Housing supply, investment demand and money creation: A comment on the drivers of London’s housing crisis

This commentary examines the current emphasis on supply-side solutions to the housing crisis in England – building more homes to increase accessibility – against a backdrop of intensifying demand-side pressures, the financialisation of housing, and the impact of credit liberalisation and money creation on housing demand and prices. It reflects on the need to balance additional housing supply, where needed, with gradual ‘demand management’ responses that at last acknowledge the centrality of spatially unbounded investment demand and the flow of money created by deregulated banks into housing as fundamental to the current crisis of housing affordability and access

New money in rural areas: assessing the impacts of investment in rural land assets

This study examines the flow of new investment into rural land assets, particularly farmland, woodland and wineries, but extending also to leisure uses such as golf courses and theme parks, and to renewable energy. The profile of rural landowners has shifted markedly in recent decades, with family farmers and life-style buyers being joined by institutional investors, whose engagement with investment assets vary from being direct and active to being indirect, passive and concerned solely with the extraction of financial income. The reported research was driven by an interest in the impacts on localities – and nearby communities – of new patterns and sources of investment