Housing - Land Value Tax Campaign

Two wrongs don’t make a right – throwing good money after bad

Written on 31 July 2021. Posted in The Housing Crisis.

From Landlord Today (!) Labour councils in London have backed the initiative from Mayor Sadiq Khan to buy back ex-council houses now in the private rental sector. Since 1980 more than 300,000 London council homes have been sold. While the number of Right to Buy sales has been declining in recent years, Khan claims the policy continues to have a negative impact on the overall number of council homes...

Canada throws some more petrol on the fire to cool it down.

Written on 16 May 2021. Posted in The Housing Crisis.

From the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (it’s not clear to me whether this is a statutory body or a trade/lobbying organisation): The First-Time Home Buyer Incentive helps qualified first-time homebuyers reduce their monthly mortgage payments without adding to their financial burdens. The First-Time Home Buyer Incentive is a shared-equity mortgage with the Government of Canada. It...

New Zealand stokes the flames of the “housing crisis”

Written on 27 March 2021. Posted in The Housing Crisis.

From RNZ: The govermnent… has unveiled its long-awaited plan to tilt the balance towards first-time buyers and to turn down the heat in the market. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the plan is a package of both urgent and long-term measures to relieve pressure. “The housing crisis is a problem decades in the making that will take time to turn around, but these measures will make a...

Housing – pressure groups

Written on 27 July 2020. Posted in Pressure Groups.

We list some of the major housing-related pressure groups below (please suggest any others we should add). These groups all realise that something is deeply wrong but they are merely scratching the surface when it comes to the underlying cause. They do not even appear to understand the policies the UK had for most of 20th century (and which many countries still have) which kept rents and house prices...

Housing crisis waffles on

Written on 1 March 2017. Posted in The Housing Crisis.

Why have all attempts to fix Britain’s housing crisis failed? Look to the land, writes Toby Lloyd in today’s Guardian. The real answer, in a nutshell, is because people like Lloyd, who know all about land value taxation and the theory behind it, but presuambly have some vested interest such as a career to protect, do not have the courage to mention it. As one commentator has written “Amazing...

What housing crisis?

Written on 2 July 2014. Posted in The Housing Crisis.

What housing crisis? Article by Mark Wadsworth.

Housing – remedies designed to fail

Written on 4 April 2014. Posted in The Housing Crisis.

In the face of a housing bubble that is pricing a lot of people out of housing in London and the South East, a variety of ideas are blooming in the spring. Some of them are described in an article by Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian. None of them address the issue. An interest rate rise is suggested, but the interest rise that will damp growth of the London bubble will be too high for the...

Britain’s dysfunctional housing market but don’t mention LVT

Written on 11 March 2014. Posted in The Housing Crisis.

There is something profoundly wrong with our housing system: demand and prices continue to rise yet supply does not, largely due to the development process. In this article, published today for the London School of Economics, Toby Lloyd argues that any serious attempt to address the housing crisis must include measures to change the land market, allowing those who want to build to buy land at a...

Analysis of the housing bubble

Written on 19 August 2013. Posted in The Housing Crisis.

In this extract from his book, The Default Line, published in the Guardian, Faisal Islam, the economics editor for Channel 4 News traces the origins of the housing bubble and argues that we’re condemning a whole generation to paying absurd prices for what is a basic human need – and he claims that it doesn’t have to be this way. A useful analysis of the financial mechanism, and...

Community Land Auctions – a critique

Written on 22 April 2012. Posted in The Housing Crisis.

The idea of community land auctions is being forwarded by Tim Leunig. It appears to be a development of a proposal set out in “In my back yard – a proposal for development auctions”, which was published in the beginning of 2007. It is presented as a means of increasing the supply of housing by making more land available for development. Under the proposed scheme, local authorities...

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