To be sick of hearing about 'the housing crisis'?

Are you actually that stupid or just think you’re hilarious?

Are there loads of homeless on the streets?

The stench of privilege is overwhelming

There’s 10 homes available to rent in my town. That is all! Only one is under £1000 per month (it’s “only” £995). I guess you don’t care about the housing crisis if you have a home.

Last week we went abroad to do some stuff for BIL’s upcoming wedding and SIL2B was showing me an area near her family’s home that’s being built on. First to be built was the school, Dr’s and shops. Once they’re built and signed off they get to build the social and low cost housing. Only once that is done do they get to build the real money making houses. It seems like a really good way of doing it, too often the infrastructure doesn’t get built

Agreed I don’t see the point. The houses they build aren’t cheap either… the issue isn’t lack of houses it’s low wages making housing and rent unaffordable. Theres tonnes of bloody houses.

It’s interesting -we are looking at moving back into the EU for our business reasons ( and having to jump through a fair old few hoops of course) - and it’s been interesting looking at house rentals in nice areas outside of Dusseldorf and Bonn in Germany - whilst not cheap the value and standard relative to decent areas here ( and we live in Bath) is just no comparison - most of them have got full useable basements with laundry rooms, storage room , often a hobby room/extra office etc -no council tax too in germany - they also build a lot ‘to rent’ and I don’t just mean 1 and 2 bed flats- 3-5 bed houses and extremely nice too that you can tailor to your requirements and rent until further notice - admittedly deposits are enormous in germany (3 months rent) but security is enormous too on tenants side and you can still give notice ok if your circumstances change- We had similar standards too when we rented in Copenhagen back in 2020 for 20 months - not one house we looked at was remotely grotty and most had very good storeage options and were quite a bit bigger than what you tend to get in the UK - Netherlands on the other hand seems to have rather a lot of crammed in estate style dinky houses - they seem to have copied the Brits - and at similar money -

That's a very narrow minded view i could say that we dont have people we have empty houses we can't get rid of nothing is selling there are no jobs and no prospects because in my area thats entirely accurate forced to build housing that is stood empty until a housing association buys it it will then hang around as part buy houses and eventually be put out for (not affordable) rent because its a new build they charge almost double

Ha ha ha

We already have the people! They’re just living in miserable overcrowded housing, or in the worst case emergency accommodation because they are homeless, with appalling outcomes for their children. Density is fine. We don’t need more roads - the roads are already there - just better public transport.

The birth rate is already historically low and immigration is predicted to be net negative next year so what do you propose to achieve fewer people? Culling?

Exactly, less people = less infrastructure = less disruption to the natural world.

The other problem is allowing people to turn two bed houses into four bed, or bungalows into houses. You need a really wide spread of housing.

Good we need to keep it that way. We need less people not more houses. The more houses built the more roads, schools etc need to be built which has a knock on effect on wildlife.

My view is that there isn't a housing crisis, there is a housing distribution crisis. As well as a climate crisis - so the presumption has to be for no green field development unless it is absolutely unavoidable.

There are, as the OP says, a LOT of empty homes. They need to be brought back into use. And we need sticks and carrots to get people to give up their second homes - ie sell or rent out for full time residential use. I think you'd get a million extra homes that way.

The system is wrong and Angela Rayner should be fixing it rather than expecting people to have massive "new villages" built in the countryside.

I'd also mind less if the houses were good quality but they are awful. Building standards are so poor in the UK. 1920s council houses were a lot better - bigger rooms, decent sized gardens, reasonably wide streets. And then you need solar panels, rainwater harvesting systems etc. They need cycle lanes, walkways that cars can't park on, amenities like playparks - if you are going to build new then build quality.

Yes, but as the poster said, if they are too expensive (people can"t afford the monthly mortgage debt payments any more) no one moves.

The family who want a four bed but currently in a three bed move into the four bed. This frees up the three bed for the family squashed into a two bed and so on down the chain. You do also need to have a balance of types of home that matches the household composition, but building even bigger homes does help, compared to building no homes. Of course if you do need to think about density too, both to make local services viable and to give more people homes.

Because they have paid it for 50 years and your son for maybe 4 years if he went to Uni?

KeepPumping

Why have you resurrected this zombie??

It is not about lack of housing units, Thatcher selling off made little or no difference, it is more about the banking de-regulation from that era that has led to the "financialisation of everything" world that we know live in.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-15855977/Thousands-new-build-London-homes-lie-service-charges-taxes-high-prices-buyers-investors.html

There's also offices. I counted our home as a three bedroom but we have a big office library too.

But do you have 17 spare rooms? Some might be studies/ offices for those who wfh? Just because they don’t use the bedrooms as bedrooms it doesn’t mean it’s not used. I have 4 bedrooms. 3 are bedrooms, one is duel purpose as my office and spare bed if the in laws come to stay. We would struggle in a smaller property but potentially could be penalised for having a ‘spare’ room.

@taxguru I totally agree - I know it's a bit boring that I mention the differences when we lived in Denmark but they are indeed a very different way of looking at it - and there was no NI as such - although you do pay into a kind of insurance scheme for sickness/unemployment .

I totally agree about NI - why should my son at 26 be paying in whereas a retired person receiving just as much pays zero NI -?

We don't have sink estates because so many are now privately owned which means our council tend to move on the worst to certain roads in town. There's always problems there.

A colleague bought a brand new house on a new estate in a cul de sac. She soon discovered the social housing one opposite was drug dealer central. Day and night characters rolled up to buy. She had a baby and was afraid to leave the house at times. As were the neighbours.

Eventually after many police Etc visits they were relocated. But there were no other issues on the estate with social housing occupants.

So I think mixed housing works better.

The issue is that council estates are no longer built as they’re believed to be ‘sink estates’.

It’s a catch 22, can’t build too many social housing without peppering them in new housing estates but then that means not enough social housing to go around.

Also means the criteria to get social housing doesn’t include the average working class family.