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.

My feeling is that affordable should be defined relative to the average wage, I guess a mode average rather than mean?
Or a single person working a minimum wage job should be able to afford a one bedroom flat...something like that?

In practise affordable depends on the availability of credit

*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.*

I agree with every word of this. More generally, and as a foreigner living here, I think housing policy in this country is schizophrenic. Either "we" (the government really) want to secure home ownership for all, or we want to push some European ideal of long term secure rents where no one's really bothered whether you're an owner or a tenant. Trying to do both at once- which seems to have been the de facto policy since Thatcher- just isn't working.

There is a huge amount of house building going on near me. Including not one but 2 new towns.

However, of one of the new towns, 2500 houses have been built so far, but only around 320 of them are inhabited (according to Council tax records). Many of the others are owned (but not inhabited) by investors in South East Asia, where the houses have been actively marketed. This means that the public transport links and area shop are simply not viable and have been "put on hold". Stopping purchases of property by anyone not ordinarily resident in this country would be relatively straightforward and it happens all over the world. It won't happen here though because it would piss off the people who would spend £75m on a house in Kensington for Ascot.

The other problem is that there are a lot of people (globally) with money to invest and a huge shortage of safe or comparatively safe investments with reasonable returns. Property is still the best bet for a lot of this and so investment is flowing there rather than bonds, or shares or pensions, all of which have been discredited or taken a nasty knock over the last 25 years (see Enron / Dot Com bubble/ Equitable Life).

I agree with you OP .. get a tin hat on though as many on here won't agree. . mostly LANDLORDS

Some of the Cornish villages now have planning laws that forbid new housing being used as second homes; penal levels of council tax on homes that are not either the primary residence of the occupier or rented out could also work. Empty housing not offered for market rent is shameful, IMO, and it is the responsibility of government to make it uneconomic to hold on to it.

The government needs desperately to invest. In many colleges construction courses (and other trades) are too expensive to run and young people are being fobbed off with lesser qualifications that are sold to them as being just as good but don't actually qualify you in a trade. Add in the fact that many more tradespeople are retiring now than are being trained and it's not hard to see why houses aren't being built.

You buy a house to invest in your future. It's madness that the government are not doing the same and investing in our country's future.

Yes exactly peaceout

It's utterly ridiculous Londoners on 100K a year looking at properties in an area where they would earn 35K in a good job and going on about how cheap it is. If you lived and worked there you woudn't be able to afford a £400K house probably any more than you can afford £1M in London.

And if you can get a comparable job on the same money then move, you'd be a fool not to!

53rd that housebuilding chart isn't really a sensible analysis of housebuilding levels. A fair proportion of the housing stock was completely destroyed in WW2 and it took decades to put right, I can even remember prefabs when I was a child. That rather distorts the picture.

Agreed, Increasingly (although I suspect more of that from 40s-70s is slum clearance rather than direct bomb damage), but I was responding to GrindingForms suggesting that house-building levels were at a high today.

Tbh is sadly more and more common to market new developments directly to Asia rather than them ever go
On the UK property market

YANBU OP. There IS a massive housing crisis, there needs to be a couple million more social housing homes built, and there needs to be a rule that no-one is allocated social housing unless they have been living in the UK for 10 years. Yeah I said it so what?

It's disgusting that house prices are high, and why SHOULD people move from the south/south east if that is where they grew up, to buy some little miners cottage in the north east, or a crumbling old hovel in deepest darkest Wales, where the public transport is uber-shit and there is fuck-all there.

And I know this makes me sounds like a nasty cunt but I don't give a shit, it makes me smirk when you see these money grabbing private landlords on tv's 'nightmare tenants' programme, in and around London, and they have had a tenant in there for 10 months who has never paid rent, and they have £15K of rent arrears!

Serves the money grabbing twats right imo. We are meant to feel sorry for them. Er no. You netted a buy to let house with the intention of fleecing people with exorbitant rents. Serves you fucking right.

When the tenant is evicted, they walk away with their £900 outfit on into their £40K car, having lost 15 grand and say' that's a relief' If I lost 15 grand, it would bankrupt me!

As I say, I can't help but smirk when these money grabbers lose 5 figures in rent loss. I have seen people letting out a 4 bed house that has been made into a 7 or 8 bed, by splitting a couple of the bedrooms in half and turning closets into bedrooms, and they have 10-12 people in them, and the landlords are amassing a fortune.

As was said on the first page, anyone owning 2 properties should be heavily taxed. And private landlords with more than 2 properties should have a compulsory purchase order on them, by the local council, so they can be put into the council's social housing stock. They make a fortune from peoples housing need, and it needs to fucking stop.

I should add that the landlords with more than 2 properties, can KEEP 2 of them, but any additional ones should go into the council's social housing stock.

t makes me smirk when you see these money grabbing private landlords on tv's 'nightmare tenants' programme, in and around London, and they have had a tenant in there for 10 months who has never paid rent, and they have £15K of rent arrears!

user, speaking as a money grabbing twat, the short term/immediate effect of this is to make me more reluctant to rent to someone who may turn out to be a nightmare tenant, and if enough money grabbing twats do this then people who are probably just fine as tenants find it difficult to get themselves housed. You certainly see this happening in the SE. There is certainly a need to question the role of landlords'/their income/their taxation/the financial products available to them, but it needs to be done in a nuanced way so that the impact isn't felt by the more vulnerable party to the transaction.

anyone owning 2 properties should be heavily taxed

User you have such a ridiculous view of the world, can't you even see the difference between a very wealthy individual/ fund with a portfolio of properties, and someone who bought a 2nd flat or house to fund their pension and is nowhere rich or wealthy.

Not all landlords are money grabbing twats, I have rented houses from lovely people. One was letting their house after being made redundant, and living in a tiny flat until things get better.

There are horrendous landlords, but there are very decent people and it would be really unfair to punish them because they are a bit better off than others. You cannot compare them with the upper class with more properties than I have rooms in my house! No one is asking the royal family to downsize, are they.

I agree with that user. The council are paying the rent anyway through housing benefit much of the time- why should members of the public get wealthy from taxpayers money? If the council can rent it for £100 a week why pay the landlord £300 a week in housing benefit to house the same people?

landlords with more than 2 properties, can KEEP 2 of them

how very generous of you, we're not in post Revolution Russia just yet then?

I agree with that user. The council are paying the rent anyway through housing benefit much of the time- why should members of the public get wealthy from taxpayers money? If the council can rent it for £100 a week why pay the landlord £300 a week in housing benefit to house the same people?

Well exactly. User is controversial in tone but speaks quite a bit of sense if you pick through it.

And in terms of 'not all landlords are money grabbing twats' I don't get the pensions stuff - why should someone make money out of someone less well off than themselves to fund a pension? People who deliberately buy a second property to rent out are doing just that whether you like it or not. OK a small minority of houses are rented out because the LL can't sell it due to negative equity etc but that isn't the majority by any means.

There is no need for anyone to buy a second home. In many cases you'd be better off in a pension scheme anyway.

What I do disagree with though is the foreigner reference - there are barely any non UK born social housing tenants- something like 96% are British

why should someone make money out of someone less well off than themselves to fund a pension?

why not? What about people earning a big salaries and who can afford private school, or a better state school because they live in a better area?
What's the alternative? Not having any money at all when you retire? What about selling your services for a profit? Selling a product for a profit?

I have zero moral issue about that. If you don't benefit from your work, there's no incentive to get up in the morning. If I can't leave anything to my kids, then I might as well go and party on the beach now.

This doesn't mean that key personnel (army, nurses, teachers etc...) shouldn't have access to low-cost housing to compensate for their low salaries, especially in very expensive areas.

Local Housing Allowance (the amount you can get on Housing Benefit) leaves some people unable to rent privately in certain areas due to affordability. Its a shame the 'pay to stay' policy was scrapped in my opinion. Social Housing should be for those who NEED accommodation, not a tenancy for life, with succession rights. If you can afford to move into the private rental market, or with shared ownership into a home of your own you should be strongly encouraged (forced) to do so. Dont allow people to underoccupy (one person in a 4 bed social home).

We have to accept that not everyone CAN afford to live in London or the SE. I work and I can't...even if salaries are considerably higher down there. The housing crisis is not a case of not enough homes but a case of not enough homes in certain parts of the country. The very fact that social landlords have empty property they can't rent out because it isnt 'popular' or in the 'right location' bears this theory out. If you NEED housing, you would take it. If you want a home for life in a naice area - you wont. The crisis is perpetuated by entitlement, which won't be solved by simply building more houses

Take a look at www.rentersrising.org.uk. They are trying to give a voice to the millions of renters and force government to change things.

It's not 'entitlement'. It's money. Houses have gone up by much more than income has. People haven't suddenly got more entitled or less hard-working.

peace They hold them empty because it doesn't cost them much to do that and if they have no income they don't need to declare it so no one knows they have the asset. Truthfully these foreign investors should be investing their money into REITs.

Anyway, here in the US DH and I are landlords and in the U.K. I am a landlord, owning a few places myself. I refuse to work with agents and believe them to be from the devil. Regulation needs to be focused on that area. The most a tentant can be charged in our town is 6 weeks rent plus the credit check fee with no mark up. As a LL I don't like to use an agent. I use word of mouth and list the place myself. I get great tenants and I do nice things like repair things on a prospective basis. A boiler which is 15 years old is likely to fail. You should replace it before it fails when you know your tenant is disabled and really can't work around having no heating.

Another area which needs to be looked at are fixed rate mortgages. The central bank should be looking to support mortgages that are fixed over the entire term of the mortgage. It would enable everyone to plan better. It would also enable a crash in housing because people who are locked in at lower rates of interest can just pay off their debt. Yes they can't move without realizing a loss. However they could rent it out or just make it work via extending or adding another unit if it's an apartment.

(and really seriously, it is NOT just London and the SE and we'd all have houses if we moved north. It isn't. Or I'd have bought a house up here long ago!)