Fighting over their castles / UK / Economist

there is not much to add..... the chart says it all.....and the fact that they have a have a (shadow) "housing minister" makes it even more weird....

dem ist nicht vile hinzuzufügen....der chart spricht für sich...... und die tatsache das die sogare "einen hausminister" haben kann einem schon merkwürdig vorkommen....


How a long boom in house prices has altered Britain

OF ALL the forces that have changed Britain over the past decade or so, the long bull market in housing is perhaps the strongest—and the most anonymous. High house prices have done their work quietly, reshaping concentrations of wealth and stoking clashes over supply. Other rich countries have had house-price booms too, but Britain's has been faster and more furious (see chart). And high levels of home ownership (Britons are more likely to own bricks than even Americans but less likely to own equities) have magnified their effect.

As problems go, the fact that the proportion of properties fetching £1m ($2m) or more in 1996 prices has increased more than tenfold since then (according to Nationwide, a mortgage provider) seems a nice one to have. For a decade, buying a house has been a one-way bet, which is one reason why more people are anxious to make it. But this windfall largely represents transfers from young to old. Those who have houses may choose to help their children get one too—over 40% of first-time buyers now receive help from their parents, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders. But children whose parents do not own homes will be left behind....
High property prices have also intensified conflicts over supply. MPs frequently receive complaints from constituents about new housing developments in their neighbourhoods. These are now balanced by complaints from parents who worry about their children staying at home indefinitely, stretching adolescence into a fourth decade. Since 2000 the number of loans made to first-time buyers has declined to levels last seen in the early 1990s, when interest rates touched 15% and many people could not afford to borrow.

Below the bottom rung of the private housing ladder, a different sort of conflict has arisen. One side-effect of high prices has been to increase demand for the social housing that is home to about 4m households. Unfair allocation of subsidised housing has become a favourite theme for the right-wing British National Party (BNP). Last year its candidates prospered in local elections by whispering that Nigerian immigrants were being favoured. Similar stories abound in areas that have seen lots of immigrants arrive from eastern Europe. Last month Margaret Hodge, a Labour minister, suggested that indigenous folk should have first refusal.

These problems are likely to get worse as the housing supply, which has only crept up while prices have been rocketing, comes under pressure from a bulge in demand. This stems from two trends. The first is a rising population, thanks to increased longevity and higher net immigration (up from 50,000-60,000 a year in the mid-1990s to an annual average of 185,000 in the three years to 2005). The second is that more people are living alone. As a result, the number of households in England will increase from 21.1m in 2004 to 26m by 2026, according to official projections......

The capital, circa 1860
To see how these conflicts are playing out, take a look at London. The city's population has been rising steadily, and yet parts of its centre are becoming less densely populated. Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea, two expensive boroughs, are the most popular places to own second homes, according to council-tax returns. Add to that the fact that London attracts wealthy foreigners who are willing to pay several million pounds for a home to live in part-time, and the result is a city whose most desirable parts are emptying.

Yet away from London's expensive centre, things are getting more cramped. Election-registration officials in east London, a favoured destination for new arrivals, report finding 15 registered voters living at a single terraced house with a couple of bedrooms. ...

A political head of steam is building behind the idea of fixing things by building more homes. Gordon Brown, the prime-minister-to-be, has argued for this recently. It will be hard to sell to the 70% of households who already own their homes, however, and especially hard for the Conservative Party, which is strong in the south-east where people think their neighbours are too close now.

Yet Michael Gove, the shadow housing minister, believes his party will accept a bonfire of planning restrictions when it is convinced that there is a good, economically liberal case for it. “The longer it goes on unchanged, the worse it gets,” says Mr Gove. Which seems a melancholy verdict on what has looked for a decade like the closest thing yet seen to a mass lottery win.