The British media is definitely working overtime to make this seem like a problem, but I'm not entirely sure I believe there's smoke under all this fire. The headline I've seen over and over is that there are 20k empty homes in London. But from the 2017 Housing in London report, prepared by the Mayor of London's office[1]:
> The number of recorded empty homes in London is far below its long-term average, at 1.7% of total stock.
From the same report:
> In the last two decades the number of jobs in London has grown by 40% and the
number of people by 25%, but the number of homes by only 15%
So if the number of people is increasing faster than the number of houses, and the percentage of empty houses is falling, then offhand I'd say your numbers are a bit exagerrated. Yes, certainly some people buy property as an investment and leave it empty, but even in London, it's not that many. And as for this:
> average prices in the area will have been pushed up for good, compounding the problem.
Asset price bubbles are a thing, but so far, everyone who's ever believed that prices were going to stay high forever has been burned, badly. What will keep London house prices high is that they're not building very many. If that changes, prices will fall. (And fall all the quicker when the people buying Mayfair properties as an investment decide to liquidate them before the price falls any further. As, again, is the way of asset bubbles.)
I've seen plenty of numbers on empty housing in London defined as "we asked the owners whether they live there and they said 'yes'".
Anybody who doesn't think this is a problem just needs to take a look at one Hyde park. Nearly empty. Prime location. You could demolish that and build high rise flats for a thousand people there, maybe more. The problem isn't just how many prime location empty apartments there are but how big they are too.
> You could demolish that and build high rise flats for a thousand people there, maybe more.
That sounds like a big argument in favour of "building more units will fix the problem" then. :)
> Anybody who doesn't think this is a problem just needs to take a look at one Hyde park.
I'm going to stick with data over anecdotes. If the data we have is flawed, then we need better data in order to make decisions; it doesn't mean we should just ignore data.
>That sounds like a big argument in favour of "building more units will fix the problem" then. :)
It's an argument in favour of building units people will live in (e.g. council housing) and against big units that consume large amounts of land that people won't live in (e.g. yet another block of luxury flats treated as gold-bar-like stores of wealth).
The amount of property tax paid on those apartments is pitiful and amounts to a market distortion. It needs to be raised about 100x before the owners will be incentivized to yield hoarded land to more productive use.
>I'm going to stick with data over anecdotes.
So you think if the data is simply based upon asking people if they live in their properties that it is to be believed?
> The number of recorded empty homes in London is far below its long-term average, at 1.7% of total stock.
From the same report:
> In the last two decades the number of jobs in London has grown by 40% and the number of people by 25%, but the number of homes by only 15%
So if the number of people is increasing faster than the number of houses, and the percentage of empty houses is falling, then offhand I'd say your numbers are a bit exagerrated. Yes, certainly some people buy property as an investment and leave it empty, but even in London, it's not that many. And as for this:
> average prices in the area will have been pushed up for good, compounding the problem.
Asset price bubbles are a thing, but so far, everyone who's ever believed that prices were going to stay high forever has been burned, badly. What will keep London house prices high is that they're not building very many. If that changes, prices will fall. (And fall all the quicker when the people buying Mayfair properties as an investment decide to liquidate them before the price falls any further. As, again, is the way of asset bubbles.)
[1]: https://files.datapress.com/london/dataset/housing-london/20...