Feminism and house prices

I think that's a good point cogito.

Women have always worked. Just most of them weren't upper-middle-class homeowners. Renting used to be much less stigmatized - there are houses that were built by factory owners for their workers to rent which were initially seen a really impressive bonus. I think that's part of the problem too.

I want to know how much it is about space. DH reckons there's a funny British resistance to living in flats or any kind of dense housing, whereas in lots of places living in skyscrapers or high-rise buildings is either normal, or even a bit chic. I think there's that aspiration to be in a 'naice' semi-detached house when you have children, and that doesn't help.

Where we are house prices are absurdly high (not London but nearly London prices) - and yet there are blocks of ex-council flats sitting unused and unrenovated because no-one wants to live there.

I think there's a tendency to dumb down any discussion on house prices to 'house prices in the South East of England'. Elsewhere in the country house prices are very different and much more affordable on one salary. The S.E angle is important because the price of houses just in one region can't be simplistically laid at the door of working women. (An argument that I also think is lazy and inaccurate) Women work nationwide, not just in the Home Counties.

Successful companies have congregated in the S.E because our transport links have been historically rubbish, government is Westminster-centric, and other regions of the country and the skill-base of the residents were traditionally geared around dying heavy industries rather than more modern forms of commerce. People like myself moved way out of their home region in search of jobs in the eighties. In 1986 when I bought my first home I could buy a three bed semi in the Yorkshire town I was leaving for £20,000 but only a 2-bed terrace in North Herts for £48,000

I would also add that the phenomenon of 'working women' is also dumbed-down to 'working middle-class women'. Growing up in a working-class area in the 1960's and 1970's, the vast majority of women I knew worked part or full-time to make the housekeeping stretch. The first truly 'SAHM' I met was the mother of my first serious boyfriend. They were a wealthy middle class family that had relocated from the South.

Cross posted with purpleroses! :)

purpleroses I'm always amused that those who blame feminism, are so reluctant to acknowledge the role played by longer life expectancy

I think it's worth noting (maybe an economist can come along with the actual figures) that as far as I'm aware, house prices didn't track female income/household income in the neat way that this anti-feminist myth demands - the banks' decision to offer high mortgage-to-deposit and high multiples of income mortgages came about 10 to 15 years after the equal pay and female entry into the workforce in large numbers. Also, you have to factor in Thatcher's sell-off of council housing and her insistence that everyone should aspire to property ownership (presumably because all property owners vote Tory ), which left banks thinking there was a vast new marketplace of consumers to be tapped (and changed the way lenders thought about their customer base, ultimately opening the way to sub-prime mortgages and the ensuing financial crisis we're in the middle of now). So the primary driver was capatilism: commercial decisions made by lenders and political decisions made by right wing neo-con economists; not feminism!

From an economist background - You're right - the increase in double-earning households in one of the factors that increased house prices in the past 3 decades, but the other critical factors are:

• Sustained low interest rates
• Huge increase in mortgages at close to, or even above, 100% of the value of the housen
• Development of buy to let mortages, leading to increase in private landlords
• Increasing number of households (from a mixture of birth rates, longer life-expectancy, migration to UK, and smaller average household size)

Against this there has been chronic under-supply of housing because of the planning system in the UK, and people's innate opposition to any housing being built anywhere near them.

SO, you have not enough housing, and increasing abilty to pay for housing, so house prices go up. Increasing double-income households is one factor amoungst many in causing this.

Well it could be said that house prices were artificially low because women weren't earning.

Personally, I think the argument that feminism is to blame is lazy and inaccurate. Lots of things lead to house price rises. There was a drive and enablement from the government for people to buy their own houses. Banks slackened their requirements for mortgages and yes, women could afford to buy/contribute to houses.

To suggest feminism is to blame is to suggest that women shouldn't really be able to buy houses. Which really shows where the people saying these things are coming from.

I'd be interested in this too - as it popped into my head when reading the thread about the MIL's comments about feminism being a factor in her having to work when she'd rather not.

House prices certainly did rise when the attitude to including second income in mortgage applications changed. The cost of housing depends on willingness/ability to pay across the buying public, and so the availability of higher loans within a market of fixed supply mean price rises were inevitable.

Before this, which I think was a factor in the 80s boom, it was quite possible to buy an average house on a manageable multiple of a single average salary. I don't think that's the case any more, and multiples of two incomes are the norm for such properties. Single income buyers can usually only dream of a house - smaller flats are the only prospect.

At least there is acknowledgement there that high house prices are a bad thing. They rose because supply is artificially restricted here, and because the banks, and property rich are so powerful. There was no effort to stop the boom, and sod all discussion of the negative impacts, and what would happen when the bubble inevitably burst.

House prices rose exponentially and the losers were the relatively young and relatively poor, so it seemed a given that the rises were a good thing.

However there is no reason why women having equal rights as men, should mean that households have to work ever longer hours. In my utopia, everyone would work part time hours, making childcare, volunteering, allotments etc easy.

And poor women have always been expected to work.