There's silly housing policies and then there's stupid ones

We'll leave it to you to work out which one this is, silly or stupid:

Londoners should be given the chance to buy a new type of state-built, price-capped home that could only ever be sold to a first-time buyer, according to David Lammy, a Labour mayoral candidate.

Announcing new details of his plans to address the housing crisis in the capital on Monday, Lammy said his plan would create a new type of tenure in the UK housing market and see the state showing “hands-on leadership” in housing.

Lammy, one of the six contenders hoping to be named as Labour’s candidate for mayor in the 2016 election, said he wanted to build 30,000 of what he described as new “first-time homes” with the intention they would provide affordable housing for Londoners for generations to come.

The homes, which he said could be available for as little as £150,000, would be built on public land and sold with conditions on the leasehold intended to stop the price rising in line with normal London house price inflation.

The buyers would be able to sell for up to 10% above cost price, but only if they had lived in the home for a long time. For those trying to sell after a shorter period, the cap on the amount by which the price could rise above cost would be “significantly lower than 10%”.

Well, no, we won't leave it to you: this is a stupid policy, not merely a silly one.

There's two ways you can ration things: by price or by queues. And if you fix the price then you will be rationing by queue. Thus the inevitable outcome of this plan will be a vast waiting list of people wanting to buy this price controlled housing. The difference between this and standard housing association or council housing is only that people will be paying a mortgage to live in it rather than rent. Which isn't in fact all that much of a difference.

If there is in fact public land upon which housing can be usefully built then sure, housing should usefully be built upon that public land. But it should of course then be sold at the market price for to do otherwise means a subsidy from all other taxpayers to those who gain that below market price. That is, the politicians would just be buying votes with our money again.