Normalising small homes

[lorieats99]

I feel like you just see those big 4-5 bedroom homes on Instagram, and it’s often young-ish people in their 20s or 30s in them. I think that will be a thing of the past soon with rising costs. We rent a small-ish 2 bed new build and it’s easy to begin to feel inadequate about it! When guests come over there isn’t really anywhere for them to sit, as we just have one sofa. Two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs, downstairs WC and upstairs bathroom. Lovely spacious garden.

It feels like our home, I’d like a 3 bed in an ideal world but I don’t think that’s happening for us for realistically quite a while. Despite both being on average incomes we will probably be in our 40s before we achieve our forever home status. We are TTC soon, we have a small bedroom for the baby but we would have no room for a playroom or anything like that & I’m wondering how much this matters. I know in some parts of Europe people raise families in flats and apartments, and it’s very normal over there!

Does anyone else have a small home?

A 4 bed new build can probably look quite different on Instagram if it’s got a couple in it as opposed to a family of 4+ which owns all sorts of associated paraphernalia like cots and toys in the same house - which will look stuffed (like mine!)

Tiny homes are only fine if all you do is sleep in it and there are affordable places to meet friends and family outside of it. As all the what were cheap forms of meeting places and entertainment such as pubs and cinemas are now becoming unaffordable to regularly do for normal people, you really need a slightly bigger home so that you have the space to have friends over or you will never get a chance to socialise or your kids to be able to meet friends outside of schools and local parks (if you have a decent one near by)

There should definitely be more money put into council housing to support more people. But is it not to help people get a better footing so they can afford to get on the property ladder at some point or maybe save up some money once they are in an established job so they are not reliant on council housing. There are definitely lots of people who aren’t ‘poor’ in CH. Of course it takes years to build yourself, be rid of childcare cost etc.

My grandparents and parents both lived in CH, I lived in one as a child. My great aunt died living in a council house and my grandparents bought theirs when loads were sold off. In my opinion these homes shouldn’t have been sold off for the price that they were, especially as they have not been replaced. What do you do when you want to retire but you can’t because of rent? A lot of people say that we are obsessed with buying homes but what do people do later in life, expect the government to subsidise you your whole life?

Not that this is you but honestly don’t think we can expect people to live their whole lives in subsided housing. It’s a great help for people who need it, but it needs to be a stepping stone to self sufficiency. Maybe this is unkind take but it can definitely be done, my parents were not in great jobs but found their way to self-sufficiency with the help of CH when times were tough. The only way is up for you and you have a great outlook, it just takes time unfortunately to get there.

Nonsense. I've managed to socialise fine in my small flat and so has DS.

in singapore 85% of the population live in subsidised housing. they do buy it though. what can be done is that you can allow different tiers for different income groups. the ones who are slightly better off can be allowed to buy them but need to surrender them to the council after 90-120 years. This could be a good option for people without DC or who know that their care costs would possibly consume their own equity anyway (so freehold house isn't that useful). This could mean that the people who aren't so rich can buy the subsidised housing for a cheaper price but yet get security of tenure and not need to pay rent in retirement. yet if passing your home to your kids is so important to you, then you can buy your home on the private market but honestly being able to pass your home down to your kids is a nice to have, not an essential

of course if you want to rent council flat for the rest of your life, thats fine too but the rent should be decided by your income. So if you are very poor and rent council flat, you pay little but if you earn around median salary, then you pay 20-30 % less than market rent (but get the security). the council would still cover their costs as unlike private landlords, they would not need to pay high mortgage interest or make a profit or pay capital gains tax. They also don't need to buy land at commercial rates.

And my point is that you are totally deluded . £130k pa is not a low income, full stop. It may not buy you what you want. It may not leave anything left over after expenses. If you've a mortgage you're struggling to afford you may be worried about that, may even be at risk of losing your house if you default on payments. None of that means you're on a low income. None of it.

I can't only imagine @rosetintedmemories2023 is taking the piss with her "relatively meagre" 130K, and her humble acceptance of being poor. Honestly, if you think the only way is up, you're absolutely deluded. There is a long way to fall.

No, before anyone says it, it's not a race to the bottom, but fml there are people who are ACTUALLY poor actually struggling.

And 14% of net income is almost nothing for a mortgage these days!

If more people thought like me, I can guarantee you there wouldn't be a Tory government today. If more people thought they were poor, they wouldn't vote for the Tory party, they would vote for a party that protects the poor and the vulnerable.

I have never voted Tory in my life and it's because I know where I stand, and I am honestly too poor to vote for a party that prioritizes business interests and unbridled capitalism. We have private healthcare but we would be bankrupted by private cancer treatment (if there is no NHS).We can afford a mortgage on a modest flat but we can't afford to buy a flat for our future DC with cash. If our earnings don't rise with inflation, maybe we would be in a tight spot. The way I see it, we could be the new poor if we don't continue working hard to increase our earnings so the way I see it I am no better than anyone else. That's why our earnings are meagre, it doesn't allow us to say 'fuck you' to the welfare state. Evidently 30% of the population feels rich enough to do that every election...

Milkmani (I think, sorry if it's not you!)
I'm wondering how high the COL is going to get. It's affecting more and more people. As you say, people who didn't expect to be affected.

It's not such a mystery about your colleagues. They could be putting everything on credit and are up to their eyes in debt permanently. I know someone who does this. Average job. Average wage. Has whatever she wants but it's all on credit so the card is never paid off and crucially, there's a lot she's happy to forgo, so the payment never goes beyond what she can afford. Brand new furniture, holidays, new clothes, always out. What people don't notice is her taking DD everywhere to avoid babysitter fees, buying DD a children's meal and herself a starter and not drinking or having main meal or desert. They don't see the supermarket pizza or the beans on toast when she's not off out and they don't know the clothes are from a discount site. They also don't know her credit card balance. Or the amount of times she stays home watching TV and takes DC to the park because it's free. She never moans about money. If she can't afford something she makes her excuses and invites people round another time for pizza and wine (from the supermarket, served on nice plates and glasses). She's bought nice furniture and decorated her private rental place, keeps it clean and she's a minimalist, so her flat isn't the typical messy cluttered environment many homes with DC are. The toys are put away after use, every time. So visiting her doesn't feel like slumming it and you'd rather be out, at all. You'd think she's better off than she is if you didn't know the truth.

Your colleagues could be on a good salary, or 2x min wage even will go a lot further in social housing, because the rent isn't as high as private rental. There's no requirement to leave social housing when your circumstances improve though, so if one or the other of your colleagues has a good salary they could just have lots of spare cash. Not everyone thinks of others like your family did. Equally if it didn't suit your family to buy, I doubt they'd have done so purely to free up social housing for someone else.

The poster who wondered about why we're not rioting in the street. Culture, maybe? I don't think of the British as a rioting sort of people. Or apathy perhaps. Those who can manage maybe either don't care, or are too busy working to ensure that state of affairs, and those who can't manage are too busy trying to survive, downtrodden and hopeless of a riot making any difference to anything to bother. I think the rioting in the streets may come if too many people end up living there. When people collectively have absolutely nothing to lose maybe that's when they'll lose their shit with the powers that be.

Thanks for this thread. I feel the same: social media accounts, colleagues and parents from nursery all living in much bigger places than us. It gets me sometimes but it is what it is. We are renting a 2 bed flat in a “naice” SW London suburban area. Planning to buy next year hopefully but with current rates and limited deposit (10%) and expensive childcare costs etc we can only aspire to get a 2 bed flat or maisonette. If we moved much much further out we could get more but it wouldn’t suit our lifestyle and needs so we decided to compromise and be where works best for us.