Thank you for visiting our blog.  A little over 13 years ago (17 June 2008) the first posts on this blog helped launch the Spatial Economics Research Centre (SERC). And in the 468 posts since - clocking up just under 2.4m views - we have covered spatial issues ranging from regeneration, housing supply and prices, HS2, the high street, planning reforms, superfast broadband, Brexit and the impact of Covid-19 on the housing market.  The blog outlasted SERC - which became part of the Urban Programme at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) in September 2015.  Many of us who u ..read more

By Paul Cheshire The white paper, Planning for the future, published in early August 2020 represents the first serious attempt to reform our dysfunctional land use planning system since its inception. Although the Barker report’s diagnosis of how our planning system caused our housing shortage were well researched, the recommendations for change did no more than paint some steely surfaces over the crumbling fabric of planning. They were fixes for an unfixable system. This white paper promises more. Its recommendations tackle two of the four policy-created barriers to building enough houses of ..read more

By Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber To speculate usefully about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Britain’s housing markets one needs a clear analytical understanding of how our housing markets work and what forces cause them to change. Given the extreme uncertainty about the impact and evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, anything in this blog is in some sense speculation, but we hope informed speculation. A recent academic paper analysing the impacts on house prices and rents of historic epidemics in Amsterdam and Paris found only relatively short lived and localised reductions in h ..read more

by Paul Cheshire, Professor of Economic Geography, LSE. To any reasonable observer, the evidence that Britain is suffering from a housing shortage of crisis proportions seems clear-cut. It is obvious looking at the data that there has been a critical problem of underbuilding for a generation or more. New housing supply is best measured as how many houses are built – ‘completions’. In the 30 years 1959-1988, 7,449,160 houses were built in England: in the 30 years 1989-2018, only 3,328,850. That suggests a shortfall of 3,120,310 homes over the last 30 years relative to the previous trend. Other ..read more

Air pollution tends to be worst in large cities and their urban cores. As a result, it is urban air pollution that makes the headlines when the media report on pollution and its effects (see, for example, this, this and this).  Since it is mainly an urban problem, air pollution exposure is shaped by urban planning and policy. In particular, it can be affected by population density, the defining feature of urbanization that distinguishes cities from smaller towns and villages. In a recent paperwe study how air pollution - as measured by fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration - is sha ..read more

By Christian Hilber, LSE Department of Geography and Environment c.hilber@lse.ac.uk In May 2016 the local residents of St. Ives approved a referendum that stops newly built houses in town from being used as a second home. A few other Cornish towns have followed suit. And tourist destinations in other parts of the country are contemplating similar policies. The Economist, the Timesand the BBC recently  pointed to unintended consequences of these policies: higher prices for existing homes, less construction of newly built homes and an adverse effect on the local economy—mainly tourist and constr ..read more

The dominance of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage is a defining feature of the United States’ housing market. For a brief period in the mid-2000s, however, this dominance was challenged by the popularity of non-traditional mortgage products that allowed borrowers easier access to credit through variable interest rates with teaser periods, extended terms, and interest only or negatively amortizing repayment schedules. In effect, borrowers could obtain a mortgage with lower monthly payments in the short-term than were available through the 30-year fixed rate mortgage. As Figure 1 shows, the sha ..read more

Britain has an extensive canal and navigable river network, which played a vital role in transporting goods from the Industrial Revolution through the 18th, 19th and early part of the 20th Century. Their use for transporting freight had all but disappeared by the mid-20th Century and many had fallen into disrepair or been abandoned. Since then, the canal and waterway network has been restored and developed into a potentially valuable environmental and recreational amenity, providing the venue for extensive range of tourism and leisure activities and a habitat for wildlife. Canals also provide ..read more