The New Mayor of London's Housing Manifesto

As the BBC and many other media outlets reported, Sadiq Khan was recently elected the new mayor of London. Mayor Khan is the city's first Muslim mayor, and will represent the Labour party in office.

For some additional background on the platform that got Mayor Khan elected, his campaign helpfully created a housing manifesto and posted it online. The "Homes for Londoners" report, as the manifesto is titled, describes the city's housing crisis as "the single biggest barrier to prosperity, growth and fairness facing Londoners today."

With homeownership increasingly out of reach and homelessness on the rise, Mayor Kahn argues for a pro-development platform. In fact, Mayor Kahn makes this promise: "my single biggest priority will be to build thousands more homes every year, for you, your family and your friends – and to give first dibs to Londoners on new homes." As a candidate, Mayor Kahn promised to make more of the homes built every year affordable (i.e., "a target of half of all the new home that are built across London being genuinely affordable to rent or buy") and provided a few specific mechanisms for doing so.

The manifesto also improves a section devoted to proposing new planning efforts, including a process to amend the London Plan.