If you can give me some tangible reasons why they are not good for the individual - and I don't mean macro reasons like sustaining the unsustainable, then I may have some sympathy, but at the moment all I have read is effectively, "Don't like them, want my own and all my own...." - that's not particularly insightful is it ?
Well you will always struggle to come up with immediate reasons why a whopping big subsidy is bad for the individual in the short term. You will always have to look at the bigger picture.
My main problem with it is summed up by the paragraph in "Better Homes, Greener Cities";
The problem with UK housing is clearest in the concern
over affordability, where there is a contradiction at the
heart of policy. There is a desire to minimise the amount of
land being built on by redeveloping existing urban land.
But in the face of increasing demand this results in rising
land and house prices. These high prices are a consequence
of planning policy but they are also, economically, a part of
that policy. Homes are then said to be ‘unaffordable’; key
workers are excluded from decent housing. This is followed
by a demand that housing should be built which is ‘affordable’,
in other words, subsidised. But this then limits the
land available for unsubsidised ‘market’ housing, so the
price of that housing further increases. Some housing is
made more affordable but only by making the rest less so.
This effect is magnified if developers are forced to pay a
levy for affordable housing or have to make a percentage of
the development affordable once planning permission is
granted.
So the main problem for the individual is that when they come to buy their next house, the price is ultimately higher than if the government hadn't been using money for subsidising key workers or building "affordable" housing schemes.
Besides why would you diminish the macro economic effects, surely it's valid for us to point out these schemes favour a few over the many and don't target the root cause of the problem. Is there a more valid point you can ever make! |