Anglosphere countries are very bad at housing.
Source: https://cps.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/How-Many-Homes-Does-the-UK-Need-.pdf
I’m only on my phone and can’t easily check the data behind this, but a very quick and dirty estimate of number of houses built per undeveloped acre between those 2 countries shows a different picture. Balancing land use has to be a factor, not just absolute number of people wanting houses. Is anyone talking about theoretical population models for different countries?
I don’t want to defend England’s housing building, but the Y axis not starting at 0 is visually misleading. Here’s a very rough correction:
i legitimately find this graph more compelling
I did exactly this for a different post a few weeks ago. Non zero starting point on the Y axis is one of the most used subtle swindler mechanisms in journalism imo.
I dug it out to upvote it :)
Thank you, very important point! I was trying to find that pic of a graph where the question is something like “Does it matter where the graph starts?” and the lower part says “Yes”, but is cut off and the upper part says “No” :')
Considering how bad the housing crisis is in France, I can’t imagine the British situation.
I don’t know how’s the market situation in France right now, but in Poland we have a surplus of housing over populace needs, yet housing crisis here is still almost inhumane.
It’s not because we don’t have space to fit our people. No, it’s not that we’re picky either. It’s because this space is not being used at all, because landlords find it often more profitable this way.
Exactly. It’s greedy landlords who withhold living space for €€€. It wouldn’t surprise me if most countries actually have a landlord problem and aren’t missing space to live in.
Could you explain? Why would it be profitable not to rent and generate cashflow? Because they speculate on rising building prices? That may only be true in a very few high value areas.
- inflating prices by limiting the supply, you don’t even need to rent your real estate, you get insane gains just via appreciation
- radically pro-tenant laws are primarily rewarding unlawful tenats by making them impossible to evict even for extreme negligence, which discourages landlords from offering their unused properties
- no laws to force landlords to rent their unused properties or discourage from purchasing additional estate just to hold them as assets
Probably I’m really, really dumb, but I still do not understand where the landlords would get their money from, even with your second text. If they don’t rent, but just sit on their unrented property, they loose money imho. Even if its only threough property taxes, and other cost. So could you clarify your thesis?
They do get their money from rentals but not the empty ones. It’s called a speculative vacancy.
For example, if you own a whole apartment building, you could rent out all the apartments and make a bunch of money. Alternately, you could deliberately leave eg. 10% of them vacant to artificially throttle supply. Because people need housing they’ll compete for the remaining ones, allowing the magic of market economics to increase rents higher than you would make from leasing out the vacancies (costs and taxes included. In some places you can even claim those losses for a tax break).
The purpose of owning them at all is to allow the landlord to easily adjust the amount of supply based on what makes them the most money. If rents drop too much from low demand, they can kick out a few tenants to try and drive prices back up. If the market gets to the point where it’s worth it to have more apartments, they can just lease more without having to build or buy anything new.
If there’s more demand for the property, its value will increase empty or not, allowing it to still be worth owning because it increases their net worth and they can sell it for more later or use it as collateral on loans.
In the short term it’s always worth more to have tenants but as a longer term strategy, empty housing lets you try to price fix. Only works if you control enough housing and/or can collude with other landlords in an area.
Kinda like De Beers did with diamonds, except with people’s homes and ability to live.
In video game/card game logic it’s “sacrifice a house to gain +1/+1 on your other houses.”
Disclaimer: not a landlord or property expert, just my layman’s understanding of how it works.
Thank you. Understood. Was not thinking in a scale that would impact market value, and still think this would not generally apply here (Germany), where - in my bubble - only small scale landlords exist.
It really depends on situation.
Rentiers that possess tens, hundreds or even thousands of estate absolutely do rent some of them, but they still keep some (if not most) of them empty. By keeping the market unsaturated, they keep their rent high. If they just let out all their estates, prices would go lower due to lesser demand. They are not penalized for abusing the market, instead they are actually being rewarded by the fact that their unrented properties’ value is constantly increasing due to appreciation.
There are also minor landlords that have some additional rentable estate, but they often choose not to be bothered, and they just sit on it for years until their offspring grows up and decide to live there. Or they just sell it in the meantime and get lots of profit for nothing.
TY. Someone needs to do the math on this, because I assume it would net more to rent all if you own >100 properties, and would not make a difference if less, depending on the city size ofc, especially when you leave the majority empty.
I don’t want to defend nor attack England, France or anyone else, but we should never look at one metric when assessing a market. The EU provides some useful insights on its website about the bloc’s housing market (unfortunately without the England or UK data …).
When measured by the gross value added (GVA) of a country’s construction sector as a share of total GVA, France is persistently below the EU average. In 2023, the EU countries with the largest shares were Slovakia (8.4%), Romania (8.3%) and Lithuania (7.3%), and with smallest Greece (2.1%), Ireland (2.6%) and Malta (4.2%).
Regarding the number of dwellings approved for construction between 2010 and 2023, France saw the largest decrease (-27%), followed by Finland and Italy (-36% and -50%, respectively). The largest increases were in Bulgaria (+269%), followed by Ireland (+123%) and Estonia (+117%).
We must also look at how affordable housing is. According to the EU data, Greece, Denmark, and Germany appear to have he least affordable housing in the EU.
You’ll find a lot of interesting data on the site: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/housing-2024
Yeah, they are generally bought by English retired.
Are they cheap temporary low-dense homes made of Fire’s Favourite Food, or are they high-density and concrete?
One of them stands a better chance of still being a home in 50 years, and I think that cheap structures just to churn people is not a great solution.
err in Europe we use bricks to build houses. A house made out of wood is not a house, it is a shed.
Hmm… this is raising so many questions…
I wonder how many homes your typical Frenchman uses up in a year?
And what’s the average of people together in a bed in England?
Shame a lot of them were built in a racialised and near-segregated manner.
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/09/britain-building-nimbys-hs2-housing
Why do we find it so much harder to build in this country than comparable countries? The obvious culprit is a planning system designed to prioritise objections over permissions, and which benefits existing local homeowners over a wider community who may stand to gain. Throw in the fact that those who have time to campaign on planning issues tend to be older, richer and have less stake in growth, and nature has run its course.
People are more favorable towards development in general than development near them. If you permit local interests to block construction, you will then tend to see less construction.
https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/a-very-short-guide-to-planning-reform/
Britain’s housing crisis is caused by a deep shortage of homes, especially in the most prosperous cities and large towns. We have built much less than other rich countries for decades – for instance, while England currently builds around 220,000-240,000 new homes a year, the highest in decades, France builds roughly 380,000 a year, a decline from a recent peak of nearly 500,000 before the financial crisis. Japan is currently building 860,000 homes a year, even though their population is shrinking.
The English planning system causes this shortage of homes by making it very difficult to build, in two ways. First, it imposes explicit bans on new construction in large parts of the country – by far the most important and costly of these is the green belt, which exists to block the growth of the country’s most economically important cities and large towns.
Second, the planning process for almost all of the remaining land is highly discretionary with nearly all significant decisions made case-by-case. The uncertainty this creates in the development process reduces the number of new homes and commercial buildings that are built, as it is possible to propose a new development that complies with the local plan and nevertheless have it rejected.
England’s system is internationally unusual – most other countries do not have construction bans outside their biggest and most innovative cities, and instead have rules-based planning systems where applications that follow the local plan must be granted planning permission. Introducing these rules-based decision-making processes is the key goal of planning reform.
