England is building houses, but not in the right places

By THE DATA TEAM

ENGLAND has been struggling to meet its residents’ burgeoning demand for housing. In 2004 2.31 people lived in the average English household. Over the following decade, the country’s population rose by 4.1m while its housing stock rose by only 1.7m, a ratio of 2.44 per new household. Estimates for 2015 indicate that the appetite for lodging will not subside: the country will have to cram another half a million people into 170,000 new properties, a cramped rate of 2.52.

Moreover, the housing shortage is not evenly distributed throughout the country but concentrated in areas of high demand. The London borough of Newham is now the most crowded in the country, with an average of 3.04 people sharing a property. It would require 16,600 extra homes to return Newham to its 2004 density, and 33,300 for it to match the national average—more than the total built in London last year. Conversely, other areas of the country have built even faster than their population growth has warranted. There were 100 more people living in Copeland, Cumbria, in the north-west of England, in 2014 compared with 2004, while the number of homes there rose by more than 1,000. And even in London, wealthy Kensington and Chelsea in the west of the city houses less than two people per dwelling, making it one of the lowest-density areas in England.