I was in Vienna a couple of weeks ago Sarah. If you're stopping off there Cafe Sperl (site of a key scene from Before Sunrise!) is delightfully on brand for Viennese cafe culture and strudel www.cafesperl.at/en_home.html and Cafe Roza is a great dinner option www.instagram.com/cafe.roza.wi...

@gmclh.bsky.social

Yes, will be interesting to see how the measures play through in Wales, a good test of what feels like the right approach

Maybe naively I'd hope that that's partly because the previous government's voter base had more of those people for whom 2nd and under-occupued homes are a good thing than the current one, but it's definitely a big challenge!

100% - these things are, at most, part of the answer

It's probably poor tactically if the sole aim is shifting policy on empty homes, but at heart these things are connected by our thinking of housing as asset, and I think it's helpful to connect them to try to move to a place of thinking about space sufficiency/climate/redistribution

I think there's value in connecting empties, 2nd homes, under-utilisation, short-term lets etc in the context of a national housing discussion so focused on new builds (as illustrated by the MHCLG response being "we're building more homes"), but you're right that the solutions are v different

The policy solutions are different, but don't you think it's important to capture the scale of the inefficiencies in existing housing, whether empty homes, second homes or the 40% "under-occupied"? www.gov.uk/government/s....