Friday Fungus: building with mushrooms...

That's right - not only can you make car body panels from mushrooms but now you can build houses!

Mycologist Philip Ross is seriously into mushrooms, but not as a food -- instead, he uses fungi as a building material. Beneath the surface of the ground, fungi form a wide network of thin, rootlike fibers called mycelium. That part of the fungus isn't particularly tasty, but Ross discovered that when dried, it can be used to form a super-strong, water-, mold- and fire-resistant building material. The dried mycelium can be grown and formed into just about any shape, and it has a remarkable consistency that makes it stronger, pound for pound, than concrete.

And the picture above is the proof - viva mushrooms!

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It's the price isn't it?

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In a fit of populist fervour the government is proposing a scheme to help first time buyers get on the housing ladder:

David Cameron will today formally open the NewBuy Guarantee scheme, where the Government guarantees part of a homebuyer’s mortgage, allowing them to take out much larger loans than they might otherwise be eligible for.

The guarantee will allow people buying new-build properties to borrow up to 95 per cent of the value of their new home. 

Two quick observations here - firstly wasn't giving housing loans to people who can't afford them the biggest reason for the current financial train crash? And if so why on earth are we repeating this mistake?

And secondly, isn't the big problem price rather than access to finance? House values have (as the fortunate owners know) risen considerably faster than general wages for several decades - barring the occasional and inevitable price crash. This means that fewer people can afford to buy those houses.

So this scheme isn't about helping people who want to buy houses at all. It's actually about helping people who want to sell houses. The best way to help buyers is to build more houses in places (like the South East) where there is work and where people want to live. But I guess there's no votes in that, is there?

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So do you want the houses built or not?

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The National Housing Federation (Nat Fed) is in a funk about the government's housing strategy - no surprise there. But one of their worries is about the renegotiation of s106 agreements to reduce the proportion of "affordable" houses built as part of individual schemes:

The housing strategy, which Mr Cameron described as a ‘radical’ way to ‘get Britain building again’, estimates that there are 82,000 homes in stalled schemes across England which would benefit from renegotiation with developers.

Of these 82,000 homes, 16,000 would have been affordable, according to the National Housing Federation - the same number of homes the government hopes to see built through a separate £400 million ‘Get Britain building’ investment fund to kick-start frozen developments.

The NHF said the policy, which will undergo consultation, was likely to force councils to scrap affordable housing obligations to get stalled schemes moving.

The question - one that ministers have answered and the Nat fed hasn't - is do we want the stalled schemes unstalling or are we happy to wait until the market recovers enough for developers to recover the margin lost from having to build those "affordable" homes?

The ministers want the houses built. Does the Nat fed?

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So we don't need to build more houses, do we?

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Rents in London and the South East are climbing through the roof. Market rents in the City are already beyond the means of most working people and continue to climb:

The cost of renting a property in London has reached a record high, despite the continuing economic slowdown.

 According to research from tenant referencing service HomeLet, the average rental price in the capital went over the £1,200 barrier for the first time ever.

In August, tenants paid an average of £1,202 compared with £1,154 the previous month.

The figures show a 12.2 per cent month-on-month rise in rental prices, while average tenant salary in Greater London rose by just 2.4 per cent.

The South East needs more houses yet the sclerotic planning system, the stolid banks and the idiot government (local and national) conspire to make it ever harder an ever more expensive to develop and ever more difficult to rent.

At the same time rents in the social housing sector (council houses and housing association lets) average about £330 - little more that 25% of the market rent. The scale of subsidy this represents is astonishing and demonstrates the difficulties with getting an effective rental market in a city where over half the properties for rent are in the social sector and in receipt of a massive subsidy determined by the property rather than by the earnings of the person(s) living in the property.

These figures - and a similar picture will be played out across the south east and in cities such as Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham - represent a huge challenge. If we fail to realise that subsidy isn't the most efficient way to manage a housing market where a great deal of the tenure is rental, we will find ourselves with an escalating problem of homelessness, default and housing debt from unaffordable rents rather than unaffordable mortgage risk.

And yes we do need to make it a lot easier for developers to build houses - this needs a sensible discussion about how to protect the 'green belt' rather than the "build the houses in the grotty industrial bits where the poor people live" approach pioneered by the CPRE.

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