City Planner
Samer Bagaeen MRTPI FRICS: Unlocking the housing market
Picking up where we left off in last week’s column, when I discussed that anybody from anywhere can buy a flat or a house in your city, let’s say in Brighton and Hove, sooner or later, the people who live and work here will not be able to afford to do so for much longer.
As we saw last week, rents were becoming difficult and unaffordable. The solution to the housing problem may not be increasing supply. It could be cutting demand. What the country can do, as a temporary measure, to please and appease, is to ban the sale of property to foreigners as they do in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway and Australia.
Denmark prohibits the sale of property to non-EU nationals
Denmark prohibits the sale of property to non-EU nationals unless they have lived in Denmark for five years. Finland and Malta can also restrict EU citizens from buying second homes. What Brighton and Hove can do, and this may irk a few people, is limit the number of property sales by restricting the numbers of buyers coming from outside and the city and from East and West Sussex.
We could limit this to stopping those outside the city and county from buying new build properties as investments. We could limit this to new build or by geography i.e. only allow Londoners to buy property in Mile Oak or Whitehawk. This should stop not only the rich investors coming from Malaysia, Singapore, Russia and elsewhere, it should also stop Londoners cashing in on their property value and snapping a house in Brighton and Hove trading down the housing ladder. Londoners cannot trade up most of the time so by trading down they get more for their money.
