George Venning

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@ian4downton I'm not pretending EVERYONE wins. It is a direct tax upon landowners.

But I prefer taxes which target UN-earned/speculative gains to those which target, work, innovation etc.

I hope that helps

End

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@ian4downton ...through they rarely admit it.

The reason is this. What is developers' single most important/expensive input? Land.

The affordable requirements notably depress the upfront land cost AND reduce back end risk - lowering capital requirements and finance costs.

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[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@proptechpioneer Sure.

But there's tension between "London urgently needs more homes & there's a terrible shortage that developers are desperate to alleviate" and "the market is so nosebleed-inducingly overvalued that we need 60% presales before the banks will let us put a spade in the ground"

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@rcolvile So don't abolish it, replace it with a capital gains tax.

It shifts the burden to the vendor (exempting FTBs automatically), gives everyone an interest in stable markets and lightens the penalty experienced by homeowners who need to move frequently.

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@Mia6778a7to @ChristineKayNew I'm not getting you. Normally, people argue that supply constraints are boosting prices, not dragging them down.

I'm saying that the private market has grown faster over the years of ticketing values

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

But private house building (you know, the bit that actually trades at the prices on the right axis) is flat. Also, after 1980, we sold off 2m council homes over 30-odd years, which is a further increase to open market supply... so market output increased as values took off.

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

A week or two ago the @nytimes published a graph comparing the affordability of housing in US cities to the output of homes. I've crunched the numbers for the UK and the results are VERY different

https://t.co/SdS8C28mzM

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@StevenBondSmith @mattyglesias Not individually but at the aggregate level, 10% of total sales is more than enough most of the time

And I'm not saying they coordinate either. They just slow down when the market goes soft.

Ask yourself. Do developers like falling values? And what do they do about it?

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

The incentive would need to be huge to get the boomers out of their homes. Don't bother.

Instead, charge a 5% probate tax when they die. That raises £8bn/annum that you could use alongside existing commitments to build 100k social rented homes a year and actually fix the problem

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@johndotwills ...without raising home values (yes, I agree) but the reality is that every time the UK economy improves we all pour the money into housing.

The oddity is that prices are high even though the economy is weak.

Ergo, we should fix economy AND suppress house price inflation

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[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@johndotwills This only makes sense in a funhouse mirror way.

A crap economy will tend to reduce house prices.

house prices here are high in absolute terms - in the sense of being high relative to the cost of rebuilding.

The problem of current prices would go away if incomes rose...

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[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@mattyglesias @cszabla The challenge is to figure out how to turn low density into medium density - ideally without having to demolish everything.

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

@mattyglesias @cszabla Because low density sprawl is bad for 100 reasons.

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

...manifesto commitment to overall housebuilding - which (and I hate to break this to you) is massively behind target and which no-one expects to be met.

Could not be less enlightening

End

[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

https://t.co/qjkLuLNeeX

Why are articles like this so maddeningly badly written?

Start with the central claim that it would take over a century to clear the current housing waiting lists. It is calculated by comparing the total list (1.3m households) to the number of social rented homes built by Councils.

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[George Venning @VenningGeorge]

The article just said that what we actually need is £90k homes per annum for a decade.

So the Government's proposed "revolution" is to build about one third of the number of social rented homes we actually need as an aspirational part of wider...

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