How not to do a basement extension

[Tim Watts]

Interesting...

[Tim Watts]

Immigration... I heard, growing up, "they needed the immigrants to do the jobs noone else wanted to do" (like bus conducting apparently).

Put this together with "entire communities out of work due to factory/mine closures."

It makes no sense...

[Tim Watts]

Ah - but you are overlooking the opportunity for new services, eg:

"Developer agencies"

They basically run the bones of the job and know how to do all the basics like building control, planning, provide architect service etc - but you get all the design input and are encouraged to oversee the works at every stage...

What an opportunity...

[Andy Burns]

It was pushed by PlotBrowser as a "right to build", but it doesn't seem to amount to that to me ...

[Mike Barnes]

Is it really so unaffordable and in such short supply nationwide, or in just a few hotspots (SE England being the obvious one)?

[Mike Barnes]

It might make no sense to you, but that's reality, so where's the problem?

[john james]

Yeah, its certainly true that not one modern first world country is even self replacing now if you take out immigration.

But it's not clear how many extra houses are needed because people have rather fewer people per house than they used to say between the wars.

[Tim Watts]

It makes no sense that someone justified opening the doors with a weak excuse, instead of saying "hang on, we've got all these jobs in the London area, and a load of unemployed up north - how do we deal with that?"

In reality, someone opened the doors wide, then when it all went wrong, they came up with a pathetically weak excuse.

Sensible countries had had points based immigration for years.

And do not confuse me with a racist - some of my friends are immigrants of first or second generation - but they would have all passed a points based system if there had been one.

The embarrassing thing is if I tried to emigrate, to, say New Zealand, I'm not sure *I'd* pass their test!

[john james]

No, some of those I managed to infect with the developer-occupier bug did use those extensively.

Yes, but I still don?t seen that there are enough who would be prepared to do that to make much difference to the housing supply.

One of the developer-occupiers I infected only did the design and painting and quite literally did the painting of the concrete block house with a broom and a big tub of paint.

[Tim Watts]

Perhaps it's not been fully realised then - but a combination of tax breaks and well placed agencies?

Look at it this way - if you could build a house for 75% of the cost of an equivalent house in the general area, people would be all over it.

One scheme that has had some success is councils selling derelict houses for a quid for "occupier-renovators" (and they managed to sew that up quite well).

The good thing was that you turned a near empty street into a street full of people who had the gumption to fix up a house (DIY or not, needs a certain effort either way) AND stay there. ie people who care and are willing to make an effort. As opposed to turning it over to a bunch of "entitled" folk who don't really care what happens because they made no real investment (financial or emotional) and because "well, if it breaks the council will fix it".

This is the sort of thinking we desperately need coming out of the government. Full marks for that scheme - I would not have though if it...

[RJH]

It cut off the supply to social housing - no 'churn'.

Nonsense. Void rates are lowest in the council sector.

The matter of unoccupied owned property remains a huge problem, to the point that some councils are getting round to CPOs, they're so pissed off.

[RJH]

That was all set in train in the mid-70s, and enacted with some vigour post-May 1979. New Labour were, if anything, worse than the Tories - witness the slashing of Social Housing Grant.

While I'd argue that the prime cause of stalled housebuilding was down to throttled government borrowing, the British construction industry hasn't helped.

[RJH]

But we had the opportunity to do something about it.

[john james]

I still don?t see that there are enough people prepared to put the sort of effort into even just supervising all the work to make any real difference to the total housing stock of the country.

I'm not convinced that it is possible to save that much and I still maintain that few would think that they could do it.

The ones I infected mostly got infected because I demonstrated that it could be done, even to the fellow that painted the house with a broom.

I only got into it myself because I happened to visit the parents when they were having a new house built on a bare block of land by an architect and builder which happened to be done using an unusual way, what's called post and beam, with exposed beams. I looked that that and thought to myself that I could do that, so I went home and bought the land straight away in a new housing estate that was government owned land sold off in theory by ballot, but in practice they had a lot more individual blocks than the demand at the time so you could just pick the block from the map and you didn?t even have to pay for it up front, you were welcome to pay it off in instalments over a couple of decades.

Yes, because most do realise that they can do renovation.

Few realise they can build a new house on a bare block of land unless they can see someone they know doing it and basically think, 'if he can do that, so can I'

Yes, owners do a lot better than renters. That's the reason Maggie was into selling council houses to their current renters.

Yes, but it's rather different with new houses on bare land.

[Capitol]

The US house market corrected.

[Capitol]

No, you need to reduce the population.

[Capitol]

They foreclosed on mortgages.

[Robin]

Mid-70s? Housing completions in England peaked much earlier - around

1967. By Wilson's government it was already down and declining.

And in 1997-98 (at the end of the long Conservative administration) there were 149,560 completions. At the end of Blair/Brown's run in

2009-10 there were 119,910. Even before the crash in 2007-08 they managed just 170,610 - and that's at a time net migration to the UK was running at 284,000 pa.

I'd stick with Kate Barker's diagnosis in 2004 which pointed mainly at the planning system. And note that Brown then sat on the recommendations. While doing ever more to make buy-to-let more attractive than other investments.

[john james]

That's why I said most and not all.

[john james]

Japan did that and didn't get that result.