How to solve the housing problem

We have an outbreak of mysteriousness in the British economy:

Buy-to-let investors are swooping to snap up property bargains as buyer demand disappears amid the housing market downturn.

Between January and November, the share of offers made by buy-to-let investors on properties that had no other bids more than doubled from 14pc to 37pc, analysis by Hamptons estate agents found.

This was the highest proportion on record in at least four years and was far above the 20pc pre-pandemic benchmark in November 2019.

Rent is the income that can be made from owning that capital asset, the buy to let house. The price of the capital asset has gone down, the income to be made from it is going up. Therefore more people are buying the asset in order to increase the supply of the thing that has gone up in price. This will moderate the price increase by increasing the supply of it.

Such mysteriousness, it’s almost as if there’s some set of rules, incentives even, that govern how people react to the world changing around them. Hopefully someone will be able to put aside some time to write the book which will explain this miraculousness to us all.

Until then, and while we all remain entirely without a clue, we’d better use politics to sort out our problems for us:

A cross-party group of MPs is seeking to change the law so childcare is treated as an infrastructure issue like schools, GPs and public transport, placing a duty on major housebuilders to ensure new developments have sufficient provision to match an expanding population.

The plan, led by the Labour MP Stella Creasy, comes as an amendment to the levelling up and regeneration bill, which returns to the Commons on Tuesday for the final part of its committee stage.

Yes, that will clearly work. Rents have leapt, so we need more housing that can be let out to people who would like to have somewhere to rent. At which point we’re going to limit the supply of housing that can be rented. Here the limitation is that we must first, before building houses to be rented out, ensure a supply of young women with too few GCSEs to gain access to a grievance studies course. That being where the country has traditionally gained its childcare labour force. Fortunately, given the modern education system, this might not be all that much of a limit.

Yes, well done, politics clearly solves our problems better than appealing to some mysteriousness like an invisible hand or something. How could anyone believe otherwise?