Quote:
Originally Posted by
Peter McGurk
And I will continue to rise that because it colours everything you say about housing and what a lot of people believe are the housing mistakes. What you say about housing is, it’s **** because it was badly designed by architects. And that’s all you say. You don’t even substantiate that.
Architects were building down to a price for sure. Housing mistakes? You can't separate planning and land when looking into it. There is a deep-root problem, but no one here has hit they button of what it is.
Planning laws create artificial land shortages. This distorts the free-market - rigging the market.
Land The Mother of All Monopolies
It is quite true that land monopoly is not the only monopoly which exists, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies - it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly. It is quite true that unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned or undeserved profit which individuals are able to secure; but it is the principal form of unearned increment which is derived from processes which are not merely not beneficial, but which are positively detrimental to the general public.
- Winston Churchill
What Churchill was saying, was that each piece of land is unique, it cannot be moved. Just because one piece of land is worth double what another is, you can't move the lower value land to the higher value land to equalise the price. Land is unique and special being completly different from movable objects like machinery, equipment and raw materials. If the price of cement rises in one location than another the cheaper cement will move to the location where the prices are higher equalising the price of cement (making cement cheaper) - moveable goods and service equalize the price (value). In that sense land ownership is the mother of all monopolies. That is anyone who owns land, even the owner/occupier.
If we had planning and land laws the served the people not the large landowners and speculators then matters would be very different to housing. Sink estates would not exist.