What's Wrong With The UK Housing Market in 2 News Reports

The city I live in increased in size by 10,000 (officially) last year. Over the same time, less than 1000 houses were built here. This pattern has been repeated for the last 2 decades, with predictable results:

• Soaring property prices (10x the average wage!)
• Awful properties (old houses are larger, better proportioned, better built)
• Soaring rents (what happens when you've got increasing population & not increased housing)
• Soaring homelessness (it's doubled over the past 5 years in this & many other UK cities)
• An ugly environment - the houses are just ugly, they are now built on tiny plots. It's the 21st century for gawd sake! We should be in the midst of an explosion of innovative designs. There's all sorts of innovative materials to build with, but we are stuck with the same boring box repeated over & over:

You get this repeated over & over again in every town & city - a pastiche (poor copy) of houses from an earlier time. Characterless, plastic windows, no privacy or adequate outdoor living space, garages too small to fit a car in! In a free market these little boxes of despair would remain unsold. But it's not a free market, it's a market so warped by government that new houses are smaller, uglier & less well built than those of 100 years ago.

Anyone who knows this city, knows that it is famously ugly - post industrial, lots of motorway fly-overs. In this environment what is the need for planning officers that get to say if you can have that extension to your house, or build a new house in that disused land? It's a grotesque joke.

Here are the two news items:

1). https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/03/theresa-may-urged-to-force-councils-to-build-more-homes

Here we have central government 'urging' local government to build more housing. The same central government that has presided over 20 years of 250,000 - 350,000 net migration PER YEAR while house building ran at only a fraction of that. A central government that has reduced local gov. funding by 30 -50% over the past few years, and that created a law that meant if local gov built any houses, they'd have to sell them at a discount (so there was no incentive to build in the first place). What a bunch of... Fffing...bleeeping...frigging..... (etc)

2). http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/north-worcestershire-golf-club-travellers-13569519

Here we have local planning officers refusing permission for 950 houses to be built on a former golf course in the city.

I despair. Why are politicians so utterly useless? Why do their actions just make situations worse? Why do we put up with them?