To add further, given construction prices in Oxford and London, CEA could have built a brand-new office/hotel/retreat center of the same size for less than half the price.
The difficulty in building, aside from the fact that CEA is not a construction firm, is all in the planning permission, not the cost of materials and labour. I would be very surprised if CEA happened to have a comparative advantage at overcoming one of the main impediments to UK economic growth over the last 70 years.
For context, here’s Matt Yglesias on the state of UK housing policy:
The nature of the UK housing issue should be familiar to Americans, especially those who read Slow Boring. There is a lot of demand for living in Greater London (and also Oxford, which isn’t far away), and that demand is not met, which leads to high prices.
But the extent of the problem can be hard for an American to grasp.
For example, as best I can tell, the average size of a home in the United Kingdom is 1033 square feet versus 968 square feet in New York City, so it’s not that Greater London is experiencing a housing squeeze comparable to Greater New York City — the UK as a whole is experiencing a housing squeeze similar to that of NYC. London is worse, and not coincidentally, the UK doesn’t have an equivalent of Dallas or Phoenix or Atlanta — a big, cheap city that is growing fast.
The difficulty in building, aside from the fact that CEA is not a construction firm, is all in the planning permission, not the cost of materials and labour. I would be very surprised if CEA happened to have a comparative advantage at overcoming one of the main impediments to UK economic growth over the last 70 years.
For context, here’s Matt Yglesias on the state of UK housing policy: