How to bring down house prices in London

June 17, 2014June 17, 2014 dnmufcLeave a comment

The London property market is potentially in bubble territory with demand clearly outstripping supply, causing prices to rise to eye-watering levels. What can be done to bring prices down? Kath Scanlon explores the possible policy routes in detail. She argues that local authorities can make it a condition of planning permission that dwellings remain in private rental for a specified period, encouraging the supply of new build housing that London desperately needs. But since new homes will only ever be a tiny proportion of transactions, she writes that we also need to persuade older ‘over-occupiers’ to downsize.

The jury is still out on whether there is a housing bubble in London, but we’re certainly approaching bubble territory in terms of the number of discussions, seminars and debates on the subject. The key issue is clear: London house prices have been rising fast—much faster than incomes. Why is this happening—and what can be done about it?

Let’s look at the basics; at supply and demand. Demand for housing in London has been growing but supply is stagnant. Demand is up because London’s permanent population is growing through natural increase and migration (from abroad and elsewhere in the UK) and there’s an increasing group of part-timers: wealthy foreigners who want a London base. Mortgage conditions, tightened in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, have now begun to relax and loans covering 95 per cent of property value are again available. Underpinning these is London’s pre-eminent position as a national and global centre of governance, finance, education and culture.

There is less agreement about the reasons for the stagnation of supply. Discussions about supply can be confusing because in popular usage the term can mean two things: the net addition to the housing stock (that is, new construction), and the number of homes offered for sale at any given time—of which the vast majority are existing dwellings. Let’s take new construction first. The rate of new build has increased, but still doesn’t come close to match the number of new households in London—so in pure numbers term the housing deficit is growing, which tends to push up prices. There are many reasons for this, and each commentator has his or her favourite. They include the greenbelt, NIMBYism and ‘land hoarding’ by developers.

In terms of housing transactions, though, the overwhelming bulk of supply is not new build but existing homes. And while house prices have risen strongly in the last five years, the number of transactions has risen much more slowly, and is still well below the peak reached in 2006—so in that sense, the supply response has been disappointing.

What can be done to bring prices down? There are three broad possibilities, alone or in combination: control prices administratively, increase supply or reduce demand. There are proponents of administrative control of prices in one part of the housing market, in the form of rent control. Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, they never advocate capping house prices. There are, however, ways of exercising indirect influence on house prices through regulation. One is to limit the size of mortgage loans by capping loan-to-value or loan-to-income ratios, which would reduce effective demand.

Another possibility is to increase supply. In terms of new construction, there is a huge amount of housing in the pipeline in London. But even (or perhaps especially) on the biggest sites, new homes are produced very slowly—even though there are few technical barriers to faster production. One reason is that house builders have learned that putting many houses on the market at the same time reduces the price of individual homes. But that doesn’t seem to apply to rented housing—even if hundreds of properties are leased at once, it doesn’t affect rents much. This means that developers could be willing to build rental-only homes at a faster rate than homes for sale. This wouldn’t directly bring down the price of homes for purchase, but would have an indirect effect by increasing overall housing supply.

Why aren’t they doing so already? There are several reasons, but the most important has to do with the cost of land. The price that developers can pay for land is the difference between the eventual sales value of the houses and the cost of development. Envision a block of two-bedroom flats—the kind of rented housing typically found in New York or Berlin. If the flats are sold individually to owner-occupiers, as normally happens in the UK, the sales price will be higher than if the developer sold the block as a whole to a landlord. That means that a developer building for owner-occupation or to individual buy-to-let investors will always be able to pay more for land than one who wants to build blocks for private rental—so the rental-only blocks just don’t get built.

There is a way around this. If the development has to be for private rental the overall value will be lower—and this brings down the price of the land. Under the British planning system there’s no special treatment of private rented housing—it doesn’t have a separate ‘use class’ or zoning. But the same effect can be achieved another way: local authorities can make it a condition of planning permission that dwellings remain in private rental for a specified period (say 10 or 20 years). This is known as ‘covenanted private rental’ and is one approach advocated in the Mayor’s Draft London Housing Strategy. Widespread adoption of this could help accelerate the supply of new build housing that London desperately needs.

But new homes will only ever be a tiny proportion of transactions. How could we increase the number of existing homes coming onto the market? If older ‘over-occupiers’—single people or couples living in family homes—could be persuaded to downsize, this would release their properties for younger families. Of course, not everyone agrees that this should be a policy goal: Mrs Thatcher famously campaigned for the poll tax by invoking the example of elderly widows unable to pay rates on their long-time homes. But we have to ask whether it is a sensible use of London’s housing stock to have older people living alone in large houses while families with small children are crammed into too-small flats.

One of the reasons that many older ‘over-occupiers’ remain in their large homes is that the alternatives are so grim. Many would never move into a retirement home, however tidy and well-run, unless forced to do so by ill health or dementia. We need to create positive, attractive living arrangements for later life—homes that active older people would genuinely prefer to live in. There are some innovative projects that may suggest a way forward—for example, a new co-housing community for over-50s currently being created at Featherstone Lodge in South London could provide a model for that could be replicated elsewhere.

Finally, a few words about demand. The UK’s house-price surge is centred on London; north of Watford might as well be another country. Demand is strong in London in part because of the massive over-centralisation of the country’s economic and public life. In the USA, by contrast, New York is the country’s financial capital, Washington its political capital, Boston its capital of higher education and San Francisco its tech capital—but in the UK London plays all of those roles. Re-balancing this would reduce pressure on London house prices and contribute to a healthier country overall.

About the Author

Kathleen Scanlon – London School of Economics

Kathleen Scanlon is a Research Fellow at LSE London. She has a wide range of research interests including comparative housing policy (across all tenures–social and private rented housing as well as owner-occupation), comparative mortgage finance, and migration.

The French are right: tear up public debt – most of it is illegitimate anyway

June 10, 2014 dnmufcLeave a comment

Debt audits show that austerity is politically motivated to favour social elites. Is a new working-class internationalism in the air ?

Contracts for Chilean student loans worth $500m go up in flames – the ‘imaginative auditing’ of the artist Francisco Tapia, commonly known as Papas Fritas (Fried Potatoes). Photograph: David von Blohn/REX

As history has shown, France is capable of the best and the worst, and often in short periods of time.

On the day following Marine Le Pen’s Front National victory in the European elections, however, France made a decisive contribution to the reinvention of a radical politics for the 21st century. On that day, the committee for a citizen’s audit on the public debt issued a 30-page report on French public debt, its origins and evolution in the past decades. The report was written by a group of experts in public finances under the coordination of Michel Husson, one of France’s finest critical economists. Its conclusion is straightforward: 60% of French public debt is illegitimate.

Anyone who has read a newspaper in recent years knows how important debt is to contemporary politics. As David Graeber among others has shown, we live in debtocracies, not democracies. Debt, rather than popular will, is the governing principle of our societies, through the devastating austerity policies implemented in the name of debt reduction. Debt was also a triggering cause of the most innovative social movements in recent years, the Occupy movement.

If it were shown that public debts were somehow illegitimate, that citizens had a right to demand a moratorium – and even the cancellation of part of these debts – the political implications would be huge. It is hard to think of an event that would transform social life as profoundly and rapidly as the emancipation of societies from the constraints of debt. And yet this is precisely what the French report aims to do.

The audit is part of a wider movement of popular debt audits in more than 18 countries. Ecuador and Brazil have had theirs, the former at the initiative of Rafael Correa’s government, the latter organised by civil society. European social movements have also put in place debt audits, especially in countries hardly hit by the sovereign debt crisis, such as Greece and Spain. In Tunisia, the post-revolutionary government declared the debt taken out during Ben Ali’s dictatorship an “odious” debt: one that served to enrich the clique in power, rather than improving the living conditions of the people.

The report on French debt contains several key findings. Primarily, the rise in the state’s debt in the past decades cannot be explained by an increase in public spending. The neoliberal argument in favour of austerity policies claims that debt is due to unreasonable public spending levels; that societies in general, and popular classes in particular, live above their means.

This is plain false. In the past 30 years, from 1978 to 2012 more precisely, French public spending has in fact decreased by two GDP points. What, then, explains the rise in public debt? First, a fall in the tax revenues of the state. Massive tax reductions for the wealthy and big corporations have been carried out since 1980. In line with the neoliberal mantra, the purpose of these reductions was to favour investment and employment. Well, unemployment is at its highest today, whereas tax revenues have decreased by five points of GDP.

The second factor is the increase in interest rates, especially in the 1990s. This increase favoured creditors and speculators, to the detriment of debtors. Instead of borrowing on financial markets at prohibitive interest rates, had the state financed itself by appealing to household savings and banks, and borrowed at historically normal rates, the public debt would be inferior to current levels by 29 GDP points.

Tax reductions for the wealthy and interest rates increases are political decisions. What the audit shows is that public deficits do not just grow naturally out of the normal course of social life. They are deliberately inflicted on society by the dominant classes, to legitimise austerity policies that will allow the transfer of value from the working classes to the wealthy ones.

French Indignants A sit-in called by Occupy France at La Défense business district in Paris. Photograph: Afp/AFP/Getty Images A stunning finding of the report is that no one actually knows who holds the French debt. To finance its debt, the French state, like any other state, issues bonds, which are bought by a set of authorised banks. These banks then sell the bonds on the global financial markets. Who owns these titles is one of the world’s best kept secrets. The state pays interests to the holders, so technically it could know who owns them. Yet a legally organised ignorance forbids the disclosure of the identity of the bond holders.

This deliberate organisation of ignorance – agnotology – in neoliberal economies intentionally renders the state powerless, even when it could have the means to know and act. This is what permits tax evasion in its various forms – which last year cost about €50bn to European societies, and €17bn to France alone.

Hence, the audit on the debt concludes, some 60% of the French public debt is illegitimate.

An illegitimate debt is one that grew in the service of private interests, and not the wellbeing of the people. Therefore the French people have a right to demand a moratorium on the payment of the debt, and the cancellation of at least part of it. There is precedent for this: in 2008 Ecuador declared 70% of its debt illegitimate.

The nascent global movement for debt audits may well contain the seeds of a new internationalism – an internationalism for today – in the working classes throughout the world. This is, among other things, a consequence of financialisation. Thus debt audits might provide a fertile ground for renewed forms of international mobilisations and solidarity.

This new internationalism could start with three easy steps.

1) Debt audits in all countries

The crucial point is to demonstrate, as the French audit did, that debt is a political construction, that it doesn’t just happen to societies when they supposedly live above their means. This is what justifies calling it illegitimate, and may lead to cancellation procedures. Audits on private debts are also possible, as the Chilean artist Francisco Tapia has recently shown by auditing student loans in an imaginative way.

2) The disclosure of the identity of debt holders

A directory of creditors at national and international levels could be assembled. Not only would such a directory help fight tax evasion, it would also reveal that while the living conditions of the majority are worsening, a small group of individuals and financial institutions has consistently taken advantage of high levels of public indebtedness. Hence, it would reveal the political nature of debt.

3) The socialisation of the banking system

The state should cease to borrow on financial markets, instead financing itself through households and banks at reasonable and controllable interest rates. The banks themselves should be put under the supervision of citizens’ committees, hence rendering the audit on the debt permanent. In short, debt should be democratised. This, of course, is the harder part, where elements of socialism are introduced at the very core of the system. Yet, to counter the tyranny of debt on every aspect of our lives, there is no alternative.

The shoebox flat is our housing crisis in microcosm

June 4, 2014 dnmufcLeave a comment

Our homes are shrinking in size and rising in cost, while a lack of supply means we can’t even choose where and how we live

Opposite ends of the spectrum: One Hyde Park has seen flats go for up to £140m … Photograph: View Pictures/Rex

A flat in London has captured the headlines. The “studio” in question is minuscule, its rent £170 a week, and it was snapped up within 16 hours of being advertised. In it a bed seems to jut out from the kitchen units like an oversized ironing board, a naked bulb hangs over a tiny table with one chair, and the only practical way to browse the narrow wardrobe appears to be standing on the bed. It hardly deserves the name apartment – unless one goes back to its original etymological meaning of “a separated place”.

The significance of the story is more symbolic than actual. It marks the culmination of four decades of irrational housing policy, increasing urbanisation, woefully inadequate building programmes, uncontrolled rent inflation, and the divestment of social housing stock. It marks – especially seen in conjunction with a flat at One Hyde Park selling for £140m last month – the denouement of Britain’s housing crisis and its re-emergence as a class issue.

The reality behind the individual story may be much more complex, of course. Little is revealed about the personal circumstances of the tenant. For all we know this tiny pod could be the environmentally conscious selection of a fashionable urbanite seeking to reduce their carbon footprint, or the thoughtless impulse of a student who only plans to use it as a base and occasional “crash-pad”, or even the clandestine choice of a relatively well-off unfaithful spouse who works nearby.

Shoebox studio flat in London rented for £170 a week. … while this is the ‘shoebox’ studio flat in London which was let for £170 a week. However, the general trends emerging from the data are undeniable: our homes are shrinking – they are on average nearly half the size that they were in 1920s; prices, especially in the south-east, continue to soar while mortgage lending requirements are tightened; all of which makes buying a property unaffordable for the vast majority of first-time buyers. The rise in the cost of renting in England and Wales has consistently outstripped inflation, which in turn has consistently outstripped wage growth, creating an unprecedented squeeze on low- and middle-income households. Half of all rural land and more than a third of all land in the UK is owned by a tiny 0.6% of the population.

Even those trends, of course, are not without complicating factors. Data tends to be disproportionately skewed by the property market in the south-east, and the debate is consequently London-centric. A growing number of Londoners are taking advantage of that price differential and moving outside the M25. London men in their 40s spend on average 84 minutes of every day commuting – a factor which might make the small central flat a much more attractive prospect. We work increasing numbers of hours and lead an increasingly sedentary lifestyle – more than 14 hours a day are spent sitting down. Add sleep into the mix and perhaps house size becomes less important.

With our increasing presence in different social media platforms, online gaming communities and the ability to roam unlimited virtual space for information or entertainment, our requirements of private space may be changing. One’s Facebook wall is possibly a more vital personal space than the wall made of bricks and mortar above their monitor; superfast broadband is a more key requirement than a spare room.

Environmental factors mean we simply must try to limit the amount of space we take up, heat, light and consume. If this is the case, we should stop obsessively focusing on house size as the only factor which affects our quality of life. In urban areas, taking action to reduce light and sound pollution, ensuring there are plentiful green public spaces, free exercise programmes and the availability of fresh produce at low prices are just as crucial. In rural areas, the improvement of internet speed and availability, and the efficacy and price of transport are key.

The only statistics which are entirely indefensible, and the absolute crux of the issue, are those of the increasing number of people who are homeless, living in shelters or temporary accommodation. The facile answer to this national shame is, of course, less immigration, suggesting it could solve the housing crisis through a declining population. Yet a declining population brings with it a lack of growth and economic activity, reduced revenues and an increasing pension deficit. All this would inevitably result in is less, not more, housing.

The only answer to the lack of housing is building, utilising and converting more of it, and ensuring its fair distribution by making it affordable. Individual preference may reasonably lead one to a shoebox flat; lack of any alternatives shouldn’t.

Why the gap between rich and poor has narrowed. And why it won’t last

June 4, 2014June 4, 2014 dnmufcLeave a comment

By James Bloodworth | Published: May 30, 2014

The narrowing of inequality is almost certainly a blip

Money no copyrightj “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” as the saying goes. It’s widely accepted that, in recent years, economic inequality has accelerated in the West. As the best selling author Thomas Piketty has noted, this is the scale of income inequality we are now dealing with:

“In a few weeks, Wimbledon will return to our television screens. The top tennis players in the world will compete for prize money that, boosted by broadcast income from more than 200 countries, will this year total £25 million.

“Forty years ago, the total prize money was £91,000. Taking into account the rise in the cost of living, the players will receive 33 times as much this year compared with in 1974. Over the same period, average real hourly earnings in manufacturing have merely doubled.”

As the below graph helpfully demonstrates, from the late 1970s up to the current recession the share of income going to the top tier of the population increased significantly. The top 1 per cent have a 14 per cent share of national income today, compared to less than 6 per cent in the late 1970s, according to the World top incomes database.

And yet contrary to popular wisdom, since the onset of the recession income inequality in Britain has actually narrowed. Indeed, believe it or not the better off were the hardest hit in the early years of the downturn, while the very poorest were sheltered to some extent by their reliance on benefits and tax credits.

The fall in income since the recession has been “largest for the richest fifth of households. In contrast, after accounting for inflation and household composition, average income for the poorest fifth has grown over this period (6.9 per cent), according to the Office for National Statistics.

As the prime minister claimed during a session of PMQs late last year, inequality in Britain is at its lowest level since 1986.

This seems bizarre when you consider that we hear it said so often that the government is waging some kind of war on the downtrodden through its austerity agenda. It’s almost as if the coalition were enacting the economic agenda of the left or something.

But hold your horses for just a second. Inequality has narrowed in recent years, but it’s unlikely to stay that way; for while the incomes of the wealthiest fell the most during the initial stages of the economic downturn, it is the poor who are now feeling the squeeze and who will be the hardest hit as changes to the benefits system take effect.

The Independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which has looked in detail at the cumulative impact of the government’s welfare reforms, said last year that much of the pain for lower-income groups was “occurring now or is still to come because these groups are the most affected by cuts to benefits and tax credits”.

“If the OBR’s macroeconomic forecasts are correct, then most of the falls in real incomes associated with the recession have now happened for middle-and higher-income groups,” senior research economist at the IFS Robert Joyce said.

If we look at some of the coalition’s reforms to the welfare system, it’s fairly easy to see why that might be the case, for many of the changes have only recently come into effect:

The Bedroom Tax – introduced in April 2013

Universal Credit – introduced in April 2014 (ongoing)

The Benefit Cap – introduced in April 2013

Changes to child tax credits – introduced in April 2012

Changes to Working Tax Credits – introduced in April 2012

In other words, and as the IFS has recognised, many of the government’s welfare reforms have only really started hurting the poor in the past year or so – and the pain will continue in the years to come.

At the other end of the income scale, pay is already outstripping inflation (wages including bonuses in the January to March period grew by 1.7 per cent. Significantly, for those who don’t receive a bonus pay is still lagging behind inflation). Top pay is also on the rise again. Research from last year found that the UK’s top 100 chief executives were paid £425m in 2012 – up by £45m 2011.

So what does this mean? It means that the narrowing of inequality is almost certainly a temporary blip. The recovery is well in motion for the rich, but there is a great deal of pain still to come for those at the bottom.

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2014/05/why-the-gap-between-rich-and-poor-has-narrowed-and-why-it-wont-last/

FT journalist in Piketty takedown accused of ‘serious errors’ of his own

June 4, 2014June 4, 2014 dnmufcLeave a comment

By James Bloodworth | Published: May 30, 2014

New analysis by the economic consultant Howard Reed supports Piketty’s view that inequality is on the rise

Thomas Pikettyj Right-wing journalists and commentators were cock-a-hoop this time last week after Thomas Piketty, whose bestselling book Capital in the 21st Century has taken the left by storm, was accused of cherry-picking data to support his view that inequality in on the increase.

The Financial Times was at the forefront of the attacks, with its journalist Chris Giles highlighting what he perceived to be “a serious discrepancy between the contemporary concentration of wealth described in Capital in the 21st Century and that reported in the official UK statistics”.

But new analysis by the economic consultant Howard Reed supports Piketty’s view that inequality is on the rise. And Reed has hit back at Piketty’s critics, accusing Giles of making “serious errors” of his own.

According to Reed, the apparent discrepancies in Piketty’s account were caused by the author making allowances for the different estimates of wealth in the data sources he used to calculate the trend since the early 19th century. Giles, Reed says, failed to adjust for these “discontinuities” in the data:

“Taken as a whole, these discontinuities imply that the estimate of the top 10 per cent share of wealth is 22.5 percentage points lower by 2010 than it would have been if the wealth statistics had been collected on a consistent basis after 1974, as they were before 1974. As I show, the main difference between the Piketty time series for UK inequality and the Giles time series for UK inequality is that Piketty corrects his data series to allow for this 23 percentage point drop (caused by changes in the methodology used to measure the wealth distribution) whereas Giles does not.”

The coup de grace comes later, however, when Reed says that it is Giles himself who is guilty of an inaccurate portrayal of the figures:

“To believe that the Giles series represents an accurate picture of the evolution of wealth inequality in the UK over the last 50 years, one would have to believe that the wealth share of the top 10 per cent really did fall by 12 percentage points during the 1970s, and by another 11 percentage points between 2005 and 2006. Does anyone really believe this? Of course not.”

He also accuses Giles of making “serious errors of his own”:

“However, Giles then goes on to make a very serious error of his own in handling the UK data: he treats changes in the way wealth inequality is measured over the decades as if they were real changes in the underlying distribution of wealth. This error leads him to the misleading conclusion that wealth inequality fell in the UK between 1980 and 2010, whereas in fact it has increased (although not by quite as much as Piketty’s published results would suggest).”

Reed does, however, acknowledge that Giles has “uncovered some errors and inconsistencies which Piketty will hopefully address in future work”.

You can read Reed’s full blog here.