House-builders/developers and their profit margins

[Hal Nail]

50 minutes ago, BachelorBoy said:

 

Babies are going out fashion in England and Wales. The Total Fertility Rate needs to be 2.1 just for the population to remain stable. 

 

A friend did point out that with the population ageing, we do actually need to keep producing working age people to generate the taxes it is costing to keep us all.

 

I fear the UK economy horse bolted a while back.

[BachelorBoy]

On 18/07/2023 at 18:54, APOLLO said:

 

Once we had an electrified railway here

An expensively nonstandard electrified railway 

[BachelorBoy]

2 minutes ago, Hal Nail said:

A friend did point out that with the population ageing, we do actually need to keep producing working age people to generate the taxes it is costing to keep us all.

 

I fear the UK economy horse bolted a while back.

 

Yup. The answer is probably immigration. 

 

(Even Japan, a monocultural monoethnic and somewhat xenophobic country, is loosening restrictions on immigration, as the population is already shrinking.)

 

One reason why Australia went without a recession from the early 1990s until covid struck was because the population rose thanks to immigration.

 

 

 

 

[wombatofludham]

On 14/07/2023 at 21:47, chris p bacon said:

 

You make some interesting points but I've highlighted the above as it has to be the most unfair system you could think of.  

 

The state takes land from a farmer and gives the lowest possible value. He can't farm the land anymore and the state has cut the income from his farm which could make it unviable. 

 

I was friendly with a farmer/landowner that ran a very large farm in Bedfordshire, when we discussed the values of land he had a different value to that of the agricultural rate as the farm was in trust (so one generation couldn't sell it and gamble it away). The land value was measured in what it could produce in crops over decades, so he had areas of the farm which were worth more than others depending on the soil conditions.  

I went to an auction with him once where he purchased some acreage of land at £50,000 an acre, I thought him a bit bonkers but he'd tested the soil and knew the area well as it bordered the farm and was prepared to pay more for it.  

The average 'Agricultural land rate' at the time was around £10,000 an acre, but he had outbid 2 local developers for the land and was happy with the price paid. 

I would expect a Housing Corporation to use only lower grade agricultural land to protect the most valuable, productive land for food production, and the compensation for the acquisition of the land would be set according to the market price for such land.  I seem to recall from my time in the profession all agricultural land is graded according to its suitability for crops, or grazing, or lower productive uses, including "horseyculture" which seems to be a major crop in the greenbelt.  The prices for the land tend to vary according to classification, but as we would not want to take top grade agricultural land out of food production, compensating a farmer at the rate at which such land changes hand on the open market would to me seem absolutely fair.  The principle of Compulsory Purchase at applicable market value is long established in public policy and law and when people moan about CPO values it is generally because they have an over inflated sense of value of the land rather than the system being wrong.  However, I cannot agree that the land owner should be compensated at an enhanced level because the land has been allocated for housing, it is an unearned windfall generated because the State has decided that the land in question would be better used for housing - therefore any increased value should accrue to the state to be recycled into further land acquisition.

[Reorte]

3 hours ago, BachelorBoy said:

 

Yup. The answer is probably immigration. 

 

(Even Japan, a monocultural monoethnic and somewhat xenophobic country, is loosening restrictions on immigration, as the population is already shrinking.)

 

One reason why Australia went without a recession from the early 1990s until covid struck was because the population rose thanks to immigration.

 

Immigration isn't the answer, it's kicking the can down the road. It's essentially a pyramid scheme argument, because those immigrants eventually get old too. Then the argument is that you need even more, rinse and repeat.

 

A country that can't manage with a roughly replacement birth rate is a country that needs to look hard at its real issues and not just treat the symptoms. And what applies to a roughly replacement one also applies to an under-replacement one, unless it's very short of replacement, and let's face it in the long run a population decline would be hugely beneficial. The downsides, unless it's too rapid, are very much outweighed by the upsides, at least when you've kicked short termisim out of the way.

 

There are two demographic shift issues. The first is earlier increases in birth rates working their way through, e.g. the baby boom. Trying to maintain that rate instead of letting it work its way through the system just leads to unsustainable exponential population growth. The second issue is with increasing lifespans shifting demographics towards the older end. That's just something we have to put up with when lifespans go up, there's no sensible way of avoiding it by trying to add more young people at the bottom, trying to do so again just leads to unsustainable population growth.

[BachelorBoy]

8 minutes ago, Reorte said:

A country that can't manage with a roughly replacement birth rate is a country that needs to look hard at its real issues and not just treat the symptoms.

About half of the countries and territories in the world have lower-than-replacement Total Fertility Rates (ie below 2.1 children per woman).

 

China's rather brutal one-child policy to stop overpopulation worked too well: its TFR is about 1.2,  and last year the population shrank for the first time since the late 1950s (when millions died in Mao's man-made famine). 

 

It's now trying to encourage traditional values to keep women at home and having babies.

 

But the one-child policy meant lots of couples aborted girls. So now there are a lot more men than women. And a lot of those men are going to remain single as a result. Couple that with youth unemployment in China at record levels of >21% and suddenly the country looks potentially unstable.

 

 

 

 

[Reorte]

China's an illustration of what happens when birth rates drop too much (those cultural aspects don't help either) - although a decline here would be greatly beneficial it's trouble if it happens too rapidly. It takes quite a long time for a drop in birth rates to work its way through to a drop in population, patience is a necessity, but a controllable, managed fall is not only desirable, it's essential for the long term viability of society.

 

Whilst it's true that the problems caused by a rapid drop in birth rates, which will probably feed through to a very rapid drop in population in the near future, are significant that doesn't mean that more measured drops are a problem.

 

It does seem odd though that China's approach has lead to youth unemployment. I'd have thought an ageing population should have no trouble finding work for the young (unless it's all caused by other factors).

[fulton]

4 hours ago, wombatofludham said:

I would expect a Housing Corporation to use only lower grade agricultural land to protect the most valuable, productive land for food production,

One of my pet moans is the amount of brown field land, that could be developed, plus the number of urban/city derelict or semi derelict properties or even just time expired properties that could be redeveloped before green field land, I know there are extra costs but there is also some help with tax for brown field sites, a brown field site at the end of my road, with planning for around 300 houses and flats has stood for 25 years now, my own house is built on brown field land, I worked for the developer and a profit was made.

[MR Chuffer]

14 minutes ago, fulton said:

is the amount of brown field land

There are no brown fields sites in the Ribble Valley, 2/3 is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Where there are plenty of brown field sites, Accrington, Blackburn, etc, no one wants to live there. Is someone going to force people to live there?

[Reorte]

1 hour ago, MR Chuffer said:

There are no brown fields sites in the Ribble Valley, 2/3 is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Where there are plenty of brown field sites, Accrington, Blackburn, etc, no one wants to live there. Is someone going to force people to live there?

What's the alternative, turn the attractive parts in to yet another housing estate? That would be criminal damage of the worst kind.

 

Developers could try building housing that people actually want to live in... Needs a bit of joined-up thinking from the council too, because getting people to want to live somewhere requires more than just houses, no matter how good they are. It's not easy but doing something properly never is.

Edited July 20, 2023 by Reorte

[Nick C]

2 hours ago, MR Chuffer said:

There are no brown fields sites in the Ribble Valley, 2/3 is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Where there are plenty of brown field sites, Accrington, Blackburn, etc, no one wants to live there. Is someone going to force people to live there?

But of you built 10,000 houses in the middle of the AONB, it'd be ugly and no one would want to live there either...

 

Best way to encourage people to want to live somewhere is to provide the things they want/need - work, civic amenities, transport etc...

[chris p bacon]

8 hours ago, wombatofludham said:

The principle of Compulsory Purchase at applicable market value is long established in public policy and law and when people moan about CPO values it is generally because they have an over inflated sense of value of the land rather than the system being wrong.

 

And yet our own family home had a CPO on the front garden for some road 'improvements' (a link road to a flyover the A1) It was a large detached Victorian house with a 25' deep front garden. The road proposal moved the road from 34' from the front door to 6' and the loss of a driveway entrance, the land was valued at £350. The CPO/authority also valued the house and noted that the road would devalue the property by £8000 but no recompense was offered.

That's not an over inflated sense  of value, but pointing out that CPO's are not flawless and should only be used in extreme circumstances.

 

Quote

However, I cannot agree that the land owner should be compensated at an enhanced level because the land has been allocated for housing, it is an unearned windfall generated because the State has decided that the land in question would be better used for housing - therefore any increased value should accrue to the state to be recycled into further land acquisition.

Are you the only one left reading The Morning Star.....🙄

[MR Chuffer]

2 hours ago, Nick C said:

10,000 houses in the middle of the AONB,

Au contraire, they are building that many houses and there are so many Porsches, Lamborghinis and Ferraris, Clitheroe, Whalley and Longridge drip wealth, glad I got here before it all started. Manchester 1 hour on the train, Preston, and WFH is where it's at.

Edited July 20, 2023 by MR Chuffer