> 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
Why the focus on second homes? I would care more about utilisation of homes by home-owners: walk around London at night, so many apartments are dark. The locals say investors own them.
The French are richer than the British. They have more stuff and a higher quality of life. It would be good for more British people to have more stuff and a higher quality of life. Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence, and for more people to have a holiday home. Those are all good. Focussing on utilisation is Green Party, NIMBY, degrowth, pro-poverty thinking. It sees a fixed pie and thinks how to distribute it instead of trying to make everything better for everyone.
More housing. A holiday home should be an utterly normal thing for a middle class family like in Finland or Spain.
Agreed. Thankfully we know what it takes to make housing a crappy investment vehicle. Build more housing. Build so much housing that returns on capital invested are flat, live Tokyo since 2000, or negative, like Seattle over the last five years.
Make building housing legal again.
Also. Renters deserve housing too. Restricting housing to the owner occupied is a great way to hate things by social class but I see no reason to further favour a population that’s richer and more powerful than the rest of the population already.
Greed, combined with a housing shortage, and the housebuilding that is going on being poorly planned (no new infrastructure, as many homes crammed onto small patches of land as possible, usually designed around car ownership but without space for the cars, etc) and focused on maximum profit.
There are more 2nd homes in France because rural housing is relatively cheap and there are lots of land. However the way the employment market works in France has screwed the younger people, I think. It's easy to stay in a job once you have one but hard to get started as a younger person. If I had to guess, France, Italy, Spain etc are in way more decline than the UK as a whole and Germany is spending hard to prop up a lot of the EU.
That's not true. In France you pay both taxe foncière (on any and all property you own) and taxe d'habitation (unless you're renting it for the whole year) on second(and more) homes you own. With some exceptions like newbuilds, newly renovated for better insulation, in very rural places, etc.
Regarding housing (and land ownership) specifically, France is over twice the size of the UK with a similar population. So there are underlying constraints that cannot easily be papered over with policy.
I'm not so sure counting lights on at any given moment is a good measure of occupancy.
The resident might be at work, at the gym, out for dinner or at the cinema, at a friend's house, in another room, might have good blackout curtains and only use lamps for ambience instead of the ceiling light, on holiday. I bet if you stood outside one of these buildings where "most of the lights are off" for the entire evening, you'd see lights come on and off, and in aggregate find that most of the flats were in fact occupied.
By the same logic, I could look outside my window right now, count zero cars driving down the road and declare it a useless waste that nobody uses.
Why the focus on second homes? I would care more about utilisation of homes by home-owners: walk around London at night, so many apartments are dark. The locals say investors own them.