So, how was the housing crisis solved then?

A rather good article by David Olusoga* contains this:

While the 1921 census is a record of a moment of unique trauma, it arrives in the public domain at another fraught and disorienting point in British history, making it impossible not to draw comparisons between then and now.

The nation of 1921, like that of 2022, was afflicted by a deep and socially corrosive housing crisis.

The 20s didn’t in fact solve that housing problem although there was much trying to do so. There were advances, a possibly apocryphal story has Bath City Council declaring that a working man needed a garden large enough to grow the family’s vegetables plus the room to keep a pig. It is true that there are council built houses on the south of Bath today built at that time with enjoyably large gardens and they’re highly desired as a result. This also something that wouldn’t be allowed today as a result of that putrid (no lesser description seems appropriate) insistence that 30 to 35 dwellings must be packed into each single hectare of land.

What did solve that housing crisis was the rampant free market boom of the 1930s. Which was, of course, the last time that it was possible to build houses people want to live in where people want to live. Since then - with that little interregnum of not much building being done at all - we’ve all been constrained by the planning system which insists, in its wisdom, on not being allowed to build housing people wish to live in where people wish to live. The end result being that Britain now produces the smallest new housing in Europe. Smaller than vastly poorer places as well as richer.

The thing that has changed in the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. Which all does indeed simply ban the building of housing that people would like to live in where people would like to live.

Fortunately this makes the crafting of a solution rather simple. Blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors.

You know it makes sense.

*Yes, we know, we know, wonders will never cease etc