By Douglas Kruger
THE year is 3,000 BC, and by golly, you want a home in Jersey! Here’s the process.
First you must choose your spot. Not too windy, not too close to neighbours. Defensible against marauding pirates and an expanding Roman Empire, (though you have a millennia to play with on that score).
Stomp the grass flat. If you don’t like stomping, tether your goat to the spot. Come back later.
Next, fell a goodly number of trees. No need to worry about specific quantities – counting isn’t obligatory yet. A GOODLY NUMBER. It’s hard work, so be sure to enlist your family.
This is why you had 12 children, after all. Sorry. A GOODLY NUMBER.
Stick the wood into the earth at your preferred proportions. Don’t forget to include space for chickens, as Dominos will not arrive at St Saviour’s Road for thirty hundred years.
Next, you must coat the outer layer with wattle and daub. This protects against the elements, and creates a favourable environment for spiders.
For the final touch, you must now thatch your roof. This also helps with spiders. If you prefer to hire a specialist, you can pay him in chickens, daughters, or a pledge to assist in raids against the foreign devils in the next village along.
Et voilà, you’re done! Time for the house-warming. You may want to sacrifice a goat. Or a virgin. Do it at equinox for added luck.
As you sit in your new fireside hearth, basking in carbon monoxide, don’t forget to tut wryly at how complicated things have become. It was all so much simpler 2000 years before, during the good old Palaeolithic. Why, back then, you could have chucked together a shelter from driftwood and animal hides, and been done with it. More than sufficient for the entire span of your eighteen-year life! Ah, the good old days.
In 2026, it’s a costlier debacle.
Jersey ranks in the top ten of the world’s most expensive places to buy a home. In fact, according to Jersey’s Better Life Index, we’re right up there in fourth place.
But here’s something weird. New Zealand ranks first. That’s odd because it’s not a small country. It seems small only because of its proximity to Australia. But NZ is comparable in size to Britain, though actually a smidge bigger. And with a total population of just over five million, it is, for all intents and purposes, empty.
So why the high cost? There’s a supply shortage, believe it or not.
It turns out that you can have all the space in the world, and still cripple your nation with unaffordable housing. So what’s going on there?
Their construction realities are described by economists as “beset by high compliance costs”, “plagued by low productivity”, and “hamstrung by a lack of competition”. Punitive tax policies come in for some grief too, and doesn’t that sound all too familiar?
It all begs an interesting question: are Jersey’s small proportions really the problem? Is it genuinely the case that housing is so expensive because we are a small island nation?
We take that as a given. But if a much larger nation has a significantly worse cost crisis, and it is quite measurably a product of bad government policy, not space, then is space really the issue? Sure, it can’t help. But it might not be the main thing.
One sure way to decrease cost in any economic equation is to increase supply. While that may seem impossible on a small island, it’s actually a trick easily pulled if we would build those connective tunnels to the mainland.
Housing scarcity conceptually vanishes if it becomes possible to commute from France, where Normandy property prices average 2.5 to three times cheaper than those of Jersey.
Think of it: if you were planning to buy a one-million-pound home here, you could have three identical properties in France for the same money. Or buy just one, and have some £700,000 left to play with. These are not small differences.
One of the obvious objections is: how would taxation work? But that reasoning is backward. To solve a problem, you don’t begin with: how can governments tax us more effectively? You begin with: why does housing cost so much, and is tax itself a part of that problem? If government policy, including taxation, is the reason for the crisis, then you do not carry the catalysts over into a proposed solution.
Land reclamation remains an option too, and we’ve done it here before. If an island is small, you can, in fact, make it bigger. That’s just an engineering problem.
Spend enough time wading through the literature about smart solutions to costly housing, and the most durable answers all focus on supply-side measures. Concepts like upzoning, fast permits, public building. But here’s the kicker. Our local construction companies keep going out of business. Costs are too high, permits too difficult, restrictions too much of an impediment. Again, is that a land-size issue?
If we had connectivity to France, builders could simply commute in each day, bringing fresh supplies by lorry. No need to house them here, decreased cost. Easy, and much cheaper. Storage woes disappear too, when everything can be carted through at the right moment, like Toyota’s “just in time” production policy.
But that requires ringing up those friendly gents from the Faroe Islands – the ones with the intelligent-looking rimless glasses – and saying, “Yes, we would like a tunnel or too. To whom do we make out the cheque?”
Personally, I remain baffled as to why an island that nearly starved after the Second World War has never solved this problem. I guess we’ve decided that it could never happen again? Or that our air travel and ferries are flawlessly dependable.
Life was certainly simpler when you could pick a spot and erect your Jersey-style yurt more or less overnight. It’s more complex now, but is all of the complication truly necessary?
We believe Jersey is expensive on the grounds that it’s small. But places with simpler building requirements are cheaper. And bigger places, with worse requirements, are more expensive. Maybe size isn’t the dominant factor after all. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a factor at all.
Douglas Kruger is an author and speaker based in Jersey. He speaks on innovation, problem-solving and leadership. His books are all available via Amazon and Audible.
