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

At the age of 20 I would have been delighted with a flat in a converted office block.

At the age of 55 with nearly 40 years of working hard, giving up stuff like holidays to pay for a nicer home and spending late nights and weekends working hard to make a home more valuable, I'll enjoy my hard earned and now mortgage free rural home.

I earned every penny of it.

The PP was specifically referring to nature. I am suggesting that the areas picked for development aren't exactly boasting rich natural habitats. But yes, there is a GP surgery planned on site. Not that we have difficulty getting GP appointments in the area.
I am currently buying a house on another brown site development and there are two new schools being built within walking distance.
We haven't been able to get an NHS dentist within 100 miles radius for years so I don't believe building one extra clinic is going to make much of a difference. The problem is with dental funding and that's entirely divorced from housing situation. We have multiple dental clinics within walking distance, none of them are willing to accept NHS patients but have plenty of capacity for private work.

The fact is that people like Farage have actually created a bigger problem by pushing the Brexit agenda- most people coming from the EU in the last 15 years were coming as singles or young couples, living in shared houses, needing little in the way of education or housing or health and often going back to home country after a few years, frequently not staying long term- the Tory's then realised they had a huge gap in working people in essential services post Brexit and basically ramped up legal immigration to include whole families even when only 1 of the family was coming as a care worker etc - these families need all of the above and hence we have pressure on all those areas. Farage pretending it's nothing to do with him is a joke, he created the'anti forriner' feeling ( unless of course they were American bankers etc) -

There are so many factors that are causing issues, selling off social housing - in my opinion Blair should have put an immediate stop to that when he had a big majority- non control of rents, people wanting low tax but expecting scandi style services and social support, UC as it is - meaning lots of lower paid people especially if renting and with kids are actually not much worse off doing as few hours as they can getaway with ( all meaning less tax take and more money out the public purse) silly rules relating to childcare support - when we lived in Denmark it was simply 'cheap' regardless of income and so more women worked full time or as near as and you got more tax take .far more two income families meant far less need for UC type social support. Same with social housing, far more of it of good quality, but then far more expectations of it being kept in good order. We have so many feral people and families that are past giving a shit about standards of behaviour on private and public.

It would take a totally different mindset though and a lot of people's first reaction these days seems to be what can I claim , not suprising really when housing costs are as they are.

We have rapidly in the last 15 years turned into survival of the fittest - not unlike the USA, I put a lot of blame on our lack of regulation in media and press who are predominantly right wing controlled and determined to force the 'I'm all right Jack agenda' - let's have a go at anyone 'not like us'- let's 'create' the agenda , rather than just report actual news.

One big advantage when we lived in Denmark was the lack of seeing all that kind of shit on a daily basis or hearing the attitudes when out in public- in fact not speaking much Danish was great because whilst I got by nicely in English I never had to overhear conversations declaring Farage as the saviour etc.

I'm not a radical left winger either- I'm very much a centreist -

That's gross 🤮. I bet they had a 5 hygiene rating . The kebab shop below me did 😅

There is a housing crisis if there are hundreds and thousands of people in unsuitable or unaffordable accommodation, homelessness and people living in temporary accommodation. There are probably enough homes if we removed holiday lets and second homes, but many of these aren't the sort of homes required (in my area there are tons of 2 bed flats and not enough affordable family homes).

YABU for commenting on a problem saying it doesn't exist, when you very clearly don't understand the issue. It is very complicated. It is not just about the number of homes, but what sort of homes they are, where they are and who can afford them. 🙄

At the risk of sounding glib, because it is a perfectly salient point, but presumably people who don't give a hoot about the price of your house 😛

This is the thing though. The UK is utterly consumed with certain things being a marker of how "well" the country is, to the point whereby they'll ignore the long-term pitfalls, then the answer when the shit hits the fan is invariably to borrow even more money and just exacerbate the issue longer-term.

The government financial intransigence in the UK is scandalous, and I'm not talking about PPI contracts or money wasted on HS2 and so on, the problem is we've been trading while insolvent since the 1950s at least, but no politician will address it because it's electoral suicide.

How about football pitches? Also a waste of space.

@Youagain2025 Indeed. I lived above a closed shop. The landlord then let it to a chicken shop. We got cockroaches.

They did this in York, converted the old Rowntree factory into flats with lots of shared ownership units. It looks great, such a nice change from demolition. Very expensive though. https://www.thecocoa-works.com

There are also quite a few asylum conversions near me.

I lived above a kebab shop once . Had mice and millions on red ants . Which probably meant they were in the shop as well .

The housing crisis isn't "supposed", it is very real. And it isn't unsustainable to build more houses.

The problem with building more houses though is that they're being build to sell, not to rent. So it fuels the issue of high rents, as landlords are buying up either the new builds, or the smaller houses that become vacant when people move up the ladder into the new houses.

What actually needs to happen is building a lot of low cost housing for social housing markets and councils. That is the only thing that's going to alleviate the pressure in the rental market, and the bottleneck of temporary housing.

As for where they build it, I don't especially care. Town and city centres are more expensive to buy and rent property in, so I don't think repurposing vacant shops is a viable solution either. Infrastructure around new housing developments has to be built into the proposal and fines levied where it is not delivered.

Go somewhere like Vienna, where it’s as expensive as London - but not to rent. They have enough housing stock in social housing that it naturally keeps the rental cost down

a housing crisis keeps housing costs high

by building housing stock and including social housing it reduces rent costs, reducing the cost of living

you presumably living in a house

ive seen near on 12000 homes built in the last 6/7 years in the surrounding fields. It’s what happens

Not really, they still provide some space for nature, far more than a housing estate will.

I imagine that wont happen because the golfers are the same people that don't believe there's a housing crisis.

This, we need to think long term. Concreting the countryside to house yet more people isn't the way forward.
Where I live we have loads of derelict empty Victorian factories- they are huge, you could fit hundreds of flats in them! Or they could be demolished and use that land to build on.
There are also places with literally empty streets full of little terraced houses, do those up instead of building new! It seems that people only like recycling when it comes to their rubbish, they want shiny brand new homes though.
This country is already screwed, we cannot feed the population as it is with the land/farmers we have. In the event of a disaster and food chains being cut off hundreds of thousands of people will starve to death. Think about that next time you see open fields being built on for 'executive housing '.

There is also the issue that the price of housing has been artifically inflated due to decades of policies that have housing as an asset, preferential treatment.

Again hands up who would support policies that decrease the value of their house?

I think the reality for the entire country is either immigration to fill skills gaps, or making it near on impossible for older people to retire. Their labour will be needed and the government won't be able to afford their pensions anyway. Or a combination of both, most likely.

We should be building on golf courses, not countryside. They’re a complete waste of space.

"The UK" is not full up, and immigration is not at anything like "unsustainable" levels in the "UK".

This is an England problem, which means that whatever the perceived solution to England's perceived problem is will dominate the discourse, and ultimately be blanket applied to the entirety of the UK regardless of whether it's wholly at odds with what is actually required in places other than England or not.

If there is any doubt about this, just look at the fact that every single Ward in Scotland voted to remain within the EU, but a blanket approach was applied across the UK regardless, then Scotland was told that it was impossible to make any small exceptions or concessions for any singular part of the UK, before NI was then granted the very concessions Scotland was told were impossible.

The problem is not a lack of space, and it's not "too many people", it's that despite an inward flux of economically active people, successive governments have squandered that financial boon, and mismanaged the UK economy in favour of chasing votes by maintaining an unrealistic standard of service v Taxation by ramping up borrowing and cutting spending.

The UK's problems are entirely rooted in an ideological aversion to spending, and the public's totally unrealistic demands given what they are willing to stump up for.

Ok, hands up - who wants to live in a flat above an empty shop?

Bristol? I lived there for years. It's extremely wealthy in parts with house prices off the scale. Ditto rents. Big financial services employment sector and a university town. It may be run down in places like every big city, but so is London. Swindon is part of the silicon valley. I worked in industry there.

Big private sector businesses are very mobile. They can be incentivised to move. Look at Dublin Docklands. They brought in a 10% tax rate for financial services in 1987 and the banks piled in, bringing work and regeneration.

I absolutely stand by the fact government needs to invest to provide work elsewhere other than the south east. This thread is about the housing crisis, and the reason prices are so much higher in the south east and developers are desperate to build here is because that's where the work is. If there was more work at better pay elsewhere in the country people would move. The south east is a horrible place to live, it's over crowded, insane pressure to get a doctor, dentist, school place and even parking. There has to be change.

This, we've had new houses built near us - I wasn't against the new houses in themselves, though the cost of them is ridiculous, nothing affordable about £500,000 houses.

But there was no thought on the impact on local schools, GP surgeries, or road infrastructure (traffic was already a complete nightmare out on the main road, and they're talking about building even more houses nearby) - or building over what was largely playing fields above an area that has flooding issues - fine for the new houses, but where does the water run off to?

I'd be fine with the new houses if all these issues had been addressed. And if they were, actually affordable.

But if they have to be heavily reduced isn't that just the market setting the price, and a great example of why increased supply does provide more affordable housing than insisting we already have enough and other people should just go live in old office spaces could ever do?

As well as helps with flash flooding

All the rural and semi rural parts of the country like Cornwall and Devon that are currently being artificially supported right now as ‘retirement areas’ by final salary pensions are going to be absolutely strapped economically in the near future, when that generation has died.
Right now those relatively wealthy retirees are spending their money in the local shops, small businesses.

When they’re gone, I worry that the ‘retirees’ that follow will be on a tiny income and will need a part time job to stay afloat on comparatively totally pathetic pensions. Meaning they/we won’t have spare cash to support the local economy. So this should be factored in to where homes are built. Most of them need to be built near transport and jobs. There isn’t going to be as large a section of the population who can not farm, or do other work, who but can afford to live right out in the country, for example.