Tackling London’s Housing Crisis

Abstract

The origins of London’s housing crisis can be traced to a failure to provide the number and types of homes that are required. This resulted in prices and rents rising rapidly, with more than a quarter of Londoners living in poverty once housing costs are taken into account. Tackling London’s housing crisis will be a marathon and not a sprint, with a need to build 66, 000 homes every year for the next 25 years. In order to meet housing need the majority of these homes will need to be affordable (subsidised) tenures. Central to addressing this challenge is to diversify who builds new homes, where they are located and how they are built. Besides that, land supply must increase and greater public investment is needed to sustain and support homebuilding. In order to build more homes, new players must enter the market to complement the work of traditional private sector developers. Action to help Londoners must not be delayed, immediate actions are needed to ensure that as many of the new homes as possible are genuinely affordable, to offer greater stability and tenant rights and to invest in places for homeless Londoners to live.