Tobias Dänzer comments on Why did CEA buy Wytham Abbey?

[Tobias Dänzer]

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.

Worst of all, as Anthony Breach from the Centre for Cities points out, English homes are getting smaller over time because the market is so squeezed.