Every year for the last 40 years, France has built more homes per person than England.

I don't want to defend England's housing building, but the Y axis not starting at 0 is visually misleading. Here's a very rough correction:

Considering how bad the housing crisis is in France, I can't imagine the British situation.

I'm only on my phone and can't easily check the data behind this, but a very quick and dirty estimate of number of houses built per undeveloped acre between those 2 countries shows a different picture. Balancing land use has to be a factor, not just absolute number of people wanting houses. Is anyone talking about theoretical population models for different countries?

I don't want to defend nor attack England, France or anyone else, but we should never look at one metric when assessing a market. The EU provides some useful insights on its website about the bloc's housing market (unfortunately without the England or UK data ...).

When measured by the gross value added (GVA) of a country's construction sector as a share of total GVA, France is persistently below the EU average. In 2023, the EU countries with the largest shares were Slovakia (8.4%), Romania (8.3%) and Lithuania (7.3%), and with smallest Greece (2.1%), Ireland (2.6%) and Malta (4.2%).

Regarding the number of dwellings approved for construction between 2010 and 2023, France saw the largest decrease (-27%), followed by Finland and Italy (-36% and -50%, respectively). The largest increases were in Bulgaria (+269%), followed by Ireland (+123%) and Estonia (+117%).

We must also look at how affordable housing is. According to the EU data, Greece, Denmark, and Germany appear to have he least affordable housing in the EU.

You'll find a lot of interesting data on the site: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/housing-2024

Yeah, they are generally bought by English retired.

Hmm... this is raising so many questions...

I wonder how many homes your typical Frenchman uses up in a year?

And what's the average of people together in a bed in England?

Shame a lot of them were built in a racialised and near-segregated manner.

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/09/britain-building-nimbys-hs2-housing

Why do we find it so much harder to build in this country than comparable countries? The obvious culprit is a planning system designed to prioritise objections over permissions, and which benefits existing local homeowners over a wider community who may stand to gain. Throw in the fact that those who have time to campaign on planning issues tend to be older, richer and have less stake in growth, and nature has run its course.

People are more favorable towards development in general than development near them. If you permit local interests to block construction, you will then tend to see less construction.

https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/a-very-short-guide-to-planning-reform/

Britain’s housing crisis is caused by a deep shortage of homes, especially in the most prosperous cities and large towns. We have built much less than other rich countries for decades – for instance, while England currently builds around 220,000-240,000 new homes a year, the highest in decades, France builds roughly 380,000 a year, a decline from a recent peak of nearly 500,000 before the financial crisis. Japan is currently building 860,000 homes a year, even though their population is shrinking.

The English planning system causes this shortage of homes by making it very difficult to build, in two ways. First, it imposes explicit bans on new construction in large parts of the country – by far the most important and costly of these is the green belt, which exists to block the growth of the country’s most economically important cities and large towns.

Second, the planning process for almost all of the remaining land is highly discretionary with nearly all significant decisions made case-by-case. The uncertainty this creates in the development process reduces the number of new homes and commercial buildings that are built, as it is possible to propose a new development that complies with the local plan and nevertheless have it rejected.

England’s system is internationally unusual – most other countries do not have construction bans outside their biggest and most innovative cities, and instead have rules-based planning systems where applications that follow the local plan must be granted planning permission. Introducing these rules-based decision-making processes is the key goal of planning reform.