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...

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...

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...

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? Article by Mark Wadsworth.

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...

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...

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...

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...

House prices increased by 2.5pc in London and by a national average of 1.1pc last month, reversing losses seen over the last year, according to Land Registry, but some market observers continue to warn of ‘trouble to come’. Disussion of the entire subject would be more enlightening and enlightened if the statistics published the figure that really counts: the price of housing land per...