Mostly about housing and transport. I work at the Greater London Authority, but the views expressed here are mine alone.
A few days ago Manchester City Council published a press release with an eye-catching factoid. Manchester saw more homes built in the last year (4,766) than all the 32 Greater London boroughs combined (4,261) a report to the Council’s Communities and Equalities Scrutiny Committee heard today (Weds 22 July). This is very inaccurate, but has Continue reading No, Manchester did not build more homes…
Peter Apps recently wrote a Substack (initially free to read, now behind a paywall) about the housing policies of the UK government and the Mayor of London, and in doing so cited a research report I wrote in 2023 on the affordability impacts of new housing supply. This is a good opportunity to clarify what Continue reading Evidence on the affordability impacts of housebuilding
The Green Alliance recently hosted a webinar on whether it s possible to build to build 1.5 million homes (the UK government target for this parliament) without accelerating the climate crisis, and wrote up some of the key points here. Here s a lightly edited version of their summary of the contribution of one of the speakers, Continue reading Additional property purchases and surplus housing
The Global Human Settlement Layer is a geographic dataset produced by the EU s Copernicus Earth observation programme, combining satellite and Census data to create fine-grained population and built environment data for the entire planet. This data is enormously valuable for understanding global urbanisation patterns, but it is also enormous in terms of file size and Continue reading World city…
The topic of empty homes attracts quite a lot of attention in England, given what seems to be a severe shortage of available housing. But surprisingly little is known about the reasons why homes may be standing empty, and how many are really available for a household to rent or buy. The first point to Continue reading Accounting for empty homes
I ve set up an account at Mastodon, on the econtwitter server. I don t ordinarily identify as an economist but the existing user base of the server looked good to me.
How do rates of multiple property ownership in Britain compare to the rest of Europe? I m not aware of any perfectly comparable datasets, so this thread looks at a few different sources. I ll compare both a wide definition of multiple property ownership, which includes properties rented out to other households, and a narrower second home Continue reading How do multiple home ownership rates in…
Paul Krugman recently published a short paper about growing economic disparities betweeen US regions, arguing that this constitutes a third great transition after an urbanisation trend that lasted until around 1920 and a suburbanisation trend that lasted until around 1980. In this blog post I set out some corroborating evidence that shows similar trends in Continue reading Pushing together and…
Various media including The Guardian reported this week on data released by ONS showing that Ribble Valley was officially the happiest place in the UK in 2018/19. Looking through the data though, I noticed that the neighbouring local authority of South Ribble had one of the lowest levels of self-reported happiness in the country (an average Continue reading The trouble with Ribbles why average…
If land prices determine house prices, and if land is fixed in supply, then rises in demand for housing feed straight into higher housing costs. That s the argument of Why can t you afford a home? by Josh Ryan-Collins, which as both he and Chris Dillow note is in many ways a return to the classical economics Continue reading Do financialisation and constrained land supply mean house prices have to…