Cement has to mostly go over the next 20 years. There's no way we can meet climate goals while still using it. Wood is likely to be the most sustainable housing material in the future - properly treated, it lasts well, and there's an argument that rebuilding properties on a 30-50 year basis is more sensible than locking in large quantities of 100-year-old housing stock.gilesgoat wrote:And FFS STOP using wood to build houses, forget it exists please, you have that super famous Portland Cement we use it everywhere in Italy ! .. USE CEMENT !!!
Wood is expensive and rots and needs to be replaced !!
As to the rest, the only effective solution I've seen that keeps house prices down is either a large publicly operated rented sector or a housing glut. That's the reason for the explosion in house pricing since the 70s - if you rely on mature private rented sectors then rents trend to what's affordable by the median wage and mortgages trend to a monthly payment that is 3-4 times that. This is the future of the UK without more intervention - I've seen it happen in the popular parts of the US. (Most of the US house prices are kept down by the vast excess of land and cheap building materials which makes it easy to build new housing, but that fails in SF, NY etc.). That's basically what's already happened in London, but it's likely the long term destination of the whole of the UK.
