A flawless plan to solve the UK housing crisis.

[The Free Neanderthal Tribes]

There is a housing crisis in the UK, prices are insanely high and there are very few properties which are affordable to first time buyers, a constantly increasing number of which are trapped in a cycle of paying exploitatively high rent, meaning they are unable to even think about saving for a deposit.

The obvious solution to this would be to build a large number of new houses. But where? You can't just plonk down houses in the middle of nowhere and expect people to buy them. They need to be near services, employers, and they need solid road links.

So I propose that we ban golf, we nationalise every golf course and we build new communities of affordable homes on every one, giving first refusal on the contracts to British companies.

By their very nature, golf courses have roads leading to them, which can handle a good amount of traffic. They are attached to the electricity, water and gas mains, they have pleasant wooded areas, which can be kept to ensure the houses have a pleasant environment. And they are generally quite close to existing towns and places of business.

Plus, on the upside, golf will be banned, and golfists will be annoyed.

(I mean, as a compromise, we could keep say five courses open, and have a waiting list to play on them.)

[New haven america]

Everywhere is going through a housing crisis.

[The Free Neanderthal Tribes]

Everywhere is going through a housing crisis.

I know, the plan is easily transferable to other golfing countries.

[Liriena]

[sutble Maoist utterances]

[Luziyca]

How on Earth would banning golf solve housing crises?

Sure, maybe we may be able to fulfill all the demands by building new houses on the golf courses, but more likely, those houses will be bought up by rich investors who can afford to buy a kajillion homes and sit on them as an investment, which would mean that we'll be back at square one.

[Bombadil]

They keep mooting this in HK but the golf community is a rich and powerful one so it never happens.

I assume it's the same in the UK.

[The Free Neanderthal Tribes]

How on Earth would banning golf solve housing crises?

Sure, maybe we may be able to fulfill all the demands by building new houses on the golf courses, but more likely, those houses will be bought up by rich investors who can afford to buy a kajillion homes and sit on them as an investment, which would mean that we'll be back at square one.

Who said the government would have to sell them on the open market? You could sell them with restrictive covenants. (A lot of homes are.)

Make it so you could only purchase them with residential mortgages, so no buy to lets, you can't buy them outright, and a person can only buy one. You cannot sell them other than to other buyers who are buying using approved residential mortgages.

Banks and building societies have whole departments whose job is to ensure that when people purchase properties at residential mortgage rates, they are living in them as their sole residency, and are not renting them out. So it isn't pie in the sky wishful thinking, to assume that you could make sure that the same happens with these properties. This is something mortgage providers do everyday, something they are bound by regulation to do, something they can be fined for not doing.

Renting out a property for which you have a residential mortgage is a breach of contract, and can see your home repossessed. (In reality, mortgage providers never repossess houses for this, it is more cost-effective for them to just charge an extra 1% interest rate on the mortgage, as repossessing costs a lot of money, but it's something they legally can do.)

[Bloodshade]

This sounds like an option from a NationStates issue.

Not complaining though. Come to think of it, golf courses are a waste of space and water.

[Pacomia]

Better than cutting homeless people in half.

[Thepeopl]

Well, as long as the houses build on the golf courses are sustainable and have a sedum roof covering, (or other green thatching) so the oxygen production won't drop. (Or a green park on the rooftop for recreation.)

And the buildings should be at least several storeys high.

And solar panels, heat wells etc are used to provide the electricity in the buildings.

With the caveat that only ppl whom own no property can live there ( rental because the park and community property needs to be maintained)

[Neu Leonstein]

Everywhere is going through a housing crisis.

Indeed.

And generally this is driven by the same factors everywhere. Part of the post-war project to build grand societies of content, prosperous nuclear family units that would get rid of the need for Marxist criticisms of our institutions was property ownership. So governments went out of their way to make sure everyone could be the lord of their little kingdom. Took different forms in different countries, sure. But the goal was generally the same. And it was very successful. Look at home ownership rates across places like the UK, Australia or even the US in the post-war years.

Problem is that once you've handed everyone a bit financial asset, usually one that people felt like they had to "earn" through mortgage repayments that were perceived to be burdensome (in that cute way in which every knobhead out there thinks of their own problems as the biggest crisis ever)... well, you've engineered one sure-fire way to either keep people content or piss them off royally.

So in short, house prices must always go up. A government presiding over a sustained drop in house prices has to deal with a population that feels more insecure and unfairly treated.

That dynamic hasn't gone away. And so any serious attempt to solve any housing crises is doomed from the start. Improving housing affordability can only really be done one of three ways... you can increase incomes, you can decrease mortgage repayment costs, or you can decrease house prices. But no one does how to do the first of these things, because underlying productivity growth has been pretty shit for decades now relative to the post-war period. And the second thing has been done to its very limits. Barely an economy left where interest rates aren't the lowest they've ever been.

Which leaves bringing down house prices, either by curtailing demand (e.g. removing tax incentives and subsidies) or by increasing supply. But, as we've seen, no government has an interest in doing this.

So no, the housing crisis will not be solved. Even the boomers dying won't help, because they'll leave their assets to their own kids, who will take their place as concerned (read: endlessly selfish) voters. Asset owners vs asset renters. One's standing in the economy and ultimately society determined primarily by one's access to investable capital. That's how the 19th century worked. And that's how much of the 21st century will work too.

[The Free Neanderthal Tribes]

You could always just tear down Labour offices and build apartments in their place.

It's not like they're doing anything worthwhile anyway.

Boom.
#Satire

I'm sa-tired right now. That one sa-tired me out. So original and clever.

[The Lone Alliance]

Even if you turned every single golf course into tenement housing complexes you'd still have a housing crisis.

[Purpelia]

All housing crisis's always come from the same source. And that's loans. Put extremely simplified the price of anything, and thus also houses, depends entirely on how much people are willing and capable to pay for them. Banks are allowed to loan idiotic amounts of money either as direct loans, mortgages etc. to people who want to buy houses which means that houses can cost that much money. If people were forbidden from taking out loans they can't repay within a couple years purchasing power of the individual would go down massively forcing prices to follow.

[Drongonia]

Or, instead of doing that, you could take real actionable approaches like:

- Loosening up city planning rules which strangle housing growth in all of the world's largest cities. Zoning laws are a big part of that.
- Give construction companies subsidies to incentivise taking on more expansive and costly housing projects.
- Allow young people coming out of trade school to join the workforce and work on government-backed projects as apprentices, instantly helping with supply on the building side.
- Survey which nature reserves and government land is not being actively inhabited/used and build there.
- Incentivise people moving out of the major centres to revitalise the rural/smaller towns and cities.
- Stop endless immigration, even if only for a few years, to allow house building to catch up to demand.
- Build more inner-city highrise buildings, but the legislatory side of that would tie into the first point.

Just some thoughts.

[The Free Neanderthal Tribes]

Or, instead of doing that, you could take real actionable approaches like:

- Loosening up city planning rules which strangle housing growth in all of the world's largest cities. Zoning laws are a big part of that.

You have some very good suggestions (although none would truly annoy golfers, so that's a downside ) but this one in particular, is something which would not help the UK at the moment.

Developers, when questioned about why more houses aren't being built and what can be done to get them to start building, have successfully lobbied the government to open up more and more land to new housing.

They lobby for more and more sites to be opened up, not so that more houses can be built (they have no intention of building on most of them,) but so that better land, the land we should be conserving, the land on which building will have the most negative impact on the environment, endemic species, and existing communities, but which is more sale-able, is opened up.

The same number of houses get built, but fewer of them on 'brown-land' where things have been built before, or where less impact will come from building, and more of them on 'green-land.'

[The Free Neanderthal Tribes]

Even if you turned every single golf course into tenement housing complexes you'd still have a housing crisis.

There are 1,872 golf courses in England, each is on average 74 acres, greater London has a population density of around 40 people per acre.

So at London's density, that's homes for: 5,541,120 people in England alone.

If you added Scotland and Wales's courses, you are looking at an additional 2,086,800.

[Page]

I like it, comrade.

[Skyhooked]

Flawless, yeah! But very, very temporary. Let's put my usual rant about "Banning things solves nothing" and look at issue's practical side.

All golf courts are no more and there are many awesome houses in their places. We solved the crisis! Woohoo! Let's break open the whiskey and beer and celebrate! But... immigrants and newborn locals came to celebrate this happy event, they socialize, they drink and they sing songs. Until the dead of the night. After this, they will have to find a place to sleep. But it turned out, that golf fields are not infinite and refined british gentlemen in hard hats could build only so many houses without excessie cramping.

Houses are full again, even worse than Japanese subway in peak hours. Even finest of bobbies couldn't shove all the people inside, and some ended up sleeping in fresh air under the stars, meditating about the housing crisis.

What's next? How to handle this? There are no gold courts in UK anymore to convert. Oh deer...

What to do? Ban some other sports? Deport all immigrants and accept no one? Invite Vault Tec to build underground housing? Make condoms free? State birth control? There are thousands of creative options for all sides of political compass.

[The Free Neanderthal Tribes]

What to do? Ban some other sports? Deport all immigrants and accept no one? Invite Vault Tec to build underground housing? Make condoms free? State birth control? There are thousands of creative options for all sides of political compass.

I've never been a fan of horse racing, so...

There's a small, and I mean tiny possibility, that when I say this would 'solve' the housing crisis, I do not genuinely believe that it will finally and for all time put an end to housing shortages. And that this may be a tongue in cheek suggestion, designed to parody the 'Britain is full' argument, which makes as much sense now as it did when people were saying it in the 1890s. And to, in a climate of austerity, where we are told we all must 'accept sacrifices for the common good' jokingly highlight a tiny sacrifice that a relatively small number of primarily financially-comfortable people could make (not playing a boring game,) that could (in a theoretical world, although possibly not in a real one) make the lives of many other people better, and alleviate a major societal problem.

As I say, tiny chance.

[Skyhooked]

But what to do, when all the sports and entertainments, that take some land are banned. And all national parks, preserves, plus not so good land is all but used up? So there ain't nothing that can be sacrificed.

[The New California Republic]

Many golf courses tend not to be near anywhere of note, so this plan would result in the creation of new towns in their own right. So you'd need to create some means of earning a living too. There would be no reason for people to live in these places until a means of earning a living is created. To be honest such an idea is complete horseshit. It'd likely have extremely negative consequences for towns where golf courses are situated, such as St. Andrews etc, where a large part of the local economy depends on golf.

[Forsher]

Some of the things people have raised here are sensible... others less so.

Urban golf courses are very unpopular among economists and planners... the people who golf can usually easily access courses in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, those who are priced out of "nice" areas cannot afford to play golf. Consequently golf courses subsidise the wealth classes and either steal park or housing land from everyone else.

House prices are also the shittiest measure of affordability out there ... they are completely unfit for purpose, but unlike the number of pirates globally look like they might measure affordability. Very, very few people pay the face value of a property ... instead they pay their debt, and now is an age of super-low interest rates.

To add to Neu Leonstein's analysis... part of the issue is that people usually buy their budget, do always put themselves at the limit of what they can afford and so expose themselves to shocks. This would be okay if they took risk into account properly but they don't (and as the GFC shows nor does anyone else). Also most of the Anglosphere has what's called an asset based welfare state, which means society is set up to make sure retirees without assets are fucked... and this gives another incentive to keep prices up.

TL;DR home ownership is... undesirable socially but a private imperative (even when ignoring cultural values)

[The Free Neanderthal Tribes]

Many golf courses tend not to be near anywhere of note, so this plan would result in the creation of new towns in their own right. So you'd need to create some means of earning a living too. There would be no reason for people to live in these places until a means of earning a living is created. To be honest such an idea is complete horseshit. It'd likely have extremely negative consequences for towns where golf courses are situated, such as St. Andrews etc, where a large part of the local economy depends on golf.

Aside from you missing the tone of the post by a touch, almost all UK golf courses are situated a very short drive from a major town, and have good road links designed to handle moderate peaks of traffic. That is one of the reasons why they are more suitable hosts for housing than most other locations.

And, jeez, fine. If you really, genuinely feel like it needs to be stated, that it isn't blindingly obvious enough to go without being spelled out in this light-hearted tongue in cheek thread:

Yes, dear, St. Andrews is obviously more use economically in its present form.

[The New California Republic]

Many golf courses tend not to be near anywhere of note, so this plan would result in the creation of new towns in their own right. So you'd need to create some means of earning a living too. There would be no reason for people to live in these places until a means of earning a living is created. To be honest such an idea is complete horseshit. It'd likely have extremely negative consequences for towns where golf courses are situated, such as St. Andrews etc, where a large part of the local economy depends on golf.

Aside from you missing the tone of the post by a touch, almost all UK golf courses are situated a very short drive from a major town, and have good road links designed to handle moderate peaks of traffic. That is one of the reasons why they are more suitable hosts for housing than most other locations.

But again it'd still entail building a new town. And if this idea is tongue in cheek as you suggest, then any discussion of the idea is pointless.