Interesting Links for 03-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• A great short film about bikes and childhood. Delightful _and_ impressive
  (tags: bicycles viaSkreidle video )
• Simon's cat vs the spider. I giggled all the way through. And now itch.
  I _wish_ that last time I had a cat, it had been this good with spiders.
  (tags: cats spiders funny video )
• Amazing car ad, full of optical illusions
  (tags: cars

Comments

[kerrypolka]

That should surely be "of London's housing market" really...

[andrewducker]

Or anywhere else with a green belt, or that's not building new housing. Which is most places, as far as I know.

[del_c]

If London wasn't attracting people, it wouldn't have higher house prices than other parts of the country. Just building a few more houses there is like bailing out a boat that's sinking because it's got a big hole in the bottom: the bailing doesn't stop the sinking. House building isn't going to stop the house prices rising.

So who wants planning permission scrapped, if it's not going to lower the prices? Chart 14 there tells the ugly story: it's people who own land in the right-hand bar, who want their land to fetch prices like the left-hand bar. gonzo21's right that, to quote blogger Lambert Strether, it really is "all about the rents".

[andrewducker]

Increasing supply _must_ either decrease price or increase demand.

Either more people paying the current minimum will move to London if there are more homes, or the price will drop. Frankly, probably both.

But it's a certainty that if you don't build more homes then the price will continue to go up.

[del_c]

The same theory ought to lower the demand for houses in London because there are cheaper houses outside London. That's not happening either. In theory, you can bail out the entire ocean, so bailing *must* help. In reality, there's an ocean to bail. The only reason for the price to move down the supply and demand curve is if you start running out of demand.

This is all historical fact for those of us who know the history of housing in London, we don't need bogus misapplied simplistic econ theories. The prices weren't going down before planning restrictions were put in place, for all the building that was happening.

[andrewducker]

"The same theory ought to lower the demand for houses in London because there are cheaper houses outside London."

I'm sure it does. There are bound to people who would quite fancy living in London, but it's much cheaper to do so elsewhere.

[kerrypolka]

Mmm, but as far as I know house prices aren't rising in other British cities the way they are in London - I'm certain that the capital is seriously distorting "national" trends.

[andrewducker]

London's the worst, but I was under the impression that everywhere was still recovering from the housing bubble. Certainly Edinburgh prices went ridiculously high, and haven't recovered dramatically, so far as I'm aware.

[naath]

Cambridge is almost as bad - the prices are a bit lower, but they are going up (and up and up).

A big problem is that *most of the jobs* are in (or near) London - so lots of demand on housing :( Need to move more jobs to other places.