50. Gimme Shelter

This is, somehow, the 50th episode of Skylines. That seems quite a lot, doesn’t it? Well done to both you and I for making it this far. This is not, in all honesty, what I intended for this episode: originally, I had hoped Stephanie would come back and we could answer listener questions, possibly while getting slightly drunk. But best laid plans did what best laid plans do, and we couldn’t make our diaries work, so we’ll do that in some future show. This week, instead, I’ve got a very special guest: myself. On Wednesday night I gave a speech on the politics of housing following the general election to a group of people working in the sector (who, if I’m absolutely honest with myself, know far more about the subject than I do). In that speech I pulled together much of what I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while – why we have a crisis, why it’s hard to solve, what I think the government is likely to do about it.And so, since I found myself facing a gap in the podcast schedule, I thought you guys might like to hear it. In other words: this episode is 20 minutes of me talking about housing, bookended up a few more minutes of me talking about the podcast and then reading some tweets. If you’ve always enjoyed Skylines but don’t much like my voice, this is probably an episode you should skip.Next week, we’ll be back to regular service with some real people joining me to talk about things. I promise.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman's cities site, CityMetric. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.