmacts

Why stick to facts when rightwing newspapers and lazy TV shows won't ever check the facts?

On Saturday morning on ITV David Cameron said (10mins 30 secs):

I get people coming to my constituency surgery saying exactly that: “We waited before we got married until we could afford it, we waited till we could afford to have children, we waited and then we managed to get a house and I see someone down the road do none of those responsible things and they get put up in a council house, they have as many children as they want.

Which council houses would these be then?

West Oxfordshire Borough Council, in which Cameron’s consituency sits, got rid of its council housing in 2001

(Lifted from Liberal Conspiracy)

Extortion

Plashing Vole lives in a rented burrow. It's above the waterline (and, unfortunately, a pizza joint). It costs rather a lot of money. I've just agreed to continue paying a lot of money to the rentier class for another year.

It turns out that I have to pay the agents for the privilege of paying more money. A new contract involves photocopying a contract of several pages and posting it - perhaps £2 in total. The charge: £68. If preparing and posting it took (at a generous guess) 5 minutes, that's an hourly rate of £816 - better than most lawyers.

Moving into private halls?

Talking of decamping to expensive accommodation, the Guardian's Money section had an interesting column on the hugely increasing cost of halls of residence.

I only lived in halls for the last term of my third year - after three years of coping with nutters (most of whom are still my friends) in cold and filthy conditions, I needed somewhere quiet and dry to revise for my Finals. It was weird, OK, but basic, and it cost a rather pricy (for then) £28 per week.

Now some of you are moving into flats in town which look like the set of Friends, at huge expense. I hope it works out, but the amount of money required scares the hell out of me - around £5000+, piling on to your already enormous debts.

Where's the money going? As Collinson elucidates, Liberty Living is a financial vehicle which raised rents in its halls by 6.8% this year - inflation this year is MINUS 0.5% and rents are generally falling in the private sector. The couple who own the company recently bought a Swiss house for £26 million pounds. So they can afford it when your payment is a week or two late…