"Ferdinand Mount: Why we owe it to our children to build, build, build"

Link to Evening Standard

"Building houses is one of the things that the British used to be quite good at, like roasting beef and writing poetry. Before the war, we regularly built 300,000 houses a year, mainly private developments. In the Fifties and Sixties, again we built more than 300,000 houses a year, this time nearly half of them council houses. 

"But in the past few years we have struggled to pass the 100,000 mark. As a result, we have brought upon ourselves a dire housing shortage.

"The signs are unmistakable, certainly in London and the South-East. Private rents go on rising and so do house prices. If the price of food had risen at the same rate as housing over the past 30 years, a supermarket chicken would now cost £47 and a jar of instant coffee £20.

"Shelter reported last month that private rents in London rose by an average of £750 a year in 2012."