The £1 house sales are happening because the UK is in the grip of a housing imbalance: too many properties in unloved locations, too few in places where people clamour to live.
In addition to regionally-coordinated urban growth boundaries, which implode new growth back to already serviced lands, planning for regional sustainability therefore also includes strategic efforts to improve extant jobs-housing imbalances through major transit investments in key urban centers.
"I have repeatedly made recommendations to the council to expand the housing supply in Palo Alto so that together with our neighboring cities who are already adding housing, we can start to make a dent in the jobs-housing imbalance that causes housing prices throughout the Bay Area to spiral out of control," Kate wrote in her resignation letter.
There is no question that the jobs-housing imbalance near employment centers will take years to fix, which underscores the need for meaningful transportation investments now.
They provided a glut of cheap, easy capital which fed the housing bubble.Trade imbalances continue to be a source of vulnerability to the health of the global economy.
Britain demonstrates the problem in an extreme way, magnifying underlying imbalances between housing demand and supply.
The Fed's latest forecast, however, reflects the surprising weight of deeper and more intractable problems, including unsustainable public and private debts, the wreckage of the housing market and trade imbalances.
Insofar as a frequently cited indicator of internal imbalances is housing investment, the disaggregation of non-residential and residential capital stocks could be of interest to identify sustainable growth.
Matthew Pointon, property economist at Capital Economics, said much of the upwards pressure on house prices was coming from imbalance between housing supply and demand, which he expected to be short term.
And more economic weakness could again knock Greece's already shaky fiscal house into greater imbalance, according to a sustainability analysis put together by the ECB, European Comission and the IMF (a/k/a "the Troika") and leaked to the press on Monday, raising the need for another bailout.
