Housing - the silent crisis?

[CrisisTime]

The shocking state of housing in this country for anyone who didn't get on the gravy train in earlier decades, that is.

The homelessness. The sheer costs of housing. The tiny rooms and tiny houses. Storage rooms converted to miniscule 'bedrooms'. The dirt and dilapidation of so many rentals. Increasingly greedy landlords and letting agents. A cool house-share like The Young Ones would never exist now. The gentle landlord I once had (a vicar's wife) and her relaxed tenants - is no more. Just the sheer lack of decent affordable housing for so many.

300,000 more people coming to UK every year as well, which makes bad matters even worse, if they could be worse that is.

Is any politician from any party ever going to do anything on this issue? All I ever heard is daft initiatives that are a drop in the ocean.

That's not true woodhill. There is a chronic shortage across all trades, not to mention the quality issues of the work of those who are working

SuperBeagle but surely if a bunch of BTLers sell up there will be a glut and prices will fall

older Not necessarily. There's more to the problem than over-demand and under-supply. They're building big developments presently and have been for years and it's not solving the problem; it's not even making a dent in it.

If the government were truly trying to address the housing crisis then they'd have to do a couple of things-

1. Create incentives for large companies to move out of the South East to areas with lower employment and more affordable housing
2. Create barriers to non-UK residents buying property like there are in most other countries
3. Time limit planning permission so that developers can't buy up tracts of land with planning permission and then sit on them for 10 years because they're waiting for prices to rise
4. Properly invest in vocational training again

I'd also like to see an introduction of minimum house / room sizes but I think that would only cause prices to rise in the short term so wouldn't be so effective.

A lot of the people working on the building sites now are from abroad so how will having more make it any better and perhaps they are not particularly skilled either?. Always about the indigenous population not being up to scratch. There are students studying construction at degree level.

The less people here then there will be less demand for housing and perhaps the poorer people will have a chance for social housing. It's all very well saying build more houses but who gets them?

And evict those who are sub letting their social housing properties.

Superbeagle, but houses don't just disappear along with the landlords. They'd either be sold or let by someone who could take the hit of rent control.

And the government hasn't been building anywhere near enough houses and those they have have been propped up by their schemes to make it look like average people can still afford to buy.

Take away the goverment schemes, stop selling to overseas investors and crack down on BTL as a fucking hobby and see what happens.

If you drive through any big British (English ?) city, you will see how our ancestors dealt with the post WW1 housing crisis. By fucking building houses.

There are entire suburbs that were put up in less than a decade. The street I grew up in - 400 houses - was built in less than a year, along with the streets parallel, and the streets that joined it. When we moved in, in 1970, our neighbour had lived in her house since it was built - 1933. She told us of how they moved in before the school (25 doors down) was built.

That's how you deal with a housing crisis. Not by faffing around with flaky mortgages to allow your banker chums to profit.

We have a housing crisis because it suits the government (and Labour are just as guilty here) to have one. As long as we lurch from crisis here, and crisis there, people will generally (look at this thread) bicker with each other, and miss the elephant in the room.

Overseas investors are a big issue, much bigger than many want to accept. You can't have high rates of immigration in the economic climate we're experiencing at the moment.

Massive development schemes present a problem of their own. It's not a viable thing to say, "build more houses!"

Those with investment properties aren't suddenly going to drop the price of their house below market value. They'll be selling them for what they're deemed to be worth at the time, and that will exclude many people from buying anyway.

Overseas investors are a big issue, much bigger than many want to accept.

www.private-eye.co.uk/registry

Bank of mum and dad is popular now and helping to keep prices high, which doesn't help those that don't have that option.
Lots of empty properties.
Lots of personal debt.
One-two beds are still affordable round here £90-£120k ish. There is quite a big leap up to three beds at £160k +

We aren't greedy Landlords - one of our tenants has just signed a long tenancy and told us he wouldn't be able to afford anything else in the area.
We have no intention of selling and kicking tenants out.

I think it's a big issue that we face. One of my biggest bones of contention is people writing letters to our local paper objecting to the local plan, who then moan that there is nowhere local for their children to live.

Did The Young Ones have a cool set up?

They had rats, lived in squalor and the landlord frequently turned up unannounced.

OneFlewOverTheDodosNest such an excellent post and i agree with every word

Strangely enough do you know what influenced the last bout of serious housebuilding in the 60s? Cathy come home. A bloody film!

woodhill I don't know what to say to you. There is a crisis of skills shortage in the building industry and it's been building for years. You don't go to university to study construction to be a good chippie, or bricklayer.

The hope is the apprenticeship levy will help.

Oh and people sub letting their social properties are already evicted

My worry is - what happens to the older renter? Perhaps it's because I'm ageing fast myself, but my wages just about pay my rent. What will happen when I'm forced to rely on a pension?

Bringing up my kids solo has meant a working life in part time/NMW jobs, so no huge private pension for me, no savings to afford bond/moving fees, and high rental costs mean I shall probably be sofa surfing at seventy.

TheNaze

Yes I live in a village where even plans for one house are met with protests and complaints.

140 houses have just been granted permission after the government stepped in and overruled the council. Village in uproar. Mostly pretending it's about infrastructure but looking at our private village FB page it's about them not wanting "asbos" living here in HA housing, they "earnt" the right to live here. I had an argument with one of the main protesters who was handing out pre typed letters and getting the elderly to sign them and send them to the council. She was scaremongering telling them we were going to be overrun, they wouldn't be able to walk their dogs anymore etc etc.

I explained to her we have a massive housing crisis and need more homes. She said "don't tell me about the housing crisis, I own TEN BTLs, I provide housing"

I literally had no words

Do you have infrastructure for that development?

Whereas I live in a perfectly decent village with good transport, nearby jobs etc and 30 odd plots with planning permission that aren't selling. Just as well as the over development massively adds to the flood risk, but no one generally cares about that.

The biggest problem we have is nimbyism. People don't want to share. There have been plans here to build on a bit of scrubland for over ten years, continually scuppered by the complainers. It keeps house prices nice and high and means that the younger people who work for the two very large employers here, cannot live here.

I completely oppose new developments in my area. There's no infrastructure planned, at all. The roads are already packed, so traffic would be just impossible, but that's only a small point.
The GP surgeries and dentists are full and closed to new patients. All the schools are oversubscribed. How much worst would it be if 200 new families move in if the new houses get built?

Banning BTL is completely unrealistic. How do you expect people to survive when they reach retirement? Not all landlords are big multinationals or the duke of Westminster, many small landlords have made huge sacrifices to buy a little something to use as a pension. Realistically, there won't be any state pension!

If anything gets done, once again it will go the same way as inheritance tax and the rest: they won't apply to trust funds, there will be caps so the wealthy won't suffer, but the lower middle class will be squeezed once again. The ones called "rich" because they barely reach the higher tax bracket but aren't entitled to any help whatsoever, and end up with less than others.

I oppose new developments in my area too.

No public transport (literally none), country roads/single lanes, not enough schools, one small country hospital, very few jobs etc.

Not only that, but property developers are swines, for the most part. They intentionally delay development in hopes that people will rescind their contracts and they can sell the houses on for more money as the market value increases.

I would (and do) vehemently oppose big developments in this area. The area simply cannot cope, and it's not a solution to the problem.

"don't tell me about the housing crisis, I own TEN BTLs, I provide housing Im laughing all the way to the bank"
(Sounds like she could be in trouble due to being over leveraged)

Unless you live in the half if the country where you can buy for £60,000 - and where the issue is jobs.

Strikhedonia, SuperBeagle

Out of interest, where would you promote new developments ? Presumably these places would have the infrastructure ?

Alternatively, if your locale had the infrastructure expanded, would you then be supportive of building more houses near you ?

Lack of infrastructure is a Tory hallmark. It stems from the "no such thing as society" mindset which gets all upset when my taxes are used to pay for your benefit. Look how some childless people begrudge paying for schools ....

The biggest problem we have is nimbyism
No it isn't.
The biggest problem is too many people and jobs crammed into one small corner.

Lurking I wouldn't support massive developments as a solution to the housing problem, because it isn't a viable solution in the long-term.

They cause urban spread, make commuter times longer and traffic worse than it already is. That's only the start of the problems mass development causes.

And no, because we'd go into substantial debt trying to get that infrastructure built. For a country whose economy is already teetering and for a country whose already in such great debt that recovery even in the longer term seems unlikely, borrowing to fund infrastructure which won't see any return would be an unwise idea.