I mean, I would quite like it if I could vote on new developments. Obviously it's not sufficient to solve the entire crisis (many other policies are needed) but it's still a solid one, and should ideally be included as part of housing reform.
Getting communities to own the plans, either figuratively or literally, can help to improve both support and results. But it rather relies on engaging a representative group of people with time and energy to spare.
@@armadillito ...and presupposes that communities will willingly own plans that involve greater housebuilding in their local areas. That was one of the component planks of the original government proposals - the algorithm would dictate how many homes must be built in an area, based on various factors, then council would seek local engagement on the best way to do it. It was...not popular with the Tory shires.
I'm not a thinktank, but I feel like it doesn't address the heart of the current problem. It's not just the extra buildings people don't want, it's the extra neighbours. More noisy kids, more competition for street parking, more competition for school places, busier parks, supermarkets, GPs, dentists... There's no way to increase a town's population without pissing people off unless you also build more amenities for that population. I think giving residents more control is a terrible idea. Not to mention that the financial incentive would mean that residents will only want big expensive homes to be built, not affordable homes or social housing. Basically, NIMBY.
Big fan of the channel and this video specifically, but one suggestion: can you please equal to volume between the opening 10 seconds and the rest of the video? It always blows my ears in the beginning cause I am not waiting for it haha
The last people to entrust with actually getting development done are locals. They will always oppose it more than they agree and the things they would agree to, if any, would usually be unfeasible. Think about it, what we need at the moment is cheaper and affordable housing in large quantities. Will any NIMBYs agree to that? Nope, it would be even more restrictive.
I don’t blame them tbh… It’s all well & good saying we need to “BUILD BUILD BUILD WHERE EVER WE CAN!”, but just will you like it so much when it’s your area? Apologies if this came off rude or aggressive, that’s not what I was trying to do.
@@mrsomeone846 I do blame them. As someone who has both had development where I live and works in engineering, I can say many nimbys are completely unreasonable shits. Tons of reasons why things are wrong and oppose every solution. If it was left to nimbys, nothing would get built anywhere. They don't want building on brownfield sites near them, don't want building on Greenfield, don't want building on old industrial areas of areas of heritage. Even areas where they have no interest in maintaining them (eg derelict industrial places) they oppose for made up bullshit health reasons. No, nimbys don't know what the hell they are talking about the majority of the time. Ask any nimby to propose a solution and I can guarantee 100% there would be other nimbys to oppose it.
I don't care about the demographics of this country. Some of the best parts of this country are in London because the people are interesting. Polish Butchers and Pakistani nurses are British and I prefer living in a country with them in it because statistically immigrants are more likely to work and less likely to take benefits than the native born. This country is 78% British and almost 90% white. That's not going to change anytime soon but change itself isn't a crime. The problem is that oligarchs own tonnes of property they never even visit, not that there are more brown people near you.
@@justanotheremptychannel2472 *England already has 9 million foreign born immigrants* *And even more people than this in England have a migrant background*
I personally know several landlords who own 40+ properties. We could build on every inch of land and still need more as developers and investors just eat up any new builds. They are added to the portfolio and rented out to locals and inflated prices……..and so it goes on.
Rapidly increasing tax on rental income and some regulation of the whole buy-to-let mortgage nightmare would be in order. As it stands, buy-to-let mortgages are generally cheaper for mutli-property landlords than a standard mortgage is for a first-time buyer and there's only personal benefit to hoarding as much property as you can, pawning off management to some estate agency and f**king off to the south of Spain while somebody manages your 36 flats and 12 houses and the money just floats into your bank account.
@@Clone683 This is the only solution and yet it rarely gets considered a serious option. It would without doubt crash the current market temporarily, but there are convoluted ways to prevent that. One example may be to introduce a scaling stamp duty tax; one which gets more expensive with each property you own. This could then be slowly wound down over say a 20 year period while a scaling land value tax which you mention replaces it incrementally. It would have the effect of locking in landlords to their current portfolio but not instantly making it impossible to be a landlord overnight but then slowly forcing them to sell their 30th, then 29th then 28th property etc etc over a number of years, slowly feeding the market and only causing a dip in prices or flat lining for decades. Ideally it would just smoothen the impact of introducing a scaling land tax, which itself, would hopefully make it unaffordable to be a landlord after a pre determined number of properties... say, 20?
Rent control tied to location and amenities would incentivise invest into the property to create nicer homes but also reduce the inflation seen in rents.
I don't get how a thinktank spent ages deliberating and then came up with the street votes proposal. It just won't work. Look at how abysmal voter turnout is for council elections. That's just *one* vote every 4 years. No one can be bothered to read through an entire planning application and decide whether they want that kind of building on the street or not. Even if it looks pretty, it will still cause noise and disruption. I also don't think the general public will give it enough thought to think 'yes let's make this street look nicer so the value appreciates'. But more than anything, I think most people just won't bother to vote, so it will never achieve 50% votes. In short, homeowners don't care about solving the housing crisis, but they do care about not having construction work on their street.
Absolutely, if they vote it will only be to vote against a plan. You have zero incentive to vote in favour of any plan as I can hardly think of any new building that will increase the value of properties in the street (unless the neighbourhood already suffers from a lot of abandoned properties like in Detroit). It makes absolutely no sense! Currently people can object to planning permissions and often people hardly even know a proposal is submitted and they often don't object because it is too much of a hassle and often they build it anyway. But even then, nobody is ever happy with any development in their streets.
There are more than 250,000 second homes in England. Incredibly, most councils actually offer a discount on council tax on those homes. Clearly, what is needed is more like double council tax on second homes.
@@dangriff12 How many current second home owners would permanently rent? The investment aspect of their present situation would, in effect, be reversed, so they'd be more likely to rent for just a couple of weeks each year.
Second home owners who currently rent their second homes would just up rent to cover the costs of whatever tax you want to bring in, passing on the tax in effect to the renter.
@@dangriff12 But then their profits on paper will also increase, meaningthey pay more income tax. So even if it didn't free up some housing, which I'd dispute, then at least tax revenue will increase to the theoretical benefit of society.
@@AntonHu depends whether they have it set up as a ltd company or not. Tax rate on ltd companies is 19% which is going to be less than the landlord earnings tax on average.
1.) Councils must start building again - for social rent and affordable ownership (in perpituity) 2.) Land value tax (replace stamp duty) to incentivise building on undeveloped land with planning permission 3.) Capital gains tax on owner-occupied homes 4.) bigger taxes on foreign investors (especially in London)
If you can't build outwards, you'll just have to build upwards. I know that's not in fashion right now, but I think it's the right way forward, especially as more people live in cities.
Exactly, we don't even need to build huge tower blocks, just more dense terrace homes instead of fully detached homes with huge driveways. Also improve public transport to reduce car use, then use all the empty car parks for buildings. This would also mean new builds wouldn't need driveways with room for 2+ cars (this also has huge environmental benefits) Also redevelopment of dying town centers to feature more flats is something that's gaining momentum.
4-5 floor houses with shared back gardens, and all basic services covered withing 15-20 minutes walk. Shops, GPs, restaurants, schools, coffee... A huge issue is building houses but not services for them.
One huge thing you missed out was landlord reform in the private sector. Too many people have 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, houses that they rent out. Make it more difficult to own more than 2 houses and bingo, loads more homes straight away.
More homes for sale, fewer to rent. It will help those able to afford their own home, but negatively effect the rental market, making it difficult for those who cannot afford a home and need to rent.
@@robertb6889 I agree with you. It's been tried here in Israel, and rent prices did go up. Housing prices didn't go down, however - developers just sat on properties waiting for the tax to go away.
Homes for rent are less of a problem than second homes which are rarely lived in and 648,000 empty homes in England, a heavy tax on empty homes should free up that unused housing stock.
Scrapping council tax in favour of a land value tax has the understated benefit of getting rid of unproductive administrators, the many granting exemptions and reductions to council tax.
You mean the system of property tax introduced by the Tories, based on the Poll Tax (as the Council Tax surely is, hence the discounts and exemptions)?
It would also mean the dream house I sacrificed many many nice things to save up for would become too expensive for me to live in. Not everyone in £250k houses is rich, some of us went without and grafted on modest wages to enjoy a nice property. I swear it feels like the government milk the average worker. The rich pay nowt, the poor get everything for free and we have to pick up the tab.
@@Ryan-lk4pu your point was mentioned in the video, it sucks for people who have just bought into the market, but it’s clear housing is too expensive and corrections must be made, the very existence of the tax will bring down the value of your property
The Land Tax seems like the best idea. It can have a time taper, so those who bought last year pay nothing and stretch that out proportionally to 2009, the last property low point.
Are you in Brisbane? The city commissioned a report by Sir Gordon Chalk in 1986 on the subject. It is available on line. One of the best official documents ever produced on the subject.
I have seen people in one breath be ecstatic about the rise in the value of their house and not wanting any new developments near them to complaining in the next that their kids can't afford to buy houses where they grew up. People are dumb.
Worse still my dad is an architect who often works on feasibility studies in order to get planning permission to increase the value of the land. It’s hard to convince people that a system is wrong when it gives them a job. Same with climate change.
@@Jay_Johnson yup - seen that. Our house is a two bed end of terrace. We've seen people trying to put similar houses on the market for near double what we paid for it 6 years ago. Exact same house - but with approved planning permission to extend. I don't see why people should gain from an extension that they haven't actually built.
It encourages municipalities to use area zoning to inflate the value of existing residential properties so that they can collect large amounts of tax. Imagine you have you home mortgaged with 25% equity and suddenly you fall into a development zone that on paper increases the value of your home by 50%, half of which you now owe to the council. You now have to extend the mortgage on your home and increase your repayments by one third in order to pay the tax. You might be able to defer the tax but since it is now a debt it is likely to accrue interest. It is also worth noting that if developers cannot make profits near expectation on land developement they will stop developing and the the increase in housing supply grinds to a halt as they move to other markets. I don't think you understand the scale of the problem, every developed country in the world and a number of others has exactly the same problem. Once the problem has set in nobody has found a fix that doesn't make things worse.
@@emizerri So you don't have local councils and boroughs? I was under the impression that you did. Municipality is a generic term for a local level government as a defined district.
Already done. Average wage down here is 25k a year average house price is 300k+ thats 12x annual wage for an average house. It was 4x 40 years ago. Don't buy a second home in Cornwall or we will start sending our homeless round when you're not home.
They're building loads of houses in our little Essex village. Problem is, nobody local can afford them so what we're actually getting is a huge influx of Londoners. Londoners that still work in London. It's pretty frustrating living at home at 35 (I refuse to rent) and watching all these houses going up near me knowing I've no way of affording one.
Affordable houses that are new built and low cost are so small. I went to view a house and in the bedroom there is literally just room for the bed and no where to put clothes. Developers just want to cram in as many as they can but don’t think about what it would be like to live there.
The way I see it, even if all restrictions were removed, there would be no incentive for developers to build enough new properties. If there are enough houses, prices fall (or remain static), but cost of construction will only increase with inflation. So, fewer houses mean more profit per house because of inflated prices. On top of that, developers don't want to build "affordable" housing, so try every trick to get out of it. So, instead of funneling 30Bn of taxpayer money to inflate house prices, use it to build new genuinely affordable housing and council housing. Also introduce rent controls, so that rents don't spiral out of control and also to reduce the buy-to-let incentives, so that again more properties are available to buy, helping to stabilise house prices. If something is not done very soon, then either most GB properties will end up being owned by overseas investors, or prices will far exceed wages (it's already almost 10x average salary) and the market will collapse.
In other countries, they just zone an area for development and sell the individual plots at auction rather than letting the big developers have a ogliopoly, People then build whatever house they want on the plot. Sometimes the plot will come with foundations and utilities already piped there. Gives the place a lot more character than the god-awful sameness of current new builds.
@@randeknight My wife introduced me to a song that we sing when going through the UK housing estates... Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes little boxes, And they're all made out of ticky-tacky, And they all look just the same. Thought you might appreciate it 😉
There are over 1 million unbuilt homes in the UK with planning permission, that developers won't build simply because they have already made a profit by getting the planning permission, and are looking to sell the land on at massively inflated prices... That you don't know that, but comment anyway, says more about you than I ever could!
Simple, stop rich people buying up family homes for HMO's. The amount of 3 bed terraced houses in my area that have been turned into 2 flats or HMOs is ludicrous.
As someone who lived in a HMO recently for 2 years, I agree, worst place I have ever lived. Paid far too much for the privilege of one room and no say over who moves in.
HMOs are part of the solution for hosting crisis. This way young people live together, socialise etc all for pretty cheap compared to renting a whole flat. At the same time requiring less housing.
@@davidcooks2379 it's only really a solution for young people age around 18-25 with low income and no immediate ambition for anything better. It doesn't solve the housing issue for anyone older, or with children/dependents, or looking to buy a home in the future. To live in a HMO you need to have no furniture of your own and be willing to share your living room, bathroom and kitchen with literally anyone the landlord decides to move in. Parking can also be very difficult if you've got a house with 5 people in it who might each have a car. It's basically like living the student life. And the more HMOs there are, the less properties on the market.
But wouldn’t that decrease the supply of homes available? And it’s not always “rich people”, it’s what people do with houses they inherited, that’s what was done with the house next door to me. Still owned by the son of it’s first owners.
@@davidcooks2379 what do you then do once these people are over the age of 25 and want to start a family? They can't buy a house because they're all filled up as HMOs.
Surely the solution to NIMBYism is to create new towns like what happened post WW2? The main issue with any kind of housing is the lack of infrastructure in the UK, can't build another 500k houses without some new roads etc,
New Tows were only part of the solution, and not the panacea you proclaim. New Towns were accompanied by a massive social housing building scheme, building millions of homes in existing cities... Strange you mention a small part of that solution, but ignore the rest of it?
Denmark is pretty decent. Moved here after the Brexit ref; despite we're both on a median income here and came to the country less than 3 years ago. We could get a mortgage for a plot of land and we got a house built. If we had stayed in the UK, we'd probably never own a house, as our paid out salary was almost 1/3 than it is here, and the UK bank did not consider my income for a mortgage (as I'm an EU citizen) making it impossible for us, if we had stayed. Now we got a brand new 4 bedroom house we designed ourselves, with a giant garden. The mortgage is 1% interest, so paying the house-tax here really isn't that bad, as it's deductible from your income tax, just like gardening, constructors, the interest, and so on, is also deductible. I am not sure how/what Denmark did, but it works. It is as if the Danish economy is designed around people actually living in it and contributing to it, and not for the rich to get richer.
The reason why it's cheap to build houses in Denmark is because Lego is from Denmark. Lol. You built it out of colourful plastic bricks, right? And you drive a Technic Bugatti? I'm joking, I just like to be nostalgic about Lego.
@@crabbycrab9955 Lego is expensive everywhere actually. But I never compared it to real bricks. By the way, you know so many people who work in Lego. Are they Denmark's biggest employer? Because of the fact that most of my knowledge of Denmark is from The Lego Story, I keep thinking that Billund and not Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark.
@White wolf doing nothing isn't solving anything either. Plus taxes help fund school, the NHS, the police and fire service and they certainly solve things.
@White wolf You made a sweeping statement that taxes never solved ANYTHING, and I simply gave you examples of taxes helping to solve problems. If you're just going to doomsay options the give your own. What are your plans to deal with the housing crisis in the UK that's continuing to be a prevalent issue???
@White wolf Taxing does not solve the supply issue here. Building houses is the only solution. Housebuilders do not want over supply the market so they are never going to build enough houses. We need to allow Local Authorities to build again.
@@oscarshedwick4862 bit over dramatic, it's more like a housing problem than a crisis, barely anyone is homeless due to not being able to afford rent or defaulting on their mortgage. The biggest problem is that it just sucks a bit if you want to own a property.
This video is catered towards the tax kids that barely pay any taxes. Guess what? If taxes get raised then prices need to go up to make projects viable
An issue (particularly in London) is from housing investors buying properties (usually flats) and just leaving them unoccupied (ie treating as a pure cash investment). This does seem to be done by foreign investor groups because renting the property leads to more complex tax situations for said investors. Maybe making owning empty properties much much harder might help? Whilst it only frees up expensive properties, it does increase the number of properties avaliable rapidly , and cause house prices are on a supply and demand basis should help reduce prices (not great for the investors which is another reason to keep them empty)
Maybe add... "below a certain value." If MR & Mrs Moneybags wants to own three or four £1M homes, let them. It's not affecting the bottom of the property market.
If the homes being rented are, you're not creating more homes for people, just forcing the owner to sell. You're just obfuscating the issue... That there aren't enough homes. Ownership is irrelevant!
Doesn't forcing the owner to sell mean that the market then has a surplus of property, meaning that property values would fall? One other option would be if you do this "statutory selling" approach is put a time limit on it, and once that expires, the government must buy the housing stock as council housing for an agreed baseline price.
@@davidmission2945 No it's not. There are more empty properties out there than homeless people. We have space for people, but properties aren't distributed evenly. People who own dozens (or hundreds) of properties being forced to suddenly sell would also lower property prices to more reasonable levels, so the distribution of properties would sort itself out quite fine.
Land Tax is the best option - will also put up the cost of 2nd homes and encourage smaller houses/flats which will be greener than current detached boxes. Taxes would be higher in South than the 'North' - that includes Wales, the SWest etc. It would also put pressure on older people to downsize when the chicks have flown - politically a bit difficult but no solution will be perfect.
Council tax already being higher for bigger houses is an incentive to downsize. Second homes are already taxed more than main homes (stamp duty and capital gains tax on sale - just that doesn't suit the narrative so not as widely known). Why should someone in the south pay more tax than someone in the North? If their bins don't cost more to collect etc. They already subsidise the North with their income tax.
I don’t see that any of your three “solutions” is actually going to increase the number of houses, two are just taxes which don’t necessarily result in any increase in house building and the final proposal has most of the disadvantages of the current system of planning permissions. The development land tax is a good idea if ( and it’s a big if) the government actually uses money raised to start to tackle the housing shortage, but it is a long term plan. It will not alleviate the current structural issues in building which are lack of skills, shortage of material and the somewhat one off approach we use to actually build houses, ie brick on brick, which is a slow process. The Land value tax just appears, as you present it as a replacement for council tax, it does not go to finance new building, assuming the structural elements could be overcome. The only solution is to build more houses which will mean adaptions to the green belt, zonal planning, more resources for social housing to Housing Associations and Local Authorities coupled with investment and training in people, modern methods of construction. It will probably take 10 years though to see any discernible difference. Theses elements should all have been tackled back in the 1990s when the problem was really starting to emerge, but then that’s governments for you, no long term thinking or planning just concentrate on what will win them the next election. The most immediate reform that governments could undertake would be to cancel the help to buy scheme, which just inflates house builders profits and instead invest the money in social housing.
The point of a land value tax is to encourage optimum use of a resource in fixed supply. It can also redress the problems of regional economic imbalance.
@Simon Delves That won't work becuase by renting out property you are providing a service to a person that will never be able to afford a home, or you are renting to students who are only staying there one or two years for there university course.
@@maximgeorgiou3174 That's what the state and communities are for, isn't it? The owners do not actually render any services, they only parasitize the worker's income
@Simon Delves Private (and non-private) landlords serve a useful purpose in that its desirable to have rental properties as part of the overall housing mix. The problem comes if there are insufficient properties to buy to meet demand for homeownership, as then you have would-be homeowners stuck in an oversized rental market (often at quite high prices) which is a benefit to the landlord, but not to anyone else.
8:24 I get it but that's also like saying any company should never release a new product because what about that one person who only just managed to save up enough money for the previous one. It's like yeh, sure that kinda sucks for that one person but obviously its even worse for everyone else if it does happen. The flaws of that kind of thinking can become even more evident when applied to medical treatment e.g doctors find a way to save a limb that would usually have to be amputated but instead, they tell the person "sorry we're still going to have to cut your leg off because we had someone in with this same problem a week ago and it wouldn't be fair to them if we used this new treatment on you."
I would love to hear more about the 'land value tax'. In a way it sounds a lot like double taxation because the property tax is based on the value of the property and the value of the property is very much based on the land it is standing on. And even undeveloped property is therefore still worth a lot of money and thus requires the owner to pay property tax over it.
An underdeveloped site is only worth a lot of money if there is consent to build on it. LVT should not be double taxation as it is a replacement for other taxes, otherwise there is not much point in having it.
The second one the tax is a good idea also scrapping second home ownership and preventing foreign investors from buying houses in order to rent out would be a good start plus it’ll take the incentive of viewing it as an “assist” I’m also a home owner and could careless of the value of my home However even with the two reforms the current immigration problem means more houses will need to be built and unfortunately the U.K. is a small island and we simply don’t have enough land to build enough houses We should be looking at other countries and complying putting more in social housing and large complexes not houses
@@ruairi4901 they also have an aging population and they've accepted an economic downturn to avoid immigration. Which is dumb, but at least their governments are competent enough to make an actual economic plan.
@@jacobedward2401 *Replacing your Native population is the dumbest thing you can do* *Japan is right* *Also, Japans economy isn't perfect, but it is still very strong and the Japanese enjoy a higher standerd of living than Brits* *And they still maintain their people and culture*
This only applies to London and the South. It's very affordable up north. By encouraging industry and business to set up, up North and move away from London it would be more desirable up here for workers etc and more people would move/stay. Things would even up without all these convoluted schemes.
Won't help, it will just cause more educated southerners to move north and push up house prices. We already know that northerners have on average less education and are less employed due to various factors including accent bias. You'll cause more harm than good forcing that kind of economy.
I did not understand how the uplifting tax would reduce housing prices. I get that it would decrease prices for unplanned land, but the way I see it, it would not do anything for the price of land after planning was granted. The only way I can see it having an effect would be by incentivizing local government to grant more land the ability to build (but this could go the other way as well, because it gives the local government a strong incentive to keep land prices high)
I'm assuming the main effect after planning was granted would be to gain more local funding for social housing, much in the same way as the indirect taxes/regulations do currently to ensure some affordable housing is built on the land; increased supply of affordable housing could lower the local housing prices. However, I also don't see how it'd incentivise councils to actually grant more planning permissions. It could possibly incentivise councils to maximise the tax they can levy, if the local pressure for planning permissions aren't strong enough, as it stands now.
Yeah why not, there is only more land in the U.K used for golf courses than all forms of building developments. So by all means lets live on top of each other. Jeez
I like the land value tax. I'd add Wellen Garden City and Milton Keynes type projects in rural unoccupied areas within commuting distance of cities. It requires extensive infrastructure but creates whole communities whilst upsetting fewer people.
They are currently building a new town near Cambridge called northstow with room for about 25,000 people, which isn't much smaller than letchworth. It's worth a Google if your into urban planning
Thank you for doing this video and covering Land Value Tax, it a major policy proposal which I wish to see implemented, and is also what I wrote my dissertation on!
@@physiocrat7143 No its not online, but it'll feature in my future book that will be a political To Do List, plus I'll probably cover it in a future video on my channel! Thanks for asking though, any questions about the findings?
@@mapk1516 Its not for me to say, as I don't see urban sprawl as an issue that needs preventing, so its not my concern tbh. Feasibly each county could set up its own LVT system that could skew things away from development and some towards, but I'm on the side of more development, not less.
Good work. As regards LVT, no mention of Ricardos Iron Law of Rent, or that LVT should replace Income Tax as well as council tax/business rates, or that the People’s Budget of Lloyd George & Winston Churchill was passed and implemented; then over turned by a later Tory Govt.
I've worked for 60 hours a week for 4 years to save up for just the deposit and moving fees for my first house. A land tax would force me off the land. Don't get me wrong. It's absolutely BS that I had to work this hard for a mid-terraced 2 bedroom house that I'll be paying off for 30 years but a land tax would crush me and make so much of my life a waste. I really wish a land tax was introduced a decade ago, though.
Can you do a video on the problems with a large state-led housebuilding program? (Similar to how the government is planning to use Homes England to ensure homes are built, for example) I guess one of the problems would be capacity in the construction industry
After working in housing policy in a previous life, the only hope I can see is that the endless can kicking and lack of action eventually creates serious social unrest that spurs on changes. People have been talking about these solutions (LV & property tax/more social housing/planning reforms) for 20 years now... politicians from all parties, think tanks, newspapers and every organisation under the sun (including some of the older generation) know what we have to do and agree that house prices disproportionately harm everyone under 45 and is terrible for the economy long term. However, the can is continually kicked down the road because it's easier for political parties to placate wealthy donors and engaged elderly voters by letting prices rise. The social contract is not being fulfilled for those under 40, we've had the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars and housing will continue to get further out of our reach, younger people should be in open revolt, this is the defining issue of our time.
I could not agree more with you. I feel like there is so much political noise in this country, yet its rarely has anything to do with the housing crisis. It baffles me that younger people are not furious on mass (maybe they are).
A familay that owns one plot of land wont be hurt as much by land tax as the people who deserve to be hurt most, people who won multiple properties only for speculative reasons and to leech off people with rent.
@@jasonmaguire7552 of course not, that’s why we have representatives and a parlament, to choose better for us…..and official hierarchy structures like engineering/architecture institutes, to gather people that have spent their lifetime mastering the disciplines to make the best decisions…..if that is not working good enough then the solution is to change the representatives, not to leave the decision to people unfamiliar with those disciplines/topics…….the first one is call representative democracy (the good type of democracy, the Republic, like US, France, Germany, etc), the second one is direct democracy (asking direct to the people) and it has failed much more through the history…..
@Mrs Pleasants Freeing enslaved people was "robbing" slave traders. That is, if they weren't paid ridiculous sums of money for it that taxpayers only recently stopped paying. Question whether you think that situation was right.
@@theMoporter That’s actually different because the slaves where freed because their status was changed from property to people and you can’t own people.
In addition I would be interested to know where we stand in reclamation & refurbishment incentives for derelict/shuttered up etc properties? Since surely a percentage of the issue could be met this way. Albeit only a small percentage, but it could assist the 3 points you’ve covered in this video. It would probably add value to the street average property values & tackle crime issues as well.
The incidence of where a tax actually falls depends on the elasticity of supply (whether you can conjure up more of it in response to a price change in the short term). There is little that is less elastic than land, and in particular locations where people in general need to be to take advantage of the social and economic opportunities that have created that value in the first place. In fact, it is the other way around - taking money from the pockets of workers or investors in production or people trading things, reduces what's left to spend on land. Hence most other taxes ultimately come out of land value anyway. So shifting them more directly onto those land values will be more efficient and can't be passed on in aggregate anyway. In this case, we're not talking about taxing more, but taxing differently, more attuned to hard economic laws rather than political whims and vested interests.
To be clear this is more or less all England specific, not UK wide, as all of these issues are devolved issues. One specific example, in Scotland we scrapped "Stamp Duty" and replaced it with LBTT (Land and Building Transaction Tax). I'm pretty sure our planning system in Scotland is also a bit different. Another thing we do in Scotland is that developers are required to build a certain amount of social housing when they build market rate housing.
And are still looking at a more pure form of land tax in Scotland. Transaction taxes, on the whole, are a bad idea as they disincentivise transactions, making the market less fluid. They may collect money once every so often. But ultimately either don't solve the problem, or make it worse.
What I see as a common thread in all of these is that renters are completely thrown under the bus. Especially that last one, the votes would almost certainly belong to the owners/landlords. Also, street-level planning is probably going to fail to address certain effects (extreme example: my street votes for a new skyscraper with 15 stories of underground parking and 50 stories of offices and commercial property; good luck with the ensuing traffic issues). Land taxes seem to be the most re-distributive of land wealth from fewer, wealthier holders to more holders of closer to average/moderate wealth. The problem of recent buyers can be addressed by adopting the tax with a phase-in date a few years in the future and a system of relief (e.g. being exempt from as much tax as the tax wiped out from your property value).
The problem can be traced back to the demutualising of Building Societies. As shareholders wanted high returns, lenders relaxed lending criteria to what they thought borrowers could afford. As interest rates fell the loan sizes increased. Bingo, prices kept going up and terms of loans also increased to counter increased monthly costs. Simplessss!!
Or phase it in. First with an exemption on paying on the house you live in if bought within the last X years (where they were the most expensive). But have landlords who rent out to others to pay it fully from the get go.
How do you define a street? In the countryside a road could have one property owner and they can now just do whatever they want in terms of on road development. Minor planning permission could easily be street based but you need to look to a wider community for larger projects
Excellent video - actual news rather than opinion and a nonsensical interview of the housing minister that we would get on the TV or radio. People want facts and explanation - superb work. Don’t sell out whatever you do and get parked on BBC News at 10pm on a Tuesday night.
Option 4: government builds social housing with a right to buy scheme that deliberately undercuts current house prices. Option 5: planing permission for new a new model city in a largely unpopulated part of the uk.
I wonder how many houses/flats are bought which just stay empty, especially in cities like London. We need to ensure every owned home is lived in and if a home stays empty for a set period of time, the owner should be made to sell it or find tenants to rent it.
What's amazing how we can allow these companies to build absolute deano shitboxes (wood frame interior's and plasterboard) and still let them charge disgusting prices. Alot of these companies in my area just build an almost brutalist block of flats and wipe their hands as if they've done a great job. Imagine thinking of buying from persimmons
That last proposal makes no sense. Why would residents want to build more homes in their own areas? Surely, that would only decrease the value of their property?
More houses, less green spaces. I've been watching all the fields where I grew up get turned into overpriced houses estates. So much natural habitat lost. Not that anyone seems to care.
If you want less expansion into nature, tell people to concentrate more closely to city centres in taller towers. Cities growing up, not out. If you want to increase concrete jungle sprawl, build large house suburbs. If you like none of those solutions, try to reduce the population or at least limit its growth.
As someone on a modest income who has sacrificed many many nice things to get on the housing ladder and build up as much equity as possible to get into a nice property, that middle solution scares me. Even 1% of my house value per year would make it untenable for me to live here.
Well, for a start, most proposals for land tax at the moment on the table in any political party are for a "revenue neutral" change, not additional overall tax take. One effect of switching to a land tax over council tax, for instance, is that properties in the lower bands will likely see lower taxes and where it is currently effectively capped at the top end will see higher taxes.
@@Ryan-lk4pu I don't think TLDR really understands how land value tax should work. You can calculate your site value by comparing it with the lowest rental value in the country of a similar sized house, somewhere like Sunderland. The difference is your site value. They also forgot to mention that LVT needs to replace a lot of other taxes in order to work.
@@physiocrat7143 I can only go off what they said in the video but what you said is interesting so thanks. I don't, however, trust any government to get it right. And I 100% guarantee I'd be worse off as a just less than uk average earner, who doesn't qualify for any benefits.
New Tows were only part of the solution, and not the panacea you proclaim. New Towns were accompanied by a massive social housing building scheme, building millions of homes in existing cities... Strange you mention a small part of that solution, but ignore the rest of it?
I think that the only way to really solve this is to make planning permissions easier outside the South East and make it harder there. Push companies to go where there is lower cost housing. After all why is the housing market so bad in the UK? Because jobs are only in the south east. Also, it is nearly impossible to self build housing in the UK. So there should be a way to get land and a planning permission process for self builders. Maybe coupled with a land uplift tax when the property is sold by the self builder.
@White wolf actually ironically cities are much more efficient for solving housing problems. You can fit way more people into way less space for a much lower cost and less use of resources.
@White wolf People move FROM the countryside TO the cities because there is more housing and jobs available. Housing in the countryside is a more limited resource and so more expensive.
Introduce 8% LVT like Singapore, and cut income tax for those who earn less than 100k or something. LVT can be phased in, with an initial exemption for those who live in their houses. Longer exemptions for those who bought their houses in recent years with much higher inflated prices.
By your own admission; you can only think about one thing at a time, and that thought occupies 100% of your brain capacity.. Should you really be commenting? Also, what happens when that brain cell has to shut down to divide?
I am a New Zealander living in France. Ideas for housing crisis: From France (where people seem mainly reasonably well housed): - often when land is sold, the commune(council) has first refusal. Council controls development. - house sales have a transaction tax about 7% (frais de notaire). Discourages speculation - Obligation on councils to offer 25% social housing, or pay a special tax. For UK and NZ (where problem just as bad as UK): -land tax seems most practical. -uplift tax (or give council right to buy (at price before zoning change) any land whose zoning is changed to allow housing). -Zoning should control building floor area, not number of units. The latter used in NZ and encourages few large houses over more numerous smaller ones. -make ownership of rental properties much less attractive through taxation. Or limit ownerships of (most) land for housing to owner occupiers (fishhooks here, but change housing land to something for housing not profit). -(more radical). Organise owner-ocupier favelas with lower standards. I suspect that many would prefer to own a low-standard house than rent forever a better one.
It is trying to "solve" the issue of banks not giving 95% mortgages anymore. If the reason only applies to new builds is to encourage new builds, increasing housing stock. Isn't that a good thing / everyone basically agrees needed?
@@danielwebb8402 a better idea would be to require banks & underwriters to provide 95% mortgages in proportion to their revenue from the other mortgages - including commercial - on their books. Make them stick their neck out a bit in return for being able to profit.
You almost got it correct but the actual beneficiaries are the MPs sitting in Parliament, majority of them are landowners, their property prices are inflated due to this scheme, and they voted it in - they are benefitting from it.
Being a landlord is a licence to print money in this country. Until this changes house prices will continue to rise and young people will be priced out of the market (unless they have affluent parents). Only a truly massive building programme will bring prices down unless rent controls are introduced.
@@billcipherproductions1789 50 years ago council housing was available and rents were much more affordable. People paid a fraction of their wages on accommodation compared to today. There were fewer homeless people. Was that worse?
The land value tax is the answer. As in Denmark, allow large bills to lower earners to be rolled up until sale. The other problem sighted was people who had recently purchased their property. That’s straightforward enough, give discounts to recent buyers tapered by the number of years since purchase, the discount would be highest to the most recent buyers. Also, why not have an annual tax free allowance so that those in the most modest properties pay very little. This should make it more politically acceptable & some of the burden of income tax could even be shifted onto property.
Streets deciding on building would be abused to prevent "others" from moving in. Also, a prettier street does not increase the value of the ugly houses in it. In fact, it would lose "curb appeal" by being next to prettier or bigger houses.
An Australian researcher went through the big development companies' reports to shareholders. Despite the companies' public claims about planning problems, the reports (and the rate of release of alread-built apartments) show that they avoid releasing enough to meet demand, because the increased value from slow release outweighs the interest they could earn on the cash from sale at the high-release lower price... that will be a problem in all major capitalist cities. Which is why there used to be state-owned housing. Here in Oz, that has mostly been sold off, sometimes to the residents but after that often eventually providing land for upmarket private apartments, and the government subsidises private rentals. Is that a problem in UK?
The big question really is how broadly and fairly neighbourhoods can be engaged with and by whom. There would be a vast amount of community work required to bring people together, table and discuss ideas and get sufficient engagement for a meaningful vote. It could be a model of grassroots democracy and community building applicable to far more than house building, but it would not be a quick, cheap fix. Edited for typos
@@Rh_879- Tried a bunch of time and always failed is very different than never tried. And this is just shifting zoning from the municipalities to the street. Just giving more local control over a small part of the government.
Planning system existing in the UK already takes a balance approach to reasonable objections to houses being built in the area by the neighbours. Neighbours have little incentive to build more houses when it could potentially reduce the value of their house.
There were some bold proposals in the 2019 Labour manifesto that included nationalising a noticeable portion of undeveloped land for future housing use to cut out the speculation and ensure the public profited from future development not just private speculators. There were also promises to spend £100 billion over 10 years to build 1 million homes, contrasting with the methods in the video which are effectively passive methods theorised to encourage the private market to build more, rather the government would just dive straight in and start building more. There have also been proposals to tax empty homes, implement rent control, tax foreign investors, and 'use it or lose it' proposals for undeveloped land and even property that is left empty for too long, all of which would prevent big money investors sitting on unused propety/land for growth rather than seeing it used for people to live in.
Yeah, but it also include stupid proposals like free internet to book your holidays, so the British public rejected it for the stupid nonsense it was...
Its one of the reasons right to buy was such an issue.... the idea was (as far as I'm aware) was to use the money raised from selling a council flat to its owner to buy new properties to kind keep social housing stock levels similar-ish.... reality was the market price for new properties was so significantly higher than the amount councils had to sell council houses for that in effect the social housing stock just became non-existent in a matter of a few years
The trouble is a lot of the places houses can be built are either green belt or where people don't want live , big cities are already rammed with houses with some of the biggest population densities in Europe . Remote/ home working would resolve this somewhat as you can live in a cheaper area that maybe outside commuter distance
Land value tax doesn't make housing more affordable. It reduces the initial purchase price by replacing that mortgage cost with an annual tax. I also don't see how street votes increase supply without either bribery by developers which they then build into the cost of the new houses or pushing up the price of the housing by incentivising more expensive buildings.
Street votes could be a very good way of enabling the land tax to drive development in an area and keep it vaguely in the control of the community around it. If you can halve your tax bill by doubling your population it's quite a powerful incentive.
@@SurmaSampo Except that it does - by forcing into use underutilised land often currently only being held for speculative purposes. You would no longer be including the capital spending in your tax assessment - so you can add to the overall value of a "plot" by "tax freely" increasing the building and splitting the tax between more occupants. Given how much of our cities are huge swathes of inter-war semis that were once at the edge of their urban area but are now effectively blocking further development even thought they are more appropriately increased in density, this effect is not to be underestimated. The highest effect, of course, would be felt if you shifted all taxes onto land values. But even not going the whole way and splitting your property tax has been shown in cities in the US where it has been done to significantly increase the amount of higher density development.
Couple of things. If a property has been empty for 6 months, councils should be able to compulsory rent it for 3-5 years. There’s a lot of properties in London and other big cities that are empty and could be used to relieve the housing crisis. A Land Value Tax could only apply to properties larger than the average plot size, that way a lot of people wouldn’t be impacted by it.
If you do land tax "properly" (as a replacement for all the distorting taxes on production - income, capital investment, trade) *most* people would benefit anyway as wages rise and you're able to save in something productive, rather than in the one asset you actually can't easily tap without having to move. Also, it has little to do with "plot size" and more to do with "location". A location is in high demand because it offers easier access to all sorts of opportunities we need - employment, social, cultural, infrastructure etc. And yes, obviously, someone with a large plot in a valuable area would pay commensurately more tax than someone with a smaller plot in a valuable area, but it is the difference between areas that matters most, that best reflects the demand, and the inputs the owner of the plot did not create.
It honestly seems like the best solution is to push for the decommodification of housing. Social housing should be heavily pushed and private housing should be phased out. It’s not politically viable though.
How do you "phase out" private housing? You do understand that it just gives all the land directly to the Regent in the UK as she is the crown that then owns the land which the government must then rent from her?
@@SurmaSampo That's easily solvable: abolish the monarchy (which is far more likely to happen in the UK than the socialisation of housing to the detriment of land developers, landlords and banks...).
It's not the solution though - as you still have to pay for it - albeit through tax revenues. And you will be providing a massive benefit to people who happen to live in high value areas (at the expense of those who don't) unless you allow a market to tell you where those are so they can be redeveloped more densely. The idea that any bureaucrat can assimilate all the information to produce an effective five, ten, twenty year plan without that is just pie in the sky.
The problem is that homeowners have a significant financial advantage over renters. If renters never have the chance to buy, then you create unbridgeable wealth gaps in society. Landlords get richer and pass properties onto their kids while renters are stuck with a financial burden they can never have a choice to overcome unless they win the lottery. It has to be possible for renters to buy if they want, or else society will become way more divided than it already is.
In our area, the residents would like more affordable housing to be built. There is a demand for it. Developers on the other hand want to build more large 4/5 bedroom homes, and also student accommodation. There needs to be a way where residents can say "this land should be used for housing with sale prices below e.g. £150 000", and currently there isn't.
The street vote proposal is pretty normal in many places in Sweden. It creates a shared community even in flats as everything is decided democratically.
Yeah, Sweden also has the 2nd highest mortality rate of any EU country, because they chose to let the people decide what they should do... Maybe ignoring specialist advice whilst letting ill-informed people decide every issue isn't always the panacea it first appears...
This video seems to concentrate more on building more houses but I gather we already have plenty of them. Make it incredibly cost prohibitive for someone to own more than 2 or 3 residential properties and the market would surely be flooded with places to buy. - (You could make the cost of all those additional properties increase incrementally so you dont just crash the market as everyone tries to cash out at once.)
Reforming planning and creating a state owned construction company would solve quite a few issues. A cap on land value per acre would also help too. A land tax would screw everyone who has bought in last few years and cause another debt crisis
Neoliberal monetary policy, QE and Zero Rates, has the effect of boosting all asset classes. Unfortunately for young people with no assets, you're out in the cold. In an unregulated market, homes have become an asset class called real estate.
@@SurmaSampo The rate of change is now much greater than it was. Mortgages now have become detached from income - the old formula of 20% of income has gone. Capital gain is not taxed like income so speculation becomes the profitable route. Then add QE money printing and the sky's the limit - for assets not income.
@@Jay...777 MMM, even ancient Rome had periods of surging house pricing. QE and capital gains incentives are an accelerator now but they are not the root cause as you originally stated. Thank you for clarifying.
@@SurmaSampo You really need to keep up - Rome was the first plutocracy - a debt is a debt - overturning the old order of the Jubilee - frequent debt cancellations and the freeing of all bond servants. Check out Michael Hudson - and forgive them their debts - for the accurate history of the ancient world. The exponential rise in real estate prices is a direct result of QE - Blackstone has trillions in the pot and is waiting to pounce on the up coming evictions. You'll see.
@@Jay...777 So in this world of forced private debt forgiveness, who repays the owners of those debts so they can in turn repay their debts to others that may often be other local investors, overseas banks or pension funds? In the ancient world second and third order debts, and complex financial markets only existed as exceptions. Also, are talking about the UK or the USA because I though this was about the UK market?
Sadly, the best option is probably to abolish or push out the green belt. Most of the UK's housing price crisis is within London, where the demand for housing is high & growing but the supply of land to build housing on is finite. This isn't to say the green belt should be opened up to unrestricted development, there's always room for parks even within London (take Richmond Park as an enormous example). The only other solutions to get to the core of London's finite land supply issue would be 1) higher buildings or 2) better transport links. And I don't mean highways, I mean large-scale rail links into and circum-London.
![เปิด อาณาจักร หมื่นล้าน "สาระตั้ม" l [Nickynachat]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3XE0nPF4YkQ/mqdefault.jpg)
''the problem is locals don't want houses in their area''
''the solution is to let locals vote about whether there's new houses''
I was puzzled about this too 😂
I mean, I would quite like it if I could vote on new developments. Obviously it's not sufficient to solve the entire crisis (many other policies are needed) but it's still a solid one, and should ideally be included as part of housing reform.
Getting communities to own the plans, either figuratively or literally, can help to improve both support and results. But it rather relies on engaging a representative group of people with time and energy to spare.
@@armadillito ...and presupposes that communities will willingly own plans that involve greater housebuilding in their local areas. That was one of the component planks of the original government proposals - the algorithm would dictate how many homes must be built in an area, based on various factors, then council would seek local engagement on the best way to do it.
It was...not popular with the Tory shires.
I'm not a thinktank, but I feel like it doesn't address the heart of the current problem. It's not just the extra buildings people don't want, it's the extra neighbours. More noisy kids, more competition for street parking, more competition for school places, busier parks, supermarkets, GPs, dentists... There's no way to increase a town's population without pissing people off unless you also build more amenities for that population. I think giving residents more control is a terrible idea. Not to mention that the financial incentive would mean that residents will only want big expensive homes to be built, not affordable homes or social housing. Basically, NIMBY.
Big fan of the channel and this video specifically, but one suggestion: can you please equal to volume between the opening 10 seconds and the rest of the video? It always blows my ears in the beginning cause I am not waiting for it haha
It's the same volume for me. Hm.
Volume is the same. Just that the pitch is more than a person talking.
@@satyakisil9711 that would explain why i don't notice. I watch on mobile, the pitch is lost on me anyway 😂
Yep, I agree. It's usually way louder than the voiceover.
The last people to entrust with actually getting development done are locals. They will always oppose it more than they agree and the things they would agree to, if any, would usually be unfeasible. Think about it, what we need at the moment is cheaper and affordable housing in large quantities. Will any NIMBYs agree to that? Nope, it would be even more restrictive.
I don’t blame them tbh…
It’s all well & good saying we need to “BUILD BUILD BUILD WHERE EVER WE CAN!”, but just will you like it so much when it’s your area?
Apologies if this came off rude or aggressive, that’s not what I was trying to do.
@@mrsomeone846 I do blame them. As someone who has both had development where I live and works in engineering, I can say many nimbys are completely unreasonable shits. Tons of reasons why things are wrong and oppose every solution. If it was left to nimbys, nothing would get built anywhere. They don't want building on brownfield sites near them, don't want building on Greenfield, don't want building on old industrial areas of areas of heritage. Even areas where they have no interest in maintaining them (eg derelict industrial places) they oppose for made up bullshit health reasons.
No, nimbys don't know what the hell they are talking about the majority of the time. Ask any nimby to propose a solution and I can guarantee 100% there would be other nimbys to oppose it.
Actually it would be pretty easy in a lot of places - literally bribe them. Buy their vote for ~£2000 and a lot of people will go 'wow, free money!'
@Swordfish3 build all you want, it won't even offset immigration fuelled population growth
You just killed the entire common law regarding private property.
"The supply of land is fixed."
The Dutch would like to have a word...
The supply of land is fixed. How usable that land is can change.
I don't care about the demographics of this country. Some of the best parts of this country are in London because the people are interesting. Polish Butchers and Pakistani nurses are British and I prefer living in a country with them in it because statistically immigrants are more likely to work and less likely to take benefits than the native born. This country is 78% British and almost 90% white. That's not going to change anytime soon but change itself isn't a crime. The problem is that oligarchs own tonnes of property they never even visit, not that there are more brown people near you.
@@ruairi4901 lmao, guy thinks 20million immigrants will be coming in XD
@@justanotheremptychannel2472
*England already has 9 million foreign born immigrants*
*And even more people than this in England have a migrant background*
@@ruairi4901 lmao, Fred Mercury had Parsi background and was Brit af, don't be insecure about your winner some girls prefer small ones
I personally know several landlords who own 40+ properties. We could build on every inch of land and still need more as developers and investors just eat up any new builds. They are added to the portfolio and rented out to locals and inflated prices……..and so it goes on.
We need exponentially higher taxes the more properties you own. Hoarding houses and living on the rental income shouldnt be a thing that happens/
Yup, the solution is to take all but one of the properties from the landlords and let people own the property instead of renting it.
Rapidly increasing tax on rental income and some regulation of the whole buy-to-let mortgage nightmare would be in order. As it stands, buy-to-let mortgages are generally cheaper for mutli-property landlords than a standard mortgage is for a first-time buyer and there's only personal benefit to hoarding as much property as you can, pawning off management to some estate agency and f**king off to the south of Spain while somebody manages your 36 flats and 12 houses and the money just floats into your bank account.
@@Clone683 This is the only solution and yet it rarely gets considered a serious option. It would without doubt crash the current market temporarily, but there are convoluted ways to prevent that. One example may be to introduce a scaling stamp duty tax; one which gets more expensive with each property you own. This could then be slowly wound down over say a 20 year period while a scaling land value tax which you mention replaces it incrementally. It would have the effect of locking in landlords to their current portfolio but not instantly making it impossible to be a landlord overnight but then slowly forcing them to sell their 30th, then 29th then 28th property etc etc over a number of years, slowly feeding the market and only causing a dip in prices or flat lining for decades. Ideally it would just smoothen the impact of introducing a scaling land tax, which itself, would hopefully make it unaffordable to be a landlord after a pre determined number of properties... say, 20?
Rent control tied to location and amenities would incentivise invest into the property to create nicer homes but also reduce the inflation seen in rents.
I don't get how a thinktank spent ages deliberating and then came up with the street votes proposal. It just won't work. Look at how abysmal voter turnout is for council elections. That's just *one* vote every 4 years. No one can be bothered to read through an entire planning application and decide whether they want that kind of building on the street or not. Even if it looks pretty, it will still cause noise and disruption. I also don't think the general public will give it enough thought to think 'yes let's make this street look nicer so the value appreciates'. But more than anything, I think most people just won't bother to vote, so it will never achieve 50% votes. In short, homeowners don't care about solving the housing crisis, but they do care about not having construction work on their street.
Well said
Absolutely, if they vote it will only be to vote against a plan. You have zero incentive to vote in favour of any plan as I can hardly think of any new building that will increase the value of properties in the street (unless the neighbourhood already suffers from a lot of abandoned properties like in Detroit). It makes absolutely no sense! Currently people can object to planning permissions and often people hardly even know a proposal is submitted and they often don't object because it is too much of a hassle and often they build it anyway. But even then, nobody is ever happy with any development in their streets.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
They’ll only vote for more expensive homes, rather than affordable homes that might negatively affect their property value.
Not necessarily against if the plan increases subsidiary buildings such as hospital , greenzone and shops etc.
There are more than 250,000 second homes in England. Incredibly, most councils actually offer a discount on council tax on those homes. Clearly, what is needed is more like double council tax on second homes.
Only issue is that would cause rents to rise
@@dangriff12 How many current second home owners would permanently rent? The investment aspect of their present situation would, in effect, be reversed, so they'd be more likely to rent for just a couple of weeks each year.
Second home owners who currently rent their second homes would just up rent to cover the costs of whatever tax you want to bring in, passing on the tax in effect to the renter.
@@dangriff12 But then their profits on paper will also increase, meaningthey pay more income tax. So even if it didn't free up some housing, which I'd dispute, then at least tax revenue will increase to the theoretical benefit of society.
@@AntonHu depends whether they have it set up as a ltd company or not. Tax rate on ltd companies is 19% which is going to be less than the landlord earnings tax on average.
I notice there was no mention of council houses. That was the drastic solution 70 or so years ago and should at least have been mentioned in passing
Exactly. They did it before, it can be done again
And look at how Singapore did it
1.) Councils must start building again - for social rent and affordable ownership (in perpituity) 2.) Land value tax (replace stamp duty) to incentivise building on undeveloped land with planning permission 3.) Capital gains tax on owner-occupied homes 4.) bigger taxes on foreign investors (especially in London)
That last solution sounds like literal NIMBYism, but maybe it wouldn't be as big a problem as I imagine
Just look at North America to see how bad the problem would get. I feel like it would do the opposite of its intended effect.
@@KyurekiHana It is nothing like how the US or Can does zoning we do it on a city level.
It absolutely would be. Search your feelings.... you know it to be true.
I really cannot see how it would help more homes be built, especially affordable homes and social housing.
@@bassetts1899 it would make it easier to rezone a street to meet demand building more homes. It may not be a fix all but it would help.
If you can't build outwards, you'll just have to build upwards. I know that's not in fashion right now, but I think it's the right way forward, especially as more people live in cities.
Exactly, we don't even need to build huge tower blocks, just more dense terrace homes instead of fully detached homes with huge driveways. Also improve public transport to reduce car use, then use all the empty car parks for buildings. This would also mean new builds wouldn't need driveways with room for 2+ cars (this also has huge environmental benefits)
Also redevelopment of dying town centers to feature more flats is something that's gaining momentum.
I agree. Just for the love of God build them with some god damn sound proofing.
I agree, it's not desirable but it's necessary.
Not is fashion right now?!?! That's all I see being build.
4-5 floor houses with shared back gardens, and all basic services covered withing 15-20 minutes walk. Shops, GPs, restaurants, schools, coffee... A huge issue is building houses but not services for them.
A quote from a famous Lib Dem." The Tories don't like building Social Housing because it creates too many Labour voters"
One huge thing you missed out was landlord reform in the private sector. Too many people have 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, houses that they rent out. Make it more difficult to own more than 2 houses and bingo, loads more homes straight away.
More homes for sale, fewer to rent. It will help those able to afford their own home, but negatively effect the rental market, making it difficult for those who cannot afford a home and need to rent.
@@robertb6889 I agree with you. It's been tried here in Israel, and rent prices did go up. Housing prices didn't go down, however - developers just sat on properties waiting for the tax to go away.
Land Value Tax will solve this. Especially if its progressive for multiple properties.
Homes for rent are less of a problem than second homes which are rarely lived in and 648,000 empty homes in England, a heavy tax on empty homes should free up that unused housing stock.
No worries conservative supporters gonna be against this so sorry no way....
Scrapping council tax in favour of a land value tax has the understated benefit of getting rid of unproductive administrators, the many granting exemptions and reductions to council tax.
You mean the system of property tax introduced by the Tories, based on the Poll Tax (as the Council Tax surely is, hence the discounts and exemptions)?
It would also mean the dream house I sacrificed many many nice things to save up for would become too expensive for me to live in.
Not everyone in £250k houses is rich, some of us went without and grafted on modest wages to enjoy a nice property.
I swear it feels like the government milk the average worker. The rich pay nowt, the poor get everything for free and we have to pick up the tab.
@@Ryan-lk4pu your point was mentioned in the video, it sucks for people who have just bought into the market, but it’s clear housing is too expensive and corrections must be made, the very existence of the tax will bring down the value of your property
To be replaced by all-new exemptions and reductions.
The Land Tax seems like the best idea. It can have a time taper, so those who bought last year pay nothing and stretch that out proportionally to 2009, the last property low point.
Are you in Brisbane? The city commissioned a report by Sir Gordon Chalk in 1986 on the subject. It is available on line. One of the best official documents ever produced on the subject.
“What do you think though?”
Fuck it, I think I’m better off packing my bags and moving to a different country 🤙
plenty of room for educated established professionals in america
I have seen people in one breath be ecstatic about the rise in the value of their house and not wanting any new developments near them to complaining in the next that their kids can't afford to buy houses where they grew up.
People are dumb.
Worse still my dad is an architect who often works on feasibility studies in order to get planning permission to increase the value of the land. It’s hard to convince people that a system is wrong when it gives them a job. Same with climate change.
@@Jay_Johnson yup - seen that. Our house is a two bed end of terrace. We've seen people trying to put similar houses on the market for near double what we paid for it 6 years ago. Exact same house - but with approved planning permission to extend. I don't see why people should gain from an extension that they haven't actually built.
Also Land Value Tax is a great idea and kills land speculation.
It encourages municipalities to use area zoning to inflate the value of existing residential properties so that they can collect large amounts of tax. Imagine you have you home mortgaged with 25% equity and suddenly you fall into a development zone that on paper increases the value of your home by 50%, half of which you now owe to the council. You now have to extend the mortgage on your home and increase your repayments by one third in order to pay the tax. You might be able to defer the tax but since it is now a debt it is likely to accrue interest.
It is also worth noting that if developers cannot make profits near expectation on land developement they will stop developing and the the increase in housing supply grinds to a halt as they move to other markets. I don't think you understand the scale of the problem, every developed country in the world and a number of others has exactly the same problem. Once the problem has set in nobody has found a fix that doesn't make things worse.
@@SurmaSampo we don't have municipalities...
Taxation based on land ownership is destroying the right of private land.
@@ssanonswu2010 How?
@@emizerri So you don't have local councils and boroughs? I was under the impression that you did. Municipality is a generic term for a local level government as a defined district.
What would the effect of the land tax be on people in places like Cornwall? Won't it just price them out of their communities?
If it's used to stop londoners then Cornwall will be all for it.
That's what taxes do, increase prices to pay for the taxes
@@Writeescape same thing in Wales, to many english own holiday homes here so everyone has to move far away to find somewhere to live
Already done. Average wage down here is 25k a year average house price is 300k+ thats 12x annual wage for an average house. It was 4x 40 years ago.
Don't buy a second home in Cornwall or we will start sending our homeless round when you're not home.
@@ruairi4901 well, i can't say i agree, but i can't say it wouldn't work
They're building loads of houses in our little Essex village. Problem is, nobody local can afford them so what we're actually getting is a huge influx of Londoners. Londoners that still work in London. It's pretty frustrating living at home at 35 (I refuse to rent) and watching all these houses going up near me knowing I've no way of affording one.
You are renting right now buddy, but your parents are getting ripped off
@@brians4640 I'm not your buddy pal.
@@TheAngryAstronomer I'm not your pal and I'm also a property owner at 22 not leaching off mum and dad.
@@brians4640 LOL congrats on your privelige.
@@TheAngryAstronomer Yeah a person of colour who is a 1st generation migrant. I must be soo privileged 🙄
Affordable houses that are new built and low cost are so small. I went to view a house and in the bedroom there is literally just room for the bed and no where to put clothes. Developers just want to cram in as many as they can but don’t think about what it would be like to live there.
Why build a £150,000 house when you can build two £100,000 houses for the same cost?
The way I see it, even if all restrictions were removed, there would be no incentive for developers to build enough new properties.
If there are enough houses, prices fall (or remain static), but cost of construction will only increase with inflation. So, fewer houses mean more profit per house because of inflated prices.
On top of that, developers don't want to build "affordable" housing, so try every trick to get out of it.
So, instead of funneling 30Bn of taxpayer money to inflate house prices, use it to build new genuinely affordable housing and council housing.
Also introduce rent controls, so that rents don't spiral out of control and also to reduce the buy-to-let incentives, so that again more properties are available to buy, helping to stabilise house prices.
If something is not done very soon, then either most GB properties will end up being owned by overseas investors, or prices will far exceed wages (it's already almost 10x average salary) and the market will collapse.
In other countries, they just zone an area for development and sell the individual plots at auction rather than letting the big developers have a ogliopoly, People then build whatever house they want on the plot. Sometimes the plot will come with foundations and utilities already piped there. Gives the place a lot more character than the god-awful sameness of current new builds.
@@randeknight
My wife introduced me to a song that we sing when going through the UK housing estates...
Little boxes, little boxes,
little boxes little boxes,
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky,
And they all look just the same.
Thought you might appreciate it 😉
There are over 1 million unbuilt homes in the UK with planning permission, that developers won't build simply because they have already made a profit by getting the planning permission, and are looking to sell the land on at massively inflated prices... That you don't know that, but comment anyway, says more about you than I ever could!
Simple, stop rich people buying up family homes for HMO's. The amount of 3 bed terraced houses in my area that have been turned into 2 flats or HMOs is ludicrous.
As someone who lived in a HMO recently for 2 years, I agree, worst place I have ever lived. Paid far too much for the privilege of one room and no say over who moves in.
HMOs are part of the solution for hosting crisis. This way young people live together, socialise etc all for pretty cheap compared to renting a whole flat. At the same time requiring less housing.
@@davidcooks2379 it's only really a solution for young people age around 18-25 with low income and no immediate ambition for anything better. It doesn't solve the housing issue for anyone older, or with children/dependents, or looking to buy a home in the future. To live in a HMO you need to have no furniture of your own and be willing to share your living room, bathroom and kitchen with literally anyone the landlord decides to move in. Parking can also be very difficult if you've got a house with 5 people in it who might each have a car. It's basically like living the student life. And the more HMOs there are, the less properties on the market.
But wouldn’t that decrease the supply of homes available?
And it’s not always “rich people”, it’s what people do with houses they inherited, that’s what was done with the house next door to me. Still owned by the son of it’s first owners.
@@davidcooks2379 what do you then do once these people are over the age of 25 and want to start a family? They can't buy a house because they're all filled up as HMOs.
Could always do one on the rent crisis too. I enjoyed this vid!
Not even been out long enough to watch it all you dosser
Surely the solution to NIMBYism is to create new towns like what happened post WW2? The main issue with any kind of housing is the lack of infrastructure in the UK, can't build another 500k houses without some new roads etc,
New Tows were only part of the solution, and not the panacea you proclaim. New Towns were accompanied by a massive social housing building scheme, building millions of homes in existing cities... Strange you mention a small part of that solution, but ignore the rest of it?
Denmark is pretty decent. Moved here after the Brexit ref; despite we're both on a median income here and came to the country less than 3 years ago. We could get a mortgage for a plot of land and we got a house built. If we had stayed in the UK, we'd probably never own a house, as our paid out salary was almost 1/3 than it is here, and the UK bank did not consider my income for a mortgage (as I'm an EU citizen) making it impossible for us, if we had stayed.
Now we got a brand new 4 bedroom house we designed ourselves, with a giant garden. The mortgage is 1% interest, so paying the house-tax here really isn't that bad, as it's deductible from your income tax, just like gardening, constructors, the interest, and so on, is also deductible. I am not sure how/what Denmark did, but it works. It is as if the Danish economy is designed around people actually living in it and contributing to it, and not for the rich to get richer.
The reason why it's cheap to build houses in Denmark is because Lego is from Denmark. Lol. You built it out of colourful plastic bricks, right? And you drive a Technic Bugatti?
I'm joking, I just like to be nostalgic about Lego.
@@موسى_7 Haha I love this!
@@crabbycrab9955 Lego is expensive everywhere actually. But I never compared it to real bricks.
By the way, you know so many people who work in Lego. Are they Denmark's biggest employer?
Because of the fact that most of my knowledge of Denmark is from The Lego Story, I keep thinking that Billund and not Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark.
The land tax seems like the better solution out of the three. The uplift tax would need to be untouchable to make a real difference
@White wolf doing nothing isn't solving anything either.
Plus taxes help fund school, the NHS, the police and fire service and they certainly solve things.
@White wolf You made a sweeping statement that taxes never solved ANYTHING, and I simply gave you examples of taxes helping to solve problems.
If you're just going to doomsay options the give your own. What are your plans to deal with the housing crisis in the UK that's continuing to be a prevalent issue???
@White wolf Taxing does not solve the supply issue here. Building houses is the only solution. Housebuilders do not want over supply the market so they are never going to build enough houses. We need to allow Local Authorities to build again.
@@oscarshedwick4862 bit over dramatic, it's more like a housing problem than a crisis, barely anyone is homeless due to not being able to afford rent or defaulting on their mortgage. The biggest problem is that it just sucks a bit if you want to own a property.
This video is catered towards the tax kids that barely pay any taxes. Guess what? If taxes get raised then prices need to go up to make projects viable
An issue (particularly in London) is from housing investors buying properties (usually flats) and just leaving them unoccupied (ie treating as a pure cash investment).
This does seem to be done by foreign investor groups because renting the property leads to more complex tax situations for said investors.
Maybe making owning empty properties much much harder might help?
Whilst it only frees up expensive properties, it does increase the number of properties avaliable rapidly , and cause house prices are on a supply and demand basis should help reduce prices (not great for the investors which is another reason to keep them empty)
want a real solution? outlaw owning more than one residential property.
Maybe add... "below a certain value."
If MR & Mrs Moneybags wants to own three or four £1M homes, let them. It's not affecting the bottom of the property market.
If the homes being rented are, you're not creating more homes for people, just forcing the owner to sell. You're just obfuscating the issue... That there aren't enough homes. Ownership is irrelevant!
Doesn't forcing the owner to sell mean that the market then has a surplus of property, meaning that property values would fall?
One other option would be if you do this "statutory selling" approach is put a time limit on it, and once that expires, the government must buy the housing stock as council housing for an agreed baseline price.
@@davidmission2945 No it's not. There are more empty properties out there than homeless people. We have space for people, but properties aren't distributed evenly. People who own dozens (or hundreds) of properties being forced to suddenly sell would also lower property prices to more reasonable levels, so the distribution of properties would sort itself out quite fine.
Land Tax is the best option - will also put up the cost of 2nd homes and encourage smaller houses/flats which will be greener than current detached boxes. Taxes would be higher in South than the 'North' - that includes Wales, the SWest etc.
It would also put pressure on older people to downsize when the chicks have flown - politically a bit difficult but no solution will be perfect.
Council tax already being higher for bigger houses is an incentive to downsize.
Second homes are already taxed more than main homes (stamp duty and capital gains tax on sale - just that doesn't suit the narrative so not as widely known).
Why should someone in the south pay more tax than someone in the North? If their bins don't cost more to collect etc. They already subsidise the North with their income tax.
I don’t see that any of your three “solutions” is actually going to increase the number of houses, two are just taxes which don’t necessarily result in any increase in house building and the final proposal has most of the disadvantages of the current system of planning permissions.
The development land tax is a good idea if ( and it’s a big if) the government actually uses money raised to start to tackle the housing shortage, but it is a long term plan. It will not alleviate the current structural issues in building which are lack of skills, shortage of material and the somewhat one off approach we use to actually build houses, ie brick on brick, which is a slow process.
The Land value tax just appears, as you present it as a replacement for council tax, it does not go to finance new building, assuming the structural elements could be overcome.
The only solution is to build more houses which will mean adaptions to the green belt, zonal planning, more resources for social housing to Housing Associations and Local Authorities coupled with investment and training in people, modern methods of construction. It will probably take 10 years though to see any discernible difference. Theses elements should all have been tackled back in the 1990s when the problem was really starting to emerge, but then that’s governments for you, no long term thinking or planning just concentrate on what will win them the next election. The most immediate reform that governments could undertake would be to cancel the help to buy scheme, which just inflates house builders profits and instead invest the money in social housing.
Yep, your last point is key I think. Building lots of good quality social housing on public land would go some way to fixing the housing crisis.
The point of a land value tax is to encourage optimum use of a resource in fixed supply. It can also redress the problems of regional economic imbalance.
Or, perhaps we should prevent the population from increasing at it's current rate. Thus preventing an even greater demand for housing
The houses are there, the problem is that it is too lucrative to rent out homes.
Start putting legal limits on property ownership quantity.
That's why land value taxes are good. And no, the houses aren't there, that's just a lie.
@Simon Delves That won't work becuase by renting out property you are providing a service to a person that will never be able to afford a home, or you are renting to students who are only staying there one or two years for there university course.
@@maximgeorgiou3174 That's what the state and communities are for, isn't it? The owners do not actually render any services, they only parasitize the worker's income
@Simon Delves Private (and non-private) landlords serve a useful purpose in that its desirable to have rental properties as part of the overall housing mix. The problem comes if there are insufficient properties to buy to meet demand for homeownership, as then you have would-be homeowners stuck in an oversized rental market (often at quite high prices) which is a benefit to the landlord, but not to anyone else.
8:24
I get it but that's also like saying any company should never release a new product because what about that one person who only just managed to save up enough money for the previous one.
It's like yeh, sure that kinda sucks for that one person but obviously its even worse for everyone else if it does happen.
The flaws of that kind of thinking can become even more evident when applied to medical treatment e.g doctors find a way to save a limb that would usually have to be amputated but instead, they tell the person "sorry we're still going to have to cut your leg off because we had someone in with this same problem a week ago and it wouldn't be fair to them if we used this new treatment on you."
I think he mentioned that because it will make the decision politically difficult, not because it is a major injustice.
I would love to hear more about the 'land value tax'. In a way it sounds a lot like double taxation because the property tax is based on the value of the property and the value of the property is very much based on the land it is standing on. And even undeveloped property is therefore still worth a lot of money and thus requires the owner to pay property tax over it.
An underdeveloped site is only worth a lot of money if there is consent to build on it. LVT should not be double taxation as it is a replacement for other taxes, otherwise there is not much point in having it.
The second one the tax is a good idea also scrapping second home ownership and preventing foreign investors from buying houses in order to rent out would be a good start plus it’ll take the incentive of viewing it as an “assist” I’m also a home owner and could careless of the value of my home
However even with the two reforms the current immigration problem means more houses will need to be built and unfortunately the U.K. is a small island and we simply don’t have enough land to build enough houses
We should be looking at other countries and complying putting more in social housing and large complexes not houses
You cant create nore land.
Netherlands intensifies
"How to solve the housing crisis"
*ques USSR anthem
@@ruairi4901 um ok have fun being a fascist and nursing your increasing numbers of elderly with no one around to help.
@@jacobedward2401
*Automation*
*Japan and South Korea have almost no immigration due to their high use of Automation*
@@ruairi4901 they also have an aging population and they've accepted an economic downturn to avoid immigration. Which is dumb, but at least their governments are competent enough to make an actual economic plan.
@@jacobedward2401
*Replacing your Native population is the dumbest thing you can do*
*Japan is right*
*Also, Japans economy isn't perfect, but it is still very strong and the Japanese enjoy a higher standerd of living than Brits*
*And they still maintain their people and culture*
If we kill enough people, demand would go down!!!!
This only applies to London and the South. It's very affordable up north.
By encouraging industry and business to set up, up North and move away from London it would be more desirable up here for workers etc and more people would move/stay. Things would even up without all these convoluted schemes.
Long term investment? Sorry; wrong country.
Won't help, it will just cause more educated southerners to move north and push up house prices. We already know that northerners have on average less education and are less employed due to various factors including accent bias. You'll cause more harm than good forcing that kind of economy.
@@williamchamberlain2263 yeah you're right, devolution for Greater Manchester, Yorkshire and the North East would be a way forward.
@@stickman6217 _industry_ ; suited to flat caps and weird accents
@@stickman6217 wtf 🤣 we don't already know any of this. It, like industry and business is about (disproportionate) funding.
I did not understand how the uplifting tax would reduce housing prices. I get that it would decrease prices for unplanned land, but the way I see it, it would not do anything for the price of land after planning was granted. The only way I can see it having an effect would be by incentivizing local government to grant more land the ability to build (but this could go the other way as well, because it gives the local government a strong incentive to keep land prices high)
I'm assuming the main effect after planning was granted would be to gain more local funding for social housing, much in the same way as the indirect taxes/regulations do currently to ensure some affordable housing is built on the land; increased supply of affordable housing could lower the local housing prices.
However, I also don't see how it'd incentivise councils to actually grant more planning permissions. It could possibly incentivise councils to maximise the tax they can levy, if the local pressure for planning permissions aren't strong enough, as it stands now.
build more multistory buildings. Each of 4 floors capable of accommodating 4 families
People don’t want to live in sardine cans. They want houses for their own intentions and to build generational wealth.
Yeah why not, there is only more land in the U.K used for golf courses than all forms of building developments. So by all means lets live on top of each other. Jeez
I like the land value tax. I'd add Wellen Garden City and Milton Keynes type projects in rural unoccupied areas within commuting distance of cities. It requires extensive infrastructure but creates whole communities whilst upsetting fewer people.
They are currently building a new town near Cambridge called northstow with room for about 25,000 people, which isn't much smaller than letchworth. It's worth a Google if your into urban planning
Thank you for doing this video and covering Land Value Tax, it a major policy proposal which I wish to see implemented, and is also what I wrote my dissertation on!
Is your dissertation on line?
@@physiocrat7143 No its not online, but it'll feature in my future book that will be a political To Do List, plus I'll probably cover it in a future video on my channel! Thanks for asking though, any questions about the findings?
@@skeletonkeysproductionskp Can you explain how an LVT can prevent urban sprawl?
@@mapk1516 Its not for me to say, as I don't see urban sprawl as an issue that needs preventing, so its not my concern tbh. Feasibly each county could set up its own LVT system that could skew things away from development and some towards, but I'm on the side of more development, not less.
Good work. As regards LVT, no mention of Ricardos Iron Law of Rent, or that LVT should replace Income Tax as well as council tax/business rates, or that the People’s Budget of Lloyd George & Winston Churchill was passed and implemented; then over turned by a later Tory Govt.
I've worked for 60 hours a week for 4 years to save up for just the deposit and moving fees for my first house. A land tax would force me off the land.
Don't get me wrong. It's absolutely BS that I had to work this hard for a mid-terraced 2 bedroom house that I'll be paying off for 30 years but a land tax would crush me and make so much of my life a waste. I really wish a land tax was introduced a decade ago, though.
Can you do a video on the problems with a large state-led housebuilding program? (Similar to how the government is planning to use Homes England to ensure homes are built, for example) I guess one of the problems would be capacity in the construction industry
After working in housing policy in a previous life, the only hope I can see is that the endless can kicking and lack of action eventually creates serious social unrest that spurs on changes.
People have been talking about these solutions (LV & property tax/more social housing/planning reforms) for 20 years now... politicians from all parties, think tanks, newspapers and every organisation under the sun (including some of the older generation) know what we have to do and agree that house prices disproportionately harm everyone under 45 and is terrible for the economy long term. However, the can is continually kicked down the road because it's easier for political parties to placate wealthy donors and engaged elderly voters by letting prices rise.
The social contract is not being fulfilled for those under 40, we've had the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars and housing will continue to get further out of our reach, younger people should be in open revolt, this is the defining issue of our time.
I could not agree more with you. I feel like there is so much political noise in this country, yet its rarely has anything to do with the housing crisis. It baffles me that younger people are not furious on mass (maybe they are).
A familay that owns one plot of land wont be hurt as much by land tax as the people who deserve to be hurt most, people who won multiple properties only for speculative reasons and to leech off people with rent.
Land tax sounds like the way to go
Street vote? What does average people know about urban planning and development? There are professionals on that for a reason…
That logic means we should scrap democracy altogethrr
@@jasonmaguire7552 of course not, that’s why we have representatives and a parlament, to choose better for us…..and official hierarchy structures like engineering/architecture institutes, to gather people that have spent their lifetime mastering the disciplines to make the best decisions…..if that is not working good enough then the solution is to change the representatives, not to leave the decision to people unfamiliar with those disciplines/topics…….the first one is call representative democracy (the good type of democracy, the Republic, like US, France, Germany, etc), the second one is direct democracy (asking direct to the people) and it has failed much more through the history…..
There are already vacant houses, start using them. Damn investors
That’s the problem with private property, you don’t get to decide what people do with the stuff they own.
@Mrs Pleasants
Correct.
@@user-op8fg3ny3j nicer way to say robbery
@Mrs Pleasants Freeing enslaved people was "robbing" slave traders. That is, if they weren't paid ridiculous sums of money for it that taxpayers only recently stopped paying. Question whether you think that situation was right.
@@theMoporter That’s actually different because the slaves where freed because their status was changed from property to people and you can’t own people.
In addition I would be interested to know where we stand in reclamation & refurbishment incentives for derelict/shuttered up etc properties? Since surely a percentage of the issue could be met this way. Albeit only a small percentage, but it could assist the 3 points you’ve covered in this video.
It would probably add value to the street average property values & tackle crime issues as well.
Taxing more to decline prices is short sighted because taxes get passed on
The incidence of where a tax actually falls depends on the elasticity of supply (whether you can conjure up more of it in response to a price change in the short term). There is little that is less elastic than land, and in particular locations where people in general need to be to take advantage of the social and economic opportunities that have created that value in the first place. In fact, it is the other way around - taking money from the pockets of workers or investors in production or people trading things, reduces what's left to spend on land. Hence most other taxes ultimately come out of land value anyway. So shifting them more directly onto those land values will be more efficient and can't be passed on in aggregate anyway. In this case, we're not talking about taxing more, but taxing differently, more attuned to hard economic laws rather than political whims and vested interests.
As someone with the name "Ricardo" you should know that a tax on land value cannot be passed on.
To be clear this is more or less all England specific, not UK wide, as all of these issues are devolved issues. One specific example, in Scotland we scrapped "Stamp Duty" and replaced it with LBTT (Land and Building Transaction Tax). I'm pretty sure our planning system in Scotland is also a bit different. Another thing we do in Scotland is that developers are required to build a certain amount of social housing when they build market rate housing.
And are still looking at a more pure form of land tax in Scotland. Transaction taxes, on the whole, are a bad idea as they disincentivise transactions, making the market less fluid. They may collect money once every so often. But ultimately either don't solve the problem, or make it worse.
What I see as a common thread in all of these is that renters are completely thrown under the bus. Especially that last one, the votes would almost certainly belong to the owners/landlords. Also, street-level planning is probably going to fail to address certain effects (extreme example: my street votes for a new skyscraper with 15 stories of underground parking and 50 stories of offices and commercial property; good luck with the ensuing traffic issues).
Land taxes seem to be the most re-distributive of land wealth from fewer, wealthier holders to more holders of closer to average/moderate wealth. The problem of recent buyers can be addressed by adopting the tax with a phase-in date a few years in the future and a system of relief (e.g. being exempt from as much tax as the tax wiped out from your property value).
The problem can be traced back to the demutualising of Building Societies. As shareholders wanted high returns, lenders relaxed lending criteria to what they thought borrowers could afford. As interest rates fell the loan sizes increased. Bingo, prices kept going up and terms of loans also increased to counter increased monthly costs. Simplessss!!
Land value + a hard date in the future where it'll come into affect, giving people the ability to time their purchases
Or phase it in. First with an exemption on paying on the house you live in if bought within the last X years (where they were the most expensive).
But have landlords who rent out to others to pay it fully from the get go.
How do you define a street? In the countryside a road could have one property owner and they can now just do whatever they want in terms of on road development. Minor planning permission could easily be street based but you need to look to a wider community for larger projects
Are you ever going to release the results of the first poll you did, which asked for peoples perception of Islam?
Excellent video - actual news rather than opinion and a nonsensical interview of the housing minister that we would get on the TV or radio. People want facts and explanation - superb work. Don’t sell out whatever you do and get parked on BBC News at 10pm on a Tuesday night.
Option 4: government builds social housing with a right to buy scheme that deliberately undercuts current house prices.
Option 5: planing permission for new a new model city in a largely unpopulated part of the uk.
Like MIlton Keynes?
I wonder how many houses/flats are bought which just stay empty, especially in cities like London. We need to ensure every owned home is lived in and if a home stays empty for a set period of time, the owner should be made to sell it or find tenants to rent it.
What's amazing how we can allow these companies to build absolute deano shitboxes (wood frame interior's and plasterboard) and still let them charge disgusting prices.
Alot of these companies in my area just build an almost brutalist block of flats and wipe their hands as if they've done a great job.
Imagine thinking of buying from persimmons
That last proposal makes no sense. Why would residents want to build more homes in their own areas? Surely, that would only decrease the value of their property?
More houses, less green spaces. I've been watching all the fields where I grew up get turned into overpriced houses estates. So much natural habitat lost. Not that anyone seems to care.
While polticans promise to build more houses and have more green spaces 😂
Why don't you move out of your house into a natural habitat then? Clearly that would be better than living in a house.
If you want less expansion into nature, tell people to concentrate more closely to city centres in taller towers. Cities growing up, not out.
If you want to increase concrete jungle sprawl, build large house suburbs.
If you like none of those solutions, try to reduce the population or at least limit its growth.
@@موسى_7 sensible stuff. Good points
As someone on a modest income who has sacrificed many many nice things to get on the housing ladder and build up as much equity as possible to get into a nice property, that middle solution scares me.
Even 1% of my house value per year would make it untenable for me to live here.
Well, for a start, most proposals for land tax at the moment on the table in any political party are for a "revenue neutral" change, not additional overall tax take. One effect of switching to a land tax over council tax, for instance, is that properties in the lower bands will likely see lower taxes and where it is currently effectively capped at the top end will see higher taxes.
Why? LVT is a replacement tax. Initially it would replace Council Tax and it is on the value of the site, not the entire house.
@@physiocrat7143 they said the value of the property iirc. So that means my £1700 council tax becomes £2750 per year; and that's basing on only 1%
@@Ryan-lk4pu I don't think TLDR really understands how land value tax should work. You can calculate your site value by comparing it with the lowest rental value in the country of a similar sized house, somewhere like Sunderland. The difference is your site value.
They also forgot to mention that LVT needs to replace a lot of other taxes in order to work.
@@physiocrat7143 I can only go off what they said in the video but what you said is interesting so thanks.
I don't, however, trust any government to get it right. And I 100% guarantee I'd be worse off as a just less than uk average earner, who doesn't qualify for any benefits.
How about building new towns like they did post-war?
New Tows were only part of the solution, and not the panacea you proclaim. New Towns were accompanied by a massive social housing building scheme, building millions of homes in existing cities... Strange you mention a small part of that solution, but ignore the rest of it?
I think that the only way to really solve this is to make planning permissions easier outside the South East and make it harder there. Push companies to go where there is lower cost housing. After all why is the housing market so bad in the UK? Because jobs are only in the south east.
Also, it is nearly impossible to self build housing in the UK. So there should be a way to get land and a planning permission process for self builders. Maybe coupled with a land uplift tax when the property is sold by the self builder.
Or, build a new city…
@White wolf actually ironically cities are much more efficient for solving housing problems. You can fit way more people into way less space for a much lower cost and less use of resources.
@White wolf I fail to see your point, that doesn't make it a good idea to just ship everyone to the countryside...
@White wolf People move FROM the countryside TO the cities because there is more housing and jobs available. Housing in the countryside is a more limited resource and so more expensive.
Introduce 8% LVT like Singapore, and cut income tax for those who earn less than 100k or something.
LVT can be phased in, with an initial exemption for those who live in their houses. Longer exemptions for those who bought their houses in recent years with much higher inflated prices.
No.
All that's in my mind whilst watching this is "authoritarian housing planning would solve this"
By your own admission; you can only think about one thing at a time, and that thought occupies 100% of your brain capacity.. Should you really be commenting? Also, what happens when that brain cell has to shut down to divide?
Holy shit, you fixed the house design alignment!! Finally! Thank you so much!
Duh, Boris has to buld a Neighborhood district in a Breathtaking tile.
I see what you did here
I am a New Zealander living in France.
Ideas for housing crisis:
From France (where people seem mainly reasonably well housed):
- often when land is sold, the commune(council) has first refusal. Council controls development.
- house sales have a transaction tax about 7% (frais de notaire). Discourages speculation
- Obligation on councils to offer 25% social housing, or pay a special tax.
For UK and NZ (where problem just as bad as UK):
-land tax seems most practical.
-uplift tax (or give council right to buy (at price before zoning change) any land whose zoning is changed to allow housing).
-Zoning should control building floor area, not number of units. The latter used in NZ and encourages few large houses over more numerous smaller ones.
-make ownership of rental properties much less attractive through taxation. Or limit ownerships of (most) land for housing to owner occupiers (fishhooks here, but change housing land to something for housing not profit).
-(more radical). Organise owner-ocupier favelas with lower standards. I suspect that many would prefer to own a low-standard house than rent forever a better one.
Help To Buy sounds like it's putting a lot of taxpayer money in developers' pockets, just as intended.
It's really not, people using help to buy are a tiny portion of the market that otherwise would not be able to buy
@@Lightningdude $30Billion is a lot of extra profit
It is trying to "solve" the issue of banks not giving 95% mortgages anymore.
If the reason only applies to new builds is to encourage new builds, increasing housing stock. Isn't that a good thing / everyone basically agrees needed?
@@danielwebb8402 a better idea would be to require banks & underwriters to provide 95% mortgages in proportion to their revenue from the other mortgages - including commercial - on their books. Make them stick their neck out a bit in return for being able to profit.
You almost got it correct but the actual beneficiaries are the MPs sitting in Parliament, majority of them are landowners, their property prices are inflated due to this scheme, and they voted it in - they are benefitting from it.
Being a landlord is a licence to print money in this country. Until this changes house prices will continue to rise and young people will be priced out of the market (unless they have affluent parents).
Only a truly massive building programme will bring prices down unless rent controls are introduced.
It's because of inflation. They don't overprice their property. Also, young people need to work harder. Things used to be far worse even 50 years ago.
@@billcipherproductions1789 50 years ago council housing was available and rents were much more affordable. People paid a fraction of their wages on accommodation compared to today. There were fewer homeless people. Was that worse?
The land value tax is the answer.
As in Denmark, allow large bills to lower earners to be rolled up until sale.
The other problem sighted was people who had recently purchased their property.
That’s straightforward enough, give discounts to recent buyers tapered by the number of years since purchase, the discount would be highest to the most recent buyers.
Also, why not have an annual tax free allowance so that those in the most modest properties pay very little. This should make it more politically acceptable & some of the burden of income tax could even be shifted onto property.
Remove the torys
Sorted
Not until a better political party that respects capitalism comes.
Streets deciding on building would be abused to prevent "others" from moving in.
Also, a prettier street does not increase the value of the ugly houses in it. In fact, it would lose "curb appeal" by being next to prettier or bigger houses.
An Australian researcher went through the big development companies' reports to shareholders. Despite the companies' public claims about planning problems, the reports (and the rate of release of alread-built apartments) show that they avoid releasing enough to meet demand, because the increased value from slow release outweighs the interest they could earn on the cash from sale at the high-release lower price... that will be a problem in all major capitalist cities.
Which is why there used to be state-owned housing. Here in Oz, that has mostly been sold off, sometimes to the residents but after that often eventually providing land for upmarket private apartments, and the government subsidises private rentals. Is that a problem in UK?
Applying a massive penalty tax to successfully getting land zoned for development is going to reduce development, not increase it.
Exactly.
Selfish old people don't want more homes being built in their areas.....
because they want their property prices to stay high
The Street Votes Proposal seem to be a beautiful idea, but we must be weary of the fact that, as it stands, it is purely theoretical.
The big question really is how broadly and fairly neighbourhoods can be engaged with and by whom. There would be a vast amount of community work required to bring people together, table and discuss ideas and get sufficient engagement for a meaningful vote. It could be a model of grassroots democracy and community building applicable to far more than house building, but it would not be a quick, cheap fix.
Edited for typos
Bit like communism! Good idea but never works in reality
@@Rh_879- Tried a bunch of time and always failed is very different than never tried. And this is just shifting zoning from the municipalities to the street. Just giving more local control over a small part of the government.
Planning system existing in the UK already takes a balance approach to reasonable objections to houses being built in the area by the neighbours. Neighbours have little incentive to build more houses when it could potentially reduce the value of their house.
@@ONeill01 Rezoning an area to allow more housing would increase the property value greatly.
There were some bold proposals in the 2019 Labour manifesto that included nationalising a noticeable portion of undeveloped land for future housing use to cut out the speculation and ensure the public profited from future development not just private speculators. There were also promises to spend £100 billion over 10 years to build 1 million homes, contrasting with the methods in the video which are effectively passive methods theorised to encourage the private market to build more, rather the government would just dive straight in and start building more. There have also been proposals to tax empty homes, implement rent control, tax foreign investors, and 'use it or lose it' proposals for undeveloped land and even property that is left empty for too long, all of which would prevent big money investors sitting on unused propety/land for growth rather than seeing it used for people to live in.
Yeah, but it also include stupid proposals like free internet to book your holidays, so the British public rejected it for the stupid nonsense it was...
Also the issue is that it will be reversed after the conservative get back in power
It is affordable housing that we need. There are multiple housing estates in our town but very few new social housing.
Yep. New build in my town start at like £300k-£400k... yay... :/
Its one of the reasons right to buy was such an issue.... the idea was (as far as I'm aware) was to use the money raised from selling a council flat to its owner to buy new properties to kind keep social housing stock levels similar-ish.... reality was the market price for new properties was so significantly higher than the amount councils had to sell council houses for that in effect the social housing stock just became non-existent in a matter of a few years
Owen Morgan Also I heard that Thatcher wouldn't let councils reinvest in new housing stock. 👍
The trouble is a lot of the places houses can be built are either green belt or where people don't want live , big cities are already rammed with houses with some of the biggest population densities in Europe . Remote/ home working would resolve this somewhat as you can live in a cheaper area that maybe outside commuter distance
Can't we combine two of these options? Land value tax and Street votes.
Land value tax doesn't make housing more affordable. It reduces the initial purchase price by replacing that mortgage cost with an annual tax.
I also don't see how street votes increase supply without either bribery by developers which they then build into the cost of the new houses or pushing up the price of the housing by incentivising more expensive buildings.
None of these options work.
Street votes could be a very good way of enabling the land tax to drive development in an area and keep it vaguely in the control of the community around it. If you can halve your tax bill by doubling your population it's quite a powerful incentive.
@@SurmaSampo Except that it does - by forcing into use underutilised land often currently only being held for speculative purposes. You would no longer be including the capital spending in your tax assessment - so you can add to the overall value of a "plot" by "tax freely" increasing the building and splitting the tax between more occupants. Given how much of our cities are huge swathes of inter-war semis that were once at the edge of their urban area but are now effectively blocking further development even thought they are more appropriately increased in density, this effect is not to be underestimated. The highest effect, of course, would be felt if you shifted all taxes onto land values. But even not going the whole way and splitting your property tax has been shown in cities in the US where it has been done to significantly increase the amount of higher density development.
Couple of things.
If a property has been empty for 6 months, councils should be able to compulsory rent it for 3-5 years. There’s a lot of properties in London and other big cities that are empty and could be used to relieve the housing crisis.
A Land Value Tax could only apply to properties larger than the average plot size, that way a lot of people wouldn’t be impacted by it.
If you do land tax "properly" (as a replacement for all the distorting taxes on production - income, capital investment, trade) *most* people would benefit anyway as wages rise and you're able to save in something productive, rather than in the one asset you actually can't easily tap without having to move. Also, it has little to do with "plot size" and more to do with "location". A location is in high demand because it offers easier access to all sorts of opportunities we need - employment, social, cultural, infrastructure etc. And yes, obviously, someone with a large plot in a valuable area would pay commensurately more tax than someone with a smaller plot in a valuable area, but it is the difference between areas that matters most, that best reflects the demand, and the inputs the owner of the plot did not create.
It honestly seems like the best solution is to push for the decommodification of housing. Social housing should be heavily pushed and private housing should be phased out. It’s not politically viable though.
How do you "phase out" private housing? You do understand that it just gives all the land directly to the Regent in the UK as she is the crown that then owns the land which the government must then rent from her?
@@SurmaSampo That's easily solvable: abolish the monarchy (which is far more likely to happen in the UK than the socialisation of housing to the detriment of land developers, landlords and banks...).
**obligatory marxism intensifies meme**
It's not the solution though - as you still have to pay for it - albeit through tax revenues. And you will be providing a massive benefit to people who happen to live in high value areas (at the expense of those who don't) unless you allow a market to tell you where those are so they can be redeveloped more densely. The idea that any bureaucrat can assimilate all the information to produce an effective five, ten, twenty year plan without that is just pie in the sky.
why don't they build more blocks of flats (towers)? If you build vertically instead of horizontally you can accommodate more people in a smaller area.
You need to stop the fixation on owning a house being the be-all and end-all and get rid of the stigma of renting your home 😐
The problem is that homeowners have a significant financial advantage over renters. If renters never have the chance to buy, then you create unbridgeable wealth gaps in society. Landlords get richer and pass properties onto their kids while renters are stuck with a financial burden they can never have a choice to overcome unless they win the lottery. It has to be possible for renters to buy if they want, or else society will become way more divided than it already is.
Renting your home means you get extra money without doing physical labour that that's god.
In our area, the residents would like more affordable housing to be built. There is a demand for it.
Developers on the other hand want to build more large 4/5 bedroom homes, and also student accommodation.
There needs to be a way where residents can say "this land should be used for housing with sale prices below e.g. £150 000", and currently there isn't.
I live in HongKong, compare it to the UK and the UK is much better
To be fair, our monolithic left-wing superstate neighbour was a lot easier to Brexit from than yours will be.
The street vote proposal is pretty normal in many places in Sweden. It creates a shared community even in flats as everything is decided democratically.
Yeah, Sweden also has the 2nd highest mortality rate of any EU country, because they chose to let the people decide what they should do... Maybe ignoring specialist advice whilst letting ill-informed people decide every issue isn't always the panacea it first appears...
Stop private businesses and Russian and Chinese billionaires buying up all the housing supply
Pretty sure the city of london is owned in its near entirety by saudi princes
so you want to ban the right to own a house base on race... thats vert brittish of you
@@wuynopypetricob1423 "vert brittish" 👍
@@afatpigeon1 well them, Russians, Chinese, Qataris and Kuwaitis lol
@@wuynopypetricob1423 well I don’t think private equity firms are a race and Russian people are a different race to British people in your eyes 🤔
This video seems to concentrate more on building more houses but I gather we already have plenty of them.
Make it incredibly cost prohibitive for someone to own more than 2 or 3 residential properties and the market would surely be flooded with places to buy.
-
(You could make the cost of all those additional properties increase incrementally so you dont just crash the market as everyone tries to cash out at once.)
Build more houses, there you go.
Reforming planning and creating a state owned construction company would solve quite a few issues. A cap on land value per acre would also help too. A land tax would screw everyone who has bought in last few years and cause another debt crisis
Neoliberal monetary policy, QE and Zero Rates, has the effect of boosting all asset classes. Unfortunately for young people with no assets, you're out in the cold. In an unregulated market, homes have become an asset class called real estate.
Homes have been an appreciating mortgage-able asset for hundreds of years. Your knowledge of history is lacking.
@@SurmaSampo The rate of change is now much greater than it was. Mortgages now have become detached from income - the old formula of 20% of income has gone. Capital gain is not taxed like income so speculation becomes the profitable route. Then add QE money printing and the sky's the limit - for assets not income.
@@Jay...777 MMM, even ancient Rome had periods of surging house pricing. QE and capital gains incentives are an accelerator now but they are not the root cause as you originally stated. Thank you for clarifying.
@@SurmaSampo You really need to keep up - Rome was the first plutocracy - a debt is a debt - overturning the old order of the Jubilee - frequent debt cancellations and the freeing of all bond servants. Check out Michael Hudson - and forgive them their debts - for the accurate history of the ancient world. The exponential rise in real estate prices is a direct result of QE - Blackstone has trillions in the pot and is waiting to pounce on the up coming evictions. You'll see.
@@Jay...777 So in this world of forced private debt forgiveness, who repays the owners of those debts so they can in turn repay their debts to others that may often be other local investors, overseas banks or pension funds?
In the ancient world second and third order debts, and complex financial markets only existed as exceptions.
Also, are talking about the UK or the USA because I though this was about the UK market?
Sadly, the best option is probably to abolish or push out the green belt. Most of the UK's housing price crisis is within London, where the demand for housing is high & growing but the supply of land to build housing on is finite. This isn't to say the green belt should be opened up to unrestricted development, there's always room for parks even within London (take Richmond Park as an enormous example). The only other solutions to get to the core of London's finite land supply issue would be 1) higher buildings or 2) better transport links. And I don't mean highways, I mean large-scale rail links into and circum-London.