that there is a huge problem with housing at the moment?

[superv1xen]

i have noticed loads of threads recently discussing council housing / social housing and who deserves it and who doesnt, and i think that all this arguing and debating is missing the point of the main issue here which is the massive problem with housing in the UK at present.

the problem is private rents are scandalously extortionate and also landlords are incredibly fussy about who they rent too (it should be illegal for them not to allow tenants with kids - wtf?). And no one on a modest income can afford to buy in the present climate and i dont think houses will ever come down to realistic prices. both private renting and paying a mortgage are vastly disproportionate to the average wage.

plus with private renting it is not secure at all, most tenancies are only for 6 months or so AFAIK. therefore a family with kids could potentialy be having to move every few months, what impact will that have on the kids, having to move schools all the time, leaving their friends behind, having next to no security in their lives. plus finding approx 2k every time a LL decides to turf you out, for deposits, admin fees, agency fees etc, who can afford that on the minimum wage? it makes me so

has no one noticed that it isnt that HA / council rents are cheap, they are just realistically affordable compared to private renting! in my area an average 3 bed HA home is £380 a month before council tax which if a family is on 15k or so they have still only got about £500 left after paying rent and council tax. not exactly a fortune!

and 15 years ago a person on £15k could buy a modest home (of similar standards to a HA / council home) for about 30-40k. therefore they would be only paying £300 a month or so mortgage. but now the same house would be about 120k which means that the price of buying a home has gone up to a disproportionately high level compared to the average wage. and it would only be a shitty tiny 2 - 3 bed terrace or something, who would want to bankrupt themselves for that?

in my opinion, EVERYONE should have the right to a secure home, not just those that are lucky enough to either afford to buy or are living in social housing. a lot of posts on the other threads just seem intent on casting aspersions against people who live in social housing! but they are not the issue, the lack of houses is.

It would be interesting to know the history of our housing as a nation. While it's right that 15 years ago buying a home was cheaper than it is now I know that three of my grandparents* were bought up where several families shared a house, each family had a room - it can't have been easy then.

*the fourth grew up in a dreadful sounding Catholic orphanage.

But since your Grandparents' generation and ours, there was a huge improvement (on average) in the standard of living. So although we live in better conditions than then, we still live in poorer conditions than the generation in between (on average)- we have actually regressed; as one of the richest countries in the world, I find this extremely worrying.

11 years ago we bought our first house for 39k in York. We had a 100% mortgage from our bank (graduate account) dh's wage as I wasn't working (at home with dd1) My parents thought we were mad and couldn't afford it.

Turns out they were wrong

A couple in the same situation now wouldn't be able to get that mortgage and in any case that sort of house is now around 130K!

Am in same situation in same area as you Mumbar.

"I seriously doubt, though, that you could have bought a house for £30 to £40k even fifteen years ago."

• well here, my dad bought a 3 bedroomed house in 1997 for about £33k. He sold it in 2007 for £158k.

"I don't see why you are moving every six months. If a tenant pays, most landlords will do all they can to hang on to them"

• from 2001 to 2006 myself and DS (mostly with now XP) were moving every 6 months because we could only find landlords who had bought a new house to live in and were profiting not only from selling their old house at maximum profit but also from rental income in the meanwhile. We had to move nurseries, bus miles into school and blow hundreds, probably even thousands, on references, deposits etc. before we were lucky enough to get a HA place.

Unfortunately, that's the reality of the private sector for most.

Thank you for this thread op.

I am becoming increasingly depressed about the whole housing situation.
Our situation is a bit complicated, so to try and put it simply.
Currently ds, dh and I are living in a bedsit. Dh is in full time employment. I am about to return to work part-time from maternity leave.
Though we need a 2 bedroom property, even with both of our wages combined we could just about afford to rent a 1 bedroom flat.

Dh doesn't have a bank account, which means that he has no credit. I was made bankrupt 4 years ago, so we will have difficulty renting from a private landlord.
It is very unlikely that they'll house us at all

Though I'd rather that we live in private accommodation,
I have sought help from the council, they have put us on the list but generally have said that they can't house us unless our landlord evicts us.
The waiting list time for our borough is about 11 years.

We need to move soon as ds is almost a year old and we are living in unsanitary conditions.

So if anyone has any ideas at all I would like to hear about them.

Whilst house prices are high, rent will stay high. Most landlords would rather not have the expense of finding tenants every 6 months, it cost us around £500 to find our last ones. My mortgage provider won't allow HB tenants, our current ones have been there for over 18 months, and have a little boy...they're great tenants I want to keep. The issue is too little social housing.

mrsc i bet there are loads of landlords out there who bought at the right time and are either paying little or no mortgage yet still charging the earth for rent for their shitholes houses.

not all, but lots.

Maybe someone needs to address the morgage people not allowing HB?

Is it because the payments aren't reliable (councils fault) or because of the stereotype? Surely references would cover the stereotype and especially those that work & only claim partial HB.

We bought our house in 1984 and it cost us £21k. We were earning £12k between us. It was a 3 bed end of terrace. We then bough a 3 bed semi for £45k and we were earning £16k.

We started our own business which unfortunatly failed and we were evicted from our house with our baby. The council housed us in a B&B for 10 months until a 2 bed flat became available. We now have 3 children, 1 very much unplanned but much loved and we were lucky enough to be moved out of our flat which had mould growing up the wall in every room, was cold in the winter (cost us £50 a week in winter to heat with the night storage heaters), you could push the windows out,the DC were always ill etc into a brand new eco friendly 3 bed house in a mixed estate.

One of the private houses on our estate has just sold for £225k. My DH is a teacher and earns £31k, which isn't a bad wage at all. I don't work as I have health issues and with 3 DC it would cost more to put them into child care than I can earn. Our rent is £500 a month and a peivate rent is around £900 for a similar size house. We are in the south west. Much as I would love to own our own home it doesn't look like it will ever be possible, even if I was working.

You are absolutely right that there is a huge problem with housing.

I am working full time, earning 12K a year, single with one child. My rent (for a very modest 2 bedroom flat, small rooms, no garden in a normal, averagely down at heel neighbourhood)is £900 per month. This is about the average private rent for my area.

When my income has been assessed, I receive Housing Benefit at a level of about £350 a month, for which I am grateful, as it means I only have to find about £550 per month towards my rent.

What really shocks me, though, is that if I was in a council or Housing Association flat, my rent would would be about £550 a month so I would not have to claim Housing Benefit at all.

But of course there is not sufficient social housing, to house everyone that needs it, since much of it was sold (some of it is now rented out by private landords) and there has been hardly any rebuilt. And a working person who has the ability to find themselves a private tenancy is very, very far down the list of people who need housing.

Which means that the government is effectively paying £350 each and every month towards a private landlord, to house a working person, multiplied by however many thousands of people are in my situation...

I've been lucky to have been housed, relatively securely - I was in my last-but-one tenancy for 6 years, and hope to be in this one for a similar length of time.

But I am shocked my how many thousands have been spent by the government to subsidise my tenancy over the years - it's not my landlord's fault - I don't imagine his mortgage / finances would allow him to rent below the market rate.

But surely it would be cheaper, for councils to just build some housing that people on modest incomes could actually afford to live in without begging help from benefits.

The housing situation is desperate for many people. I mean, what sort of society allows families to live in cramped, damp and inadequate housing, while others own multiple properties?

If you are working (or trying to), you should be able to afford a dignified place to live, and be able to settle down and have a family. It souldn´t just be the comfortable middle classes who can afford a home and children.

I am just about coming to terms with the fact that I will never own my own home (we rent privately), but not sure if I will ever come to terms with the truth of what a sorry state our housing situation is in here in the UK.

Our situation is nowhere near as bad as some people's, but had ds in 2008 and since I found out I was pg we have moved 3 times. Our last home is a good example of the situations we have found ourselves in; we found a lovely 3 bed house on a nice street close to good schools when ds was 9 months old and the landlady, who was pg and moving in with her bf, assured us she wanted long-term tenants, only to serve us notice a year later as she wanted to move back in to be in the catchment area for the local school. I know it was her house so she had every right, but I am sick of uprooting my son every year or so and of not having any alternative to this very unstable way of living.

We are lucky to have found another house close by and the owners are in New Zealand,so this house could be more long-term, but I worry about them moving back unexpectedly and am in debt because of the cost of the move. I never feel I can settle here because of this worry so it just does not feel like our home, to add to this they have even stipulated what colours we can and can't paint the house.

Me and my partner are not on a bad salary between us but most of our money goes on rent and council tax. I missed the boat with buying a property in the late 90s / early 00s as I did not have parents able to lend me a deposit, and am fuming with family and friends asking us when we are going to get on the ladder. They just don't seem to understand that we have just as much chance of saving the 50k we need as a deposit as taking a trip to the moon. Oh, and if we did save the 50k, our mortgage would be even more than the rent we are paying now.

I too feel the answer is more social housing and more secure tenancies for private renters. Oh, and a little less of a judgmental attitude from lucky homeowners wouldn't go amiss .

Rant over

If anyone wants to feel really sick, I read a quote the other day from someone working in a Housing Department in the late 1970's saying (something like) "if we keep building homes at this rate, we'll be able to close the waiting lists by 1985!"

I would love to track that quote down, or anything to prove whether or not that really would have been feasible.

At any rate, what actually happened next was that 'Right To Buy' was introduced, and people were encouraged into 'buy-to-let' as an investment, which drove up house prices for everyone to today's ridiculous level...

Also in the 1970's I believe JG Ballard wrote an essay as science fiction positing that in the future people would make more money from property values than they did from their day-to-day jobs.

How on earth we get back from this, I have no fucking idea!

8rubberduckies agree with everything you said!