Everything that's wrong with the Home-Owner-Ist/supply sider overlap in four short paragraphs:
We should be honest: our housing crisis is one caused by the state, by draconian planning restrictions and convoluted finance policies.
Clearly, it's not a "crisis", it's a long term thing. Even if it were, it's not actually a "housing crisis", it's a "transfer of wealth crisis". Planning restrictions have little to do with it, it's all about the lack of good locations. Simply building more homes in good locations (while being a good idea) does not increase the number of good locations, if anything, it reduces it. And how is the tortured ASI suggestion of a massive extension of Help To Buy for a limited group of people (for that is what it is) not a "convoluted finance policy"?
More state intervention in the form of rent controls, as has been suggested in some quarters, would merely help the privileged few already here at the expense of the next generation and leave us all the poorer for it.
Nope. We had rent controls/tenant protection in one form or another from WW1 until 1988. That was a key element of Georgism Lite which helped keep selling prices down, so benefitted everybody who bought prior to the 1990s price surge. Rent controls are a second best policy, but better than nothing.
A massive expansion in council-owned housing while ending the right to buy will not be a long-term solution either. Sure, you’re no longer trapped paying rent to a private landlord. But you’ve merely swapped to paying rent forever to the state. What a choice.
The "massive expansion in council housing" up to the 1970s was another key part of Georgism Lite. It is and always was hugely popular - people would prefer a secure council tenancy for £80 a week to an insecure private sector one for £200. And the government's got to get money from somewhere, charging people rent is infinitely better than collecting taxes on output and earnings from 'everybody else'.
Our housing crisis will only be fixed by freeing up the market and building more – and we will continue to call on the government to do exactly this, and build more homes where they are most needed. But we need to make better use of our existing homes too. And that starts with giving people choice.
We've done this one, see above, it's bollocks.
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