"Hi, my AI marketing system has identified a tangential connection between our services and your tiny charity, can we set up a call so we can try and sell you something irrelevant to your work that you can't afford?" Getting on for a quarter of my inbox these days... god bless AI.

Which is a long way of agreeing with you in spirit, that it's about the different things we expect the state to fund, and the cost/benefit of the state investing in better places for low income communities.

We see this esp when CLTs want to develop shared facilities, or cohousing amenities, which HE won't enable/fund, and which cannot be built & maintained by rental income.

Nor is it very affordable for the leaseholders (via RtB) who get stung with enormous bills when councils try to get on top of the backlog of poor maintenance.

I agree it shouldn't mean poor people = poor maintenance/facilities. But I suppose the reality is that with a lot of historic stock, the rent alone (even with housing benefit) doesn't adequately fund it, and councils were kneecapped in the 80s from cross-subsidy from general fund.

Though I've heard academics say if your objective is to tackle housing poverty the UK system is better overall.

Contrast with the UK where it was often built cheaply in the 60s and with whopping debts in the 70s, maintenance catastrophically under-funded from the 80s, and also targeted at those most in need (with least income) plus RtB, and few examples where tenants have any agency or sense of ownership.

My understanding of social housing in Switzerland (as in much of the continent) is that it's less focused on poverty/need so the income profile is more balanced, may be part of the reason? There's also a lot of co-op housing which often requires buying shares of up to £5k to rent a flat.

I love this!

I can endorse the quality :) I'll have to look out for the others.

Yes I think I'm getting at the latter, but I'd be interested in how you undo 45 years of damage to get that system working at that scale again. For the last 15 years we seem to be caught in a loop of low ambition and diminished capacity.

That's a good point. I guess the (v.senior) analyst's point is that (in theory!) LHA and other benefits flex to meet the changing need. The counterargument might be the instability this still leaves them with, all the friction in the system, not having a secure home. Plus the human cost - not just £

but I've never seen anyone try to articulate a longer-term horizon to structurally change the housing market, whether 'back to the 60s' or some other scenario, in which social rent again makes up a very large part of housebuilding and is seen as an investment in essential infrastructure.

It would be really interesting to see a 10 or 20 year plan, a sort of housing industrial strategy, exploring how the different moving parts could be brought together, and accounting for fluctuations in the dependencies you mention. The govt has been doing a bit of this focused on re-capitalising RPs