The proposed planning rules for holiday lets sound like a massive giveaway of public value. Why not have everyone apply for short, expensive licences? Do holiday lets in central London really have to be subsidised? bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

The more important question is arguably if housing needs are actually met in both jurisdictions and what the resource footprint per capita is of doing so.

Whenever we do build, this is the way to do it:

Mainstream economics will have you believe that to address food poverty you have to increase food supply until prices drop enough for the destitute to afford it. Even if enough food is already being produced. I wonder how much food waste you'd incur at that production level.

It would be great to have a direct train from Hamburg to Oslo. But why not run it overnight? Oslo 8pm to Hamburg 7am sounds more pleasant to me than 11 hours on a day train. Any updates on this? Back-on-Track.eu thelocal.com/20230202/new-t…

If we taxed the rents arising from the use of scarce ecological space much construction would be uneconomical. We would have to focus on rents arising from the use of existing land and buildings. But you don't have to wait for nature to be adequately priced to do that!

In the mid-90s England had 37sqm housing per person and aidThompsin’s mum buys a house in Maidenhead for £70k. In the early 2020s England has 38sqm/person and everyone is priced out. If we had 39sqm/person in five years, would housing be affordable again?

There is a case for building the homes we need: transport-led, zero carbon, on public land. But as Vicky Spratt points out: "there is an elephant in the room: building new homes won’t necessarily make housing any more affordable."

Did greater housing stock growth in the 19th century mean that people were better housed than today? Of course not. What matters are the size and quality of the overall housing stock. Oddly though, that's not typically the metric that we're looking at in housing policy.

Good to keep this data in mind. It always seems like a "housing shortage" in the part of the cycle when there are the most homes.