A visit to Scotland always reminds me of the huge gap in house prices between London and the South East and much of the rest of the country. This matters a great deal for many reasons but one of the issues that is normally not mentioned is productivity.
Getting the right person for the right job is much more difficult and expensive if they can’t afford to move. Leave London and you may never be able to afford to move back. Get a job in London and you might well not be able to afford to buy there.
Labour market flexibility is good for the economy but not just in the hire and fire sense, huge differences in house prices stop the productive allocation of resources.
This is another reason why Government aid to home buyers is so stupid, cutting stamp duty and subsidising deposits with tax payers money just pushes up property prices and makes the economy less mobile and productive. This is throwing government money away to make current home owners wealthier while damaging the economy.
https://jonty.substack.com/
https://jonty.substack.com/
After the circumstances of an individual's birth (male/female, family lineage, ethnicity, sexual orientation, in or out of wedlock, birthplace (either within or outwith the national borders)), this society defines people by their property holdings (including, obviously, land / residence, but more generally wealth). The BBC dedicates a large percentage of it's output reinforcing this, implanting the idea that residential land is a status investment, rather than an abode (even drawing sympathy for landed estate owners for how much time, effort and expenditure their huge mansion estates require to maintain).
Until this mindset is changed, house prices will continue to rise and residential home ownership will continue to fall, as both enterprising and manipulative persons will continue to treat the housing stock as a bull market to make them wealthy. The Northern Independence Party has already been demonstrating this, presenting videos of self promotional London estate agents actively saying that the northern housing market is there to be gouged for rent.
Add to this that the statutes governing land ownership have been largely devised in 1925 - nearly a century ago, since which time there has been the Depression, a World War that devastated a generation, major immigration, the fall of the Empire, Thatcher defeating the unions, a transfer to a service economy centred largely in the south east, the information age and more. The two-tier status of land ownership, leasehold and freehold, means that persons who sold the land centuries ago, can still dictate the terms of the land's usage, which is perverse.