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A driving factor for lack of homes is the disincentive for homeowners to welcome building in their area. ‘Local cohesion’ and ‘overdevelopment’ are used to bat away any chance of progress. And as with many vested interests, homeowners have significant political sway: enough to encourage the Liberal Democrats to go against their national platform for house building in local elections; enough to ensure that local MPs advocate for housing, as long as it’s not in their own constituency, of course.
With little chance of busting this housing cartel outright, the only hope is to bring them along. We will need to emphasise win-win solutions that ensure more supply of housing while maintaining public support.
The clearest solution is to truly democratise house building. As proposed by the Adam Smith Institute and Yimby London, we should introduce street votes: giving residents the chance vote on graceful, higher density development. This means allowing a street to opt into additional stories, extensions on unused parts of existing plots and design codes for future development. This would bring power back to homeowners, allowing them to maintain or increase the value of their assets while creating more, and more beautiful, homes.
Whatever the solution, our current system is unsustainable. Homeowners striking down any and all new developments, the return of stamp duty clogging up transactions and a restrictive planning system have resulted in a generation of young people getting the short end of the stick. And with everything that young people have sacrificed over the last 18 months, can we really be expected to sacrifice homeownership as well?
It’s time for a change in consensus; young people are not dispensable, their needs and lives matter just as much as the previous generations, and it’s time we start acknowledging that. Homeowners should want to be part of creating a better future for their children — more opportunity and more prosperity than they could have imagined. Instead, they’re saddling an entire generation with an insurmountable challenge. If the Conservatives want to maintain a property-owning democracy, a strong basis for a liberal free market economy from which their votes flow, they will need to take serious action towards righting this wrong.
Because you read about construction
Also by Morgan Schondelmeier
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