Anyone who says "X is what we need to do" over and over again will be part of a weird cult eventually and that's not a bad thing regardless of whether X is desirable.
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RTB was one of the worst policies of all time, led to a permanent reduction in the annual construction of new houses by about 100,000 per year through a massive reduction in state housebuilding and no corresponding increase in private building https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1051137717300165-fx2.jpg …
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Interesting!
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if you have to sell council houses at a huge discount to tenants, it's not economical to ever build new ones. so they were replaced by a demand-subsidy Housing Benefit (think a guaranteed means-tested section 8) which has become a spiraling gov cost & pumps up private rents
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I see. So it was an ongoing policy and not a one-off?
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it's *still* an ongoing policy. the Tories are starting to realise that housing demand subsidies being a 23.4 billion per year current expenditure is unsustainable so they removed restrictions on muni borrowing to build this year, but RTB is a totem for them
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Huh. Wild.
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That was the main plan to win over working people, make them homeowners that benefitted from (credit-fuelled) home price rises (enabled by financial deregulation).
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Also ties in with Niall Ferguson’s idea of a property owning democracy. Property owners have a stake in the system and become reluctant to overthrow it
End of conversation
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