The big idea: could fixing housing fix everything else, too?
I f you could wave a magic wand and fix one modern ill, what would it be? Inequality? Pollution? Intergenerational unfairness? The decline of the high street? Suburban ennui? What if you didn’t have to pick, because there was one social problem that lay at the root of all of them?
It’s not exactly news that Britain has a shortage of housing. We’re not building enough, and the homes we do build are often too small and in the wrong places. That means houses are expensive, with the obvious result that we have to spend more on rent and mortgages. But the real costs go far beyond that. Where we live affects our jobs, our families, even our impact on the environment. And just as smoking damages every part of your body, a housing shortage makes all those aspects of our lives worse than they should be, too.
You can see how severe the current shortage is by looking at prices. In London, the cost of a property has risen from an average of £24,000 in 1980 to nearly £500,000 this year. During the same period, average annual wages in the UK rose from £4,370 to £30,200 – so prices in the capital have risen about 1,400 percentage points above nationwide wages. Across the country the picture isn’t much better: prices have risen 900 percentage points above wages. Rents have risen almost in lock-step with wages, so a big share of renters’ collective wage rises over the years has just gone to landlords.
