You don't make houses cheaper by making them more expensive to build.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Doing a house is so much harder than doing a skyscraper.
It's cheaper to buy a house and finance it than it is to rent in many markets.
Why should I build an asset when I can buy it more cheaply than you can build it?
For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.
A home is a home, and excess supply leads to prices falling.
I tell you, it is easier to build a grand opera or a city center than to build a personal house.
Tackling affordable housing via land use planning won't necessarily solve the problem.
It's easy to underestimate the real cost of home ownership.
No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.
Why can't we, with a more intelligent policy, actually have houses that are affordable, built at higher densities than they are at the moment and built on brownfield sites.