The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 has been identified as a cause of insufficient housebuilding activity, and new legislation is currently working its way through the House of Lords to alleviate this.
In the late 60s/70s DIY builders were almost completely displaced by developers who lobbied for regulations that stomped out "a guy and his pickup truck" by and large almost anywhere with desirable land. Then the owners of those houses reinforced same to prop up their property values.
I live in one of the last remaining counties that didn't do that, and last year I built a house for $60k. Pretty easy if you're in a place with essentially no codes or zoning. My (fairly) newlywed and I built the house with basically no experience either.
Funny someone else is allowed to discuss UK in regards to an American article, but I'm not allowed to discuss America on a UK thread about an American article.
The discussion about the effects of UK HMOs on wider housing availability is indeed a peripheral discussion of limited interest to most. Your comment, while of interest to me, was only tangentially related to my comment. I'm not arguing that you shouldn't have written it - as I said, I found it interesting - I'm just pointing out that it doesn't flow well from what came before it.
But then you're a billion miles from anywhere.
Demographics. Homeowners skew old, which gives them a bunch of advantages in enacting their political power. Higher turnout, baby boom giving them numerical superiority, and the time advantage of being able to enact policy decades ago.
In the US, this is supplemented by matters of race, where because of past redlining policies, "pro-homeowner" policy (esp. suburban single-family-homes) in the last half-century has been a way to primarily benefit white people.
No.
Being a homeowner doesn't grant one political influence. Being old grants one political influence.
It's the correlation of age and homeownership that means homeowners have the political influence the push through policy that drives up real estate prices.
Non-homeowners have political incentives all the same. If only just to oppose those very homeowners' policies. What they lack is the political influence to make it happen.
On top of that, more of those people vote than the renters in their area.
There's not really much more to it than that.
I assure you, a lot of people in the UK want house prices to fall too. There are too many renters who don't want to be renting, and the proportion is increasing. They wish they could buy instead, but can't either because of price, inability to save enough for a down-payment as fast as prices rise (while large rent rises impede their saving or even drain it, and incomes rise more slowly than prices), or inability to obtain a mortgage despite a history of consistently paying more than a mortgage in rent. For the latter category, who can afford a mortgage but can't get one, and are already paying more in rent, their main problem isn't income or price, it's the tighter restrictions on mortgage availability since the 2008 financial crises. But they would still like lower prices.
You have this wrong.
> Somehow the homeowners almost always win against the renters
First lets look at homeownership rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S Home ownership is a functionally unmovable number staying around 63%
Home owners are in the majority.
Do you know what one of the biggest predictors of voting is? It is home ownership and local elections with zoning issues (or things that might impact home values) will drive turn out: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-...
Meanwhile to the original article, 80s TV like Golden Girls (shared housing) and Boosom Buddies (boarding houses) are quaint historic notes, the reality is that our use of housing stock has made the problem of where to live worse: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...
When you dig down into the data, the article is highlighting a real problem. We have destroyed a lot of historical co-habitation that kept the system working and healthy. We did this with zoning (getting rid of high density to prop up home values) banning types of housing (dense single room, affordable) and making other types impossible (owning a home and renting a room or two, people dont do this because of tenants rights issues).
But you don't refute this, if anything you make the case that, since the majority are homeowners, they would of course want ever-increasing home values. And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
The 66 percent turn out rate is not that high period. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voter-turnou...
If non voting renters showed up, this could easily swing the other way. Renters are (generally) unmotivated to change their destiny at the voting booth.
> And it's common knowledge that homeowners assume/depend on rising values as part of their purchasing decision.
This is far far far more complicated than it looks. Because what is inflation vs increase in value after adjustment. There are plenty of places where housing has gone down in value (see Detroit, see Camden NJ). There are plenty of places where gentrification has changed whole regions (see the SF Bay Area).
There has also been a massive change in what we build (smaller homes, vs McMansions).
When you dig into the WHY of this, the destruction of old stock is a huge part of it (see Detroit). Massive changes to what and how we build (back to home owners and zoning) limiting growth in areas. Over regulation (see slow rebuilding in southern CA after fires, and the whole housing shortage here). NOTE: the ADU law that was an attempt to let home owners fix this themselves has been somewhat of a flop... however it is gaining momentum.
The fixes to housing in the US require voters to pass something where only a bit more than half of it would be "good" for them and in a hard to explain way. It is easy to get them to vote such a policy down when the 40 percent that might impact them makes for a clear cut argument for a NO.
How many in the top 10% of the wealth distribution do you think are renters? How many in the bottom 20% do you think are homeowners?
Housing in UK/US seems to suffer from simultaneous under-and over- regulation. We over-regulate urban infill housing, and over-regulate the types of housing you can build. We under-regulate landowner profits by letting them keep land rents.
A holistic fix would address both causes of failure in the housing market.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...
Right, you're just dragging in migration to the discussion, which is entirely a side issue, purely out of the goodness of your heart.
From your link:
> The UK has experienced broadly similar levels of migration compared to other high-income countries, on average, over the past few decades
That doesn't make it sound like the UK is an outlier, contrary to the implication of your statement.
The UK net immigration rate has been high relative to other countries worldwide, especially in recent years. It is an outlier on that basis. I'm not sure why you would limit the comparison to only high-income countries.
This isn't correct. When a house is split into multiple flats, they're individual flats rented out under separate agreements and not a HMO.
A HMO is when that house is rented to a group of people who are unrelated to each other (i.e. not of the same 'household'). They are generally jointly and severally liable (under an AST). They each have a bedroom and share kitchen/bathroom/common areas. HMO's have stricter health & safety regulations. For example, doors must be the automatically closing fire doors that you get in public buildings.
That’s usually the case for student rentals but largely isn’t the case for professional rentals where each room is let separately
I think it probably depends on how the initial people moved in. If the estate agent is renting the rooms individually from the beginning it'll be separate agreements. If it's initially rented to a group of friends it's likely a joint AST and then re-assigned over the years as individuals change and the lease is renewed until you have a bunch of strangers jointly and severally liable (not a great idea).
Surely, the correct solution is just to put in some simple rules to bring the cost of housing down. For example: planning restrictions are suspended until the average family home hits 3x average family income. Rather than just packing us like sardines into ever more expensive houses.