Guy Parker

Gwynedd house prices plunge as council acts on second homes House prices in a Welsh county have fallen by more than 12% year-on-year, according to new figures.

Good sign that the Welsh crackdown on second homes is bearing fruit. The true test will be rents getting more affordable, homelessness cases dropping and fewer adults living with parents
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I was in Vienna a couple of weeks ago Sarah. If you're stopping off there Cafe Sperl (site of a key scene from Before Sunrise!) is delightfully on brand for Viennese cafe culture and strudel www.cafesperl.at/en_home.html and Cafe Roza is a great dinner option www.instagram.com/cafe.roza.wi...

This approach to housing policy would finally start to address the housing crisis and homelessness and be politically effective too.

This is a fascinating dataset: www.oecd.org/content/dam/...

Amongst home-owners and renters, UK has more rooms per person than almost anywhere.

Suggests type of home (and tenure) is a bigger challenge than the volume of housing.

Lowlights from new homelessness stats:
- 16% increase in households in temporary accommodation (78,420 with kids)
- 308%(!!!) increase in people made homeless after leaving asylum accommodation
- 29% increase in numbers homeless after leaving prison or hospital

Emergency action needed now.

Is social housing NOT for "households on ordinary incomes for whom paying private rent is a struggle"? I thought that was exactly who social rent was intended for (alongside people unable to work). Most working age social tenants in London work.

@gmclh.bsky.social

Screengrab from Inside Housing reading: Scrapping hope value would slash cost of building 90,000 social homes a year by £4.5bn, new report finds News 20.11.24 by Stephen Delahunty A new report has found that scrapping hope value for landowners, which has been blamed for artificially inflating land prices, would slash the cost of building 90,000 social homes a year by £4.5bn.

We need to build 90,000 new social homes a year to meet govt housing targets and fix the housing crisis. But a land rule from the 1960s is blocking our ability to do this.
Today's new research in @insidehousing - and the government's response in 🧵

Scrapping hope value would slash cost of building 90,000 social homes a year by £4.5bn, new report finds A new report has found that scrapping hope value for landowners would slash the cost of building 90,000 social homes a year by £4.5bn.

New @neweconomics.bsky.social research out today shows that removing 'hope value' from the price councils have to pay for land could reduce the cost of building the 90,000 new social homes we need each year by a quarter, saving £4.5bn www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/scrappi...

The greenest building is the one that already exists - equalising VAT on new builds, refurbs and conversions would help protect the planet and deliver more homes that local nimbys welcome

Yes, will be interesting to see how the measures play through in Wales, a good test of what feels like the right approach

Maybe naively I'd hope that that's partly because the previous government's voter base had more of those people for whom 2nd and under-occupued homes are a good thing than the current one, but it's definitely a big challenge!

100% - these things are, at most, part of the answer

It's probably poor tactically if the sole aim is shifting policy on empty homes, but at heart these things are connected by our thinking of housing as asset, and I think it's helpful to connect them to try to move to a place of thinking about space sufficiency/climate/redistribution

I think there's value in connecting empties, 2nd homes, under-utilisation, short-term lets etc in the context of a national housing discussion so focused on new builds (as illustrated by the MHCLG response being "we're building more homes"), but you're right that the solutions are v different

Chapter 4: Dwelling condition

The policy solutions are different, but don't you think it's important to capture the scale of the inefficiencies in existing housing, whether empty homes, second homes or the 40% "under-occupied"? www.gov.uk/government/s....

One million homes are lying empty. Here's how we can fill them There are around one million empty homes in England. With Labour facing an uphill task to build 1.5 million homes, here's how to fill them.

“One million homes are lying empty in England. Here's how we can fill them
Campaigners have urged the Labour government to draw up the first national empty homes strategy since 2016 to bolster attempts to deliver 1.5 million homes while in power”
##ukhousing

www.bigissue.com/news/housing...

Exciting visit for GM Community Led Homes and Habitat for Humanity, looking at a site for possible new social homes, with design led by homelessness experienced people, and some authentic Manc features

This is the key stat for understanding the UK housing crisis...

No-fault eviction hits eight-year high following Capital Gains Tax cut - Generation Rent Section 21 evictions are at their highest level since June 2016, with 8,425 households in England taken to court under the law between July and September, according to new figures […]

No fault evictions have reached their HIGHEST levels since 2016!

Our warnings about the impact of Jeremy Hunt's Capital Gains Tax cut have proven true. More landlords are cashing in while evicting us! We need more protections ASAP.

Read more in our blog 👇

www.generationrent.org/2024/11/14/n...

Council tax premium on 2nd homes due to come in next April can't come too soon - latest figures show 280k second homes in England: www.gov.uk/government/s...

It would take less than half of them to move every family in temporary accommodation into a permanent home