The Economist: "London’s property woes are getting worse: Faulty land-use regulation is throttling the capital"

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"AT FIRST glance London looks unstoppable. It is the most important city in Europe, perhaps the world. In the past decade its economy has grown twice as fast as Britain's and its population 50% faster. Scratch the surface, however, and its situation looks less good. The motor of the British economy is becoming less productive and more unequal. The fundamental problem is how land is used and regulated.

"Over the last full economic cycle, from 1993 to 2008, the cost of a hectare of residential land in London increased by more than 300% in real terms, to more than £8m ($15m). Commercial-property prices rocketed up as well. Now less-productive industries are moving out. The supply of floor space put to industrial uses such as factories and warehousing has fallen by half in the past five years, suggest data from JLL, a property firm. At the same time London's population is growing more skilled. Over the past decade the proportion of people with university degrees has increased much more quickly inside the capital than outside it."

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The Guardian:
"Onerous planning regulations and cheap debt pushed house prices into the stratosphere – and it’s in the interests of the political elite to keep them there"

"House prices have risen by 10% in the last year, the Halifax announced last week. Whoopeedoo. What that means is that the intergenerational wealth divide just rose by another 10% – and anyone born after 1985 is going to find it 10% harder to ever buy a home.

"There is perhaps no greater manifestation of the wealth gap in this country than who owns a house and who doesn't, and yet it's so unnecessary. Ignoring land prices for the moment, houses do not cost a lot of money to build – a quick search online shows you can buy the materials for a three-bed timber-framed house for less than £30,000; in China a 3D printer can build a basic home for less than £3,000 – and the building cost of the houses we already have has long since been paid.

"How can it be that, in the liberal, peaceful, educated society that is 21st-century Britain, a generation is priced out? These are not times of war, nor are they, for the most part, periods of national emergency, so why should one couple be able to settle down and start a family and another not, by virtue of the fact that one was born 15 years earlier than the other?"