‘Xac’ly - Britain needs at least 5 million more second homes
It’s good to see people realising one of the things we here have been saying for some time. This is, after all, what we consider to be our job, to state what’s considered to be wholly out there yet true and then watch in wonder as the society at large comes around to recognising that truth.
The best way to get more people to holiday in Britain would be to follow the Nordic example. Over the years they have built enough houses that the majority of people in Sweden and Finland either own, or through family and close friends, have access to a second home in the countryside.
That justification of where people holiday doesn’t do it for us, no, but the observation itself is sound.
But the figures are stark: across Europe, about 25% of homeowners have a second property, compared with just 3% in the UK.
As we’ve said:
As we all know we’re told that we should live more like Europeans. In flats. You know, stack-a-prole worker flats because that’s communal, social, and that protects our precious natural countryside. As we’ve pointed out there’s a problem with this. The Europeans don’t live - not solely - in stack-a-prole worker flats.
This then means that when likely lads propose a development of townhouses and mansion flats they’re missing the other part of the technology required to make it all work:
This new Cambridge suburb - so where are you putting the country cottages?
Europe has, roughly enough, two housing technologies. Flats plus a country shack and the des res suburban house with front and back garden. Flats without the country shack does not work - despite the insistences of the planners for getting on for a century now that the British must live in flats. The refusal to allow anyone to build housing on decent sized gardens - those insistences that development must be at 30 and even 50 dwellings per hectare - plus punitive taxation of anyone daring to have a shack is to completely misunderstand the basic technologies at issue.
But then Hayek, obviously, the centre never does have the information to understand what it’s trying to plan, does it?
We don’t mind which solution is chosen. In fact, we’re pretty sure that some will prefer the flat in town with the rural idyll - certainly been true of the British haute bourgeoisie for centuries now - and some will prefer that des res with front and back. And, you know, we might therefore have an open market in planning so that the actual consumers can choose which they’d prefer? Now there’s an idea, eh?
Tim Worstall