An entire generation has been priced out of homeownership. The average price of a home in England is now nearly £300,000, rising to more than £500,000 in London. For most young people this means the only hope of getting on the housing ladder is with help from mum and dad. That’s why more than 50 per cent of first-time buyers had help from their parents between 2015 and 2019. This is an unacceptable, and unforgivable, state of affairs.
The underlying cause for this crisis is simple: we haven’t built enough homes. A combination of international immigration, the changing fortunes of UK regions, and increasing incomes has led to a huge demand for housing in places that have only seen a tiny amount of housebuilding. Put simply: we have a desperate shortage of places to live.
This is obvious from spiralling rents, caused by more demand than there is supply. This presents a second blow for those looking to own a place of their own: how can you save for a deposit when up to half of your income goes straight on rent?
Ultimately, this crisis stems from nimbyism: the tendency for people to object to development near them, even if they express support for more housebuilding in the abstract. Objections from local residents can frequently derail the building of homes: in one particularly egregious example a development right next to Cockfosters Tube station in Enfield, north London, was blocked — at the cost of more than 300 homes.
We see this sort of objection beyond housing too. For example, when the dire state of water infrastructure in the South East was exposed this summer with a major drought, many pointed out that we haven’t built any reservoirs in the entire country since 1992. One has been planned for Abingdon, near Oxford, but consistently opposed by, you guessed it, residents. By failing to move forward with crucial development, of both housing and strategic infrastructure, we leave ourselves with spiralling rents and unable to water our gardens.
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The problem for housing advocates like me is that nimbyism is rational. Nimbys have nothing to gain from, say, 200 homes being built near them, and, in fact, more than a little to lose in terms of traffic, less chance of getting into their chosen school, longer NHS waiting times, and perhaps the loss of a view. Some of these may seem small us, but those really matter to residents. Sure, we shouldn’t make national policy to specially protect such matters, but we also can’t solve these debates without acknowledging human nature.
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Can we ever cure nimbyism? In California, efforts to impose more housing have provoked a campaign to change the constitution to prevent the state imposing more housing on towns. In Chesham and Amersham, Buckinghamshire, anxiety about development led to a safe seat flipping to the Liberal Democrats. Only this month, the housing secretary Michael Gove made large concessions to Conservative backbench rebels. Sheer political bloody-mindedness simply doesn’t have a good track record.
It may be impossible to surgically extract a part of human nature from the housing debate. But perhaps we don’t need to. There are enormous economic benefits from development, and part of the problem with the present system is that those benefits just go to the landowner. We’re never going to change human nature. We need more ways to capture the benefits of development and share them with the people who are most affected — and to make development more environmentally friendly, with more homes near public transport.
That led, for example, to eight flats becoming 16 near Clapham Junction in southwest London when a group of residents decided to redevelop their own block in 2017. Our economy works on win-win deals all the time: if it didn’t benefit both me and the plumber to come in to fix my tap, it wouldn’t happen. Nimbyism is such a problem because it is so central to human nature. To beat it, we are going to have to be clever.
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Freddie Poser is the director of PricedOut, the campaign for affordable house prices
