Feminism and house prices

Must depend cos I know my parents couldn't and that was late 60s

Were mortgage lenders allowed to take second incomes into account in the 60s & 70s? I may be wrong but I suspect that was one of the things that was liberalised in the mortgage reforms of the early 80s.

The answer is yes. DH and I bought our first house in 1967 and the mortgage was based on both our salaries.

This feminism is responsible bollocks is just that - bollocks. Just another thing to try and make women feel guilty.

Just to add in the mix, due to the focus on the private sector here to build houses we're relying on the very people who make money out of a housing shortage to alleviate a housing shortage. House builders want to sell at the highest price. High demand through lack of supply raises prices. So house builders can limit supply, by building less, and boost their profits.

This article isn't really about this but it touches on it:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/06/deborah-orr-welfare-winners-losers

It is ridiculous, isn't it, that it can be remotely defensible to say, effectively: "it would have been much easier for me to buy a house when only half of adults were allowed to, and the other half had to rely on being in favour with those who were allowed material and financial agency, and I was in the lucky half, so it was better. For me, and people like me." Of course tragically many of the people coming out with this drivel aren't even in the lucky half.

Were mortgage lenders allowed to take second incomes into account in the 60s & 70s? I may be wrong but I suspect that was one of the things that was liberalised in the mortgage reforms of the early 80s.

I can never get the argument that women working has caused house prices to rise. Firstly, before the 1960s (I think ) home ownership was much less common - I imagine the desire to own your own home was probably a middle-class aspirational thing. Secondly, owning your own home is a peculiarly British thing. Thirdly, surely a greater demand for homes to buy would have driven prices up. Fourthly, it has become much easier generally to get a mortgage than it was 50 years ago with people being lent much more. Fifthly, houses are often seen as an investment rather than a place to live. People are always on about "putting value on your house" and making money from it. If none of that makes sense, I just wrote them in the order they came into my head.

People love to blame women for all sorts of problems. It helps with the argument that women shouldn't be doing things. I once knew someone who insisted that Britain's relative economic decline and decline as a world power had been caused by women being given the vote in 1918.

It is about as logical as saying it's all the faulf of the NHS for making people live longer

I always find this argument a bit gobsmacking. How anyone can defend the right of half the population to be economically active is beyond me.

Also - concierges! Someone is employed to keep the communal areas clean, check everything is in working order, put bins out etc.

I live in Brussels and it is very common to live in apartments - even when you have a family. But like Holey said - they are much better designed. The new builds they do here generally have 2 bathrooms, or at least a separate loo, utility room, storage etc. They landscape the area outside too. Our last apartment had a lovely view over a small park with playground and allotments that was all planned as part of the development. It also common to have offstreet/underground parking and a "cave" a lockable storage space in the basement where you can keep your bikes, xmas decs etc.

Fair enough cogito, my point was only anecdotal, you'd know better.

I did wonder about what chunky says being true though - we do seem to be really bad at building decent flats.

I went to view a flat in a grim tower block a couple of years ago - one of those horrible, scary looking ones that went up in the 60s. Its location was so ideal for DH and I, and the advertised rent was so cheap, we felt we had to check it out. The maisonette flat had been very thoughtfully designed, with lots of storage space and decent sized rooms. The flat was fabulous, and we offered more than the advertised rent, only to find that somebody else had offered them even more . The owner had told us that that ugly style of tower block was designed from the inside out, with function being prioritised over external appearance.

I would much sooner have lived there than the newbuild flats we viewed which did not have any storage space whatsoever and had miserably poky rooms.

"DH reckons there's a funny British resistance to living in flats or any kind of dense housing"

I think that's because the dense housing we tend to have here is both tiny and grim (much like many houses actually) unlike in other countries.

I could live in the nice bit of downtown Vancouver, in a 1200sq ft 2 bed/bath flat with facilities. For the same price, in a grottier bit of outer london I can afford a 2 bed flat with no facilities, and it's less than half the size. I couldn't afford to live in the equivalent bit of London at all.

People in the UK live in rabbit hutches in comparison to most other countries I've lived in (Hong Kong being the exception)

There is a huge effort now to support elderly people living longer in their homes as it is considered much cheaper than supporting them in care homes. The elderly people I know have home help coming in several times a day to look after them - I don't know how long this policy has been in place, and I don't know the details of what costs are taken into account when they make these comparisons. Obviously the benefits of this policy are harder still to measure, and support to remain in their own homes is exactly what the people in question seem to want.

Life expectancy has increased massively, and many of these elderly people are in homes which are very poorly suited to their changing needs (tiny bathrooms that can't be adapted, steps to front and back doors, narrow doorways and no space for a downstairs loo etc).

I also know some young families who don't have space for a dining table, or where the parents are sleeping in the living room, and there is no realistic prospect of them "moving up a rung" on the property ladder.

In theory it would be good if it was more common for people to move into retirement flats before they become infirm - so that they have the good health and energy to get themselves established in a community, and to free up more housing which would be suitable for families. However, none of the older people I know would be willing to consider it.

I don't think aspirations of more house-room are uniquely British tbh. There is that ideal of 'your own front door' I suppose, we have a history of building truly horrible tower-blocks, and it's true that ownership definitely trumps rental in British culture. But, working as closely as I do with people from all kinds of European countries, I know they love that extra bit of living space just as much as the rest of us.

That's true too, but wasn't what I was initially thinking of.

What I was thinking about was the way that, whereas where DH is from, it'd be normal for a couple to live in a one-bed flat with maybe a kitchen-living room and a bedroom and a bathroom, it's 'aspirational' in the UK for a couple to live in a two-up, two-down house, so they've got a spare room, and a living room downstairs, and so on. It just takes more space. By and large, I think people in the UK want to move out of flats and see high-rise buildings as undesirable. Even though for lots of people that is what is affordable.

The flats near me standing empty are right up against small two-up two-down houses that you'd rent for over a grand a month. It seems absurd no-one wants to live there.

"DH reckons there's a funny British resistance to living in flats or any kind of dense housing"

He's got a point actually. One of the biggest pressures on the amount of available housing is the increasing number of single person households and the number of under-occupied houses. The population has not risen very fast but the number of individual households has ballooned. Again, where I grew up, a lot of people had various elderly relatives living in the house with them - now they're shipped off to care homes. Young people didn't leave home 'until they got married'... and often lived with parents after they got married until they'd saved up a deposit on their own place. (A trend that is coming back) Houses were much fuller!!!!

Now you could - ironically for this discussion - lay some of that under-crowding at the door of progress in gender equality. When women were entirely financially dependent on a husband and could accumulate no assets of their own they often didn't have any choice than to stick around and stick it out. 2 people in 1 house. Now, thankfully, we're far freer to live independently and many of us choose to do so.

I am sure a good portion of the rise in productivity that came with women not being marginalised (quite so much) at work did get captured into house prices.

That is what happens when you have a class of asset that is limited - in this case land, further limited by restrictive planning permission.

(it's the same thing with farming- as agricultural productivity goes up it isn't farmers who get richer it's landowners)

A good portion of the gains in productivity from computers and other technological advances also ended up in rising house prices. But no body is going to say that computers were to blame for rising house prices (...and therefore were a bad idea..?)

If you want house prices to come down you have to make it possible to build more houses (or for cheaper areas of the country to become attractive and take the heat off the overheated SE).

I do think what Ninedragons said is interesting though - basically there is split pricing for middle class family houses - short commutable require two incomes to support, long commutable require one income to support but you need a SAHP to make the lifestyle viable. One problem that this causes I think is that people move out to the suburbs when the wife is taking a career break, and then she finds that she can't ever get back to work because the commute makes having two working parents unviable.

i think a lot of the problem arose when property became an "investment" and way to make money rather than just a home. Think of all those buy a dump/make a fortune programmes.....

And also - you've got to live somewhere. So when we create a society where the housing stock isn't where the jobs are, social housing is in short supply and mortgages even on multiples of 5 or more times income still come in cheaper than rents in the private sector (propped up by artificially low interest rates, driven by political pressures to do with the budget deficit and trying to keep some sort of liquidity there for industry), it's hardly suprising that people "choose" to over-extend themselves, but it's Hobson's choice, not a real choice.

Annie - I think the trouble is that commercial decision making is both more complicated and less rational than the phrase "what the market will bear". It's not as simple as "our customers can realistically pay X so we will charge them X".

Rather there's a sequence of decisions: "what we think we can get from our customers is Y" (which may or may not be affordable, depending on whether the customers' decisions are rational, fully informed ones - for instance, in the subprime crash, raises in interest rates a year or so into the term of the mortgage) were very carefully hidden in the small print) "The percentage we expect to default is Z" (where that assumption about the percentage may be incorrect). "We can use highly leveraged derivatives as insurance policies against default" (so highly leveraged and complicated that not even the banks themselves understood what they were buying and selling, by the time product within product within product had been packaged up like an absurd financial Russian doll). "The quants (quantitative economists) tell us that this time the market won't be subject to sudden, chaotic - in the technical, mathematical sense- and catatrophic crashes" (contrary to what any knowledge of economic history might have told them). Add to that outright fraud (the serious fraud office is looking into a number of cases of illegal consortia of developers, estate agents and solicitors using "cash back" schemes to deliberately misreport house purchase prices to the land registry in order to send house prices in an area spiralling upwards) and the fact that the commercial interests of the major players (banks, estate agents, developers) may pull in different directions, and you have a recipe for complete chaos - in the everyday sense. The actual income levels of the punters at the bottom end of this monstrous heap were only a tiny ingredient in the mix!

I think it's widely acknowledged to be true - when the double-income family became the norm, the price of a standard family house adjusted in line with a standard family income.

But what happened in my city, and presumably many others, was that houses that offered short commutes shot up relative to salaries far more than those that necessitated long commutes. You would need two incomes to buy a house in the belt that means you'd have a commute of less than 45 minutes each way, but if your family follows the old model where one person is available (ie domestically supported) to sit on a train for two hours a day and the other is available to do all the shopping, cooking, and picking up kids, you can still buy on one average income.

I think economics always comes down to swings and roundabouts, essentially.