david_chisnall on Nostr: I wish people who talk about housing shortages would also look at internal migration ...
I wish people who talk about housing shortages would also look at internal migration and remote work. I used to live in Swansea, where houses are cheap and work remotely. I bought a two bedroom maisonette overlooking the sea for under £100K in 2010.
I moved to Cambridge for an in-person job 12 years ago. House prices look to have almost doubled in Cambridge since I moved. House prices in Swansea have increased by under 20%. The gap is now far wider than it was. A quick search on RightMove shows 15 properties (including a few houses) for sale in easy walking distance of the city centre in Swansea for under £100K and a lot more with a small increase. The same search in Cambridge (in both cases, filtering out retirement homes and shared ownership) finds on thing but it’s actually a weird investment scheme.
There are lots of places in the UK that have lots of houses but no jobs and people are moving away from them to places where there are jobs.
If we had tax incentives for companies that hire remote workers in places with lower house prices, for example, we might start to reverse that trend. And, as you spread the well-paid people across the country, you also create jobs in shops, restaurants, and so on.
The French government has subsidies fibre to the premises across the whole country. I don’t yet know what impact this will have, but my guess is that you’ll start to see a reverse in the flight of young people from the countryside (probably not quickly, but as people realise that they can buy a large house with a swimming pool and decent garden for the same price as a small flat in Paris and can do the same job, the attractions of the big cities will appeal to fewer of them).
I moved to Cambridge for an in-person job 12 years ago. House prices look to have almost doubled in Cambridge since I moved. House prices in Swansea have increased by under 20%. The gap is now far wider than it was. A quick search on RightMove shows 15 properties (including a few houses) for sale in easy walking distance of the city centre in Swansea for under £100K and a lot more with a small increase. The same search in Cambridge (in both cases, filtering out retirement homes and shared ownership) finds on thing but it’s actually a weird investment scheme.
There are lots of places in the UK that have lots of houses but no jobs and people are moving away from them to places where there are jobs.
If we had tax incentives for companies that hire remote workers in places with lower house prices, for example, we might start to reverse that trend. And, as you spread the well-paid people across the country, you also create jobs in shops, restaurants, and so on.
The French government has subsidies fibre to the premises across the whole country. I don’t yet know what impact this will have, but my guess is that you’ll start to see a reverse in the flight of young people from the countryside (probably not quickly, but as people realise that they can buy a large house with a swimming pool and decent garden for the same price as a small flat in Paris and can do the same job, the attractions of the big cities will appeal to fewer of them).