There is no doubt in my mind, not for a second, that houses are not being build in order to keep house prices up. There are huge swathes of brown field sites in Liverpool which are being left empty. A good area of which is off Smithdown Road if anyone knows that area. It currently looks like some kind of comedy park.
As in, say, Burnley there is no real housing shortage in Liverpool. People want to live in "nice" areas from where they can travel daily to work. I guess the people of Liverpool would generally prefer not to live on brownfield sites surrounded by the usual detritus of post industrialisation and given the chance would "flee" to
greener more pleasant surrounding areas. Much the same as people in other old industrial/commercial prefer the greener more spacious suburbs.
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The evidence to back up your suspicion is the fact that the big volume house builders ' land banks have been growing steadily over the past five years, but they refuse to develop if they have to include any significant affordable housing in the development and /or the planning authority requires them to provide any meaningful benefit to the local community via section 108 payments.
Tthey instead bully and blackmail local planning authorities into granting permission on unnecessary greenfield sites for yet more 'executive' developments - the most wasteful type of residential development that contributes nothing to resolving our mounting crisis.
Builders are in business to make money for shareholders. If they didn't run the business for the benefit of the shareholders they would be failing in their primary responsibility. If it is more profitable to keep land undeveloped as land values increase than build houses and sell them and the land at current values then that is what they will do. Perhaps public bodies could be organised to have building land CPOd and then contract to have houses built on that land and sell on at cost price. Perhaps that would increase supply. Of course influential people who would see the value of land assets would howl at the injustice of being robbed by the state - just think of the Daily Mail headlines.
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There was a "mini-ice age" for a period of time in the last millennium when "frost fairs" were held on the frozen waters of the River Thames, just to give one example.
Indeed yes. But wasn't the Thames much wider and slower flowing in
London than today's constricted channel making it more likely that ice would develop. But I agreere there was a mini ice age. And before that there were vineyards in what is now Hampshire.
I have a feeling that there is much money to be made from global warning research funded by people with an interest in talking it up. Truly independent vigorous research by disinterested and very bright academics into the subject would be most welcome - but who would pay?
