UK Politics 2023

[dubsartur]

As to the housing, I'm not too sure.  I expect it massively depends on where you live. In my area many of the recently built houses are large and very expensive but this is more to do with what developers think will sell well than local zoning afaik.

Humh, you can model the housing crisis in the USA and Canada as three types of factors.

Fiscal policy

- Wealth inequality (if Jeff Bezos can pay USD $50m for a London house- and he wanted to, only to find that none met his requirements- that drives up the price for everyone)
- the Zero Real Interest Rate Policy of 2008-2022 which drives up the price of financial assets (if two lawyers or surgeons with a few million dollars can borrow money for free, if they don't bid higher for property then someone else will)
- the aspects of the global capital system which cause a lot of money with dubious origins to be spent on real estate (NB. whether a specific act is 'money laundering' or 'integrating Russia into the global economy,' 'allowing capital flight from China' or 'opening our universities to young Chinese people' changes with the wind, but both kinds drive up housing prices)
- rent controls in some US cities (if you can't make back your money you won't invest in renovations or new construction)

Physical constraints
- energy supply
- timber, steel, concrete supply
- labour supply (NB. that expensive housing reduces the supply and increases the cost of labour, and that bringing in large numbers of people drives up the price of housing)
- geography (Vancover is a wedge between a border, steep mountains, and the Salish Sea which is also some of the very limited farmland in BC)

Local housing policy constraints
- building codes
- zoning (A very large part of greater Vancouver, a metropolitan area of 3 million people, is zoned Single-Family Residential and has been as long as my parents have been alive http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/the-death-and-life-of-the-single-family-house)
- liberum veto type policies where a few homeowners with time on their hands can block new developments just by attending council meetings and speaking

For five years or so high-income, university-educated people tend to focus on the last two points under local housing policy.  Fiscal policy is arguably more important but seemed more intractable until 2022.

[Jubal]

I think in the UK there's a big thing of local councils generally trying to block any new housing (because it reduces house prices of existing voters and puts strain on infrastructure) plus developers wanting to build inefficient single units in a sprawl.

In other news, Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister (and for most of the last few years therefore probably the most powerful executive Labour politician in the UK) has decided to step down, it's not clear who'll replace him but as far as I'm aware there's not a hugely wide difference between possible candidates.

Several members of Layla Moran MP's family have been trapped in a Gaza City church around which people keep getting shot by the IDF: it's the sort of thing that makes it significantly harder for pro-Netanyahu types to make their case in the UK when public figures are able to directly contradict their claims of the necessity of how they're conducting the operation.

In the polls, Sunak is only a point or two above where Liz Truss fell to at her worst: with another possible by-election in a very winnable seat for Labour after the Tory MP for Blackpool South got found blatantly breaking lobbying rules, and with most of Sunak's plans being attacked from all sides, it's hard to see where the Conservatives make up the shortfall.