Despite what the headlines might sometimes suggest, the housing crisis is not one, uniform problem faced by the whole nation, but rather a series of local and very different crises. The ratio between average house prices and average yearly earnings, for example, varies wildly across the country. In Kensington and Chelsea, the median person would have to work for over 30 years to pay off the average home there, as compared to fewer than 4 in County Durham. And while there are many exceptions – not least of all tourist hotspots – often the housing crisis is at its worst in urban areas; most notably London, but also Surrey, where almost 90% of people live in urban areas, but the average home is over 12 times the average earnings.
This cannot be alleviated unless we build more homes; however, building homes in urban areas presents unique challenges. They are densely populated and short on land supply. Room size in the UK has already shrunk by over 30% since the 1970s, and houses in England are some of the smallest in Europe. But ingenious ideas can go some of the way to mending this.
