Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long time.
Partly changing social customs - and you could, legitimately I think, argue some of this is down to immigration/multiculturalism - the old landlady/boarding house model, for example, which provided a LOT of cheap and relatively comfortable roofs over heads, was based on higher trust and cultural commonality than exists today.
But a lot of demand is driven by people living alone, either due to family breakdown, old age, or just out of personal choice.
On that basis if you wanted to increase supply, levers you could pull are an even more favourable tax treatment of rent-a-room schemes (although it's already pretty generous - people just don't want to), land value taxes to encourage under-occupiers to downsize, inheritance tax changes for the same (no more favourable "family home" treatment relative to cash or pension assets) and, more difficult this, legal and planning instruments to encourage suburban densification, get streets that are largely full of decaying HMOs knocked down and replaced by mid-rise which is fit for purpose.
> Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long time.
It has nothing to do with what I read on the news. It is simply numbers. You can come up with all these crazy schemes to increase supply which probably won't happen, or you could reduce demand that could literally be done tomorrow if they wanted to.
Partly changing social customs - and you could, legitimately I think, argue some of this is down to immigration/multiculturalism - the old landlady/boarding house model, for example, which provided a LOT of cheap and relatively comfortable roofs over heads, was based on higher trust and cultural commonality than exists today.
But a lot of demand is driven by people living alone, either due to family breakdown, old age, or just out of personal choice.
On that basis if you wanted to increase supply, levers you could pull are an even more favourable tax treatment of rent-a-room schemes (although it's already pretty generous - people just don't want to), land value taxes to encourage under-occupiers to downsize, inheritance tax changes for the same (no more favourable "family home" treatment relative to cash or pension assets) and, more difficult this, legal and planning instruments to encourage suburban densification, get streets that are largely full of decaying HMOs knocked down and replaced by mid-rise which is fit for purpose.