Younger people should be rewarded for lockdown via affordable housing

[Ordree]

As others have noted, young people (not just those in frontline roles) are making enormous sacrifices to protect others, mostly but not exclusively from much older age groups. They will be bequeathed a damaged planet, a ruined economy and they will have done further damage to their mental health by staying indoors for months on end. They are the ones paying older people's pensions when they won't have anything like the same financial security to look forward to themselves. Yes I know older people paid their elders pensions during their working lives, bit never has there been such an imbalance. As the economy is likely to be ruined short to medium term anyway, would it not be reasonable to start the biggest givernment-funded housebuilding programme ever, allow younger people who have just bought to write off negative equity losses against tax, and essentially redress some of the appalling imbalance between generations and classes?

Agreed Ordree. Lots of rubbish posted here. And what about care workers? Forgotten as usual! Doctors get the highest reward for their study - above all other grads. Nurses are not bottom of the pile either. We cannot keep rewarding and spending when we are skint! We need to decide upon priorities and guess what, the worst off in society will pay and those without work - which will be millions. NHS workers won’t be one of them.

@ZombieFan while I agree that it’s true of some people, it really isn’t true of all young people. Perhaps certain sects but none of my friends (I’m late twenties) have the latest iPhone, car or PlayStation! We are all in starter homes. My parents (50s) are far more frivolous in their spending than me and my friends. They couldn’t bear to go to Lidl, Aldi or B&M etc.

It’s also worth bearing in mind re the clothing thing that if you have less disposable income you tend to buy cheaper clothes that get tatty and can’t be repaired. Because you don’t have the cash to spend on quality fabrics that can be sewn up every year or so. I’m trying to save up more to buy better quality clothing so I can buy less, but if your living hand to mouth you buy what you can afford even if that means buying again in a few months time! Clothing quality isn’t what it was!

Ok @Ordree in the 90s. Forgive me. I'm d and remember my older siblings struggling with negative equity. They are in their 60s now

Ordree

Why isn’t your friend buying a place they can afford then renting it out.

Or moving the parent into their place in a cheaper area and commuting

Even if they are staying with the parent it isn’t like they need a place to live atm they have a roof over their heads.

My Dd is one of those young people you want to be given a helping hand to.

At 19 having left school with a few scraped through GCSEs and been working through a lot of zero hours contracts she found herself last year with the fact she would never be able to get a decent sized mortgage for a few years.

So she bought for cash a grotty studio flat hundreds of miles away.

She has put herself through diy courses to be able to do most of the things herself and was just about to put it on the market when Corona hit.

She is probably earning similar to your friend but the difference is she is realistic

In our area the average price for a house is probably well over a million.

It would be ridiculous to think she could go straight into even a flat around here as a ftb

If someone is expecting to do that and moaning because they can’t then they are really going to have a hard life.

I know people who back in the 70s and 80s who refused to move away to get a job or go to a different area to be able to buy a house.

They didn’t do well and are now the ones saying we were lucky.

At the time they thought it was madness going from job to job to earn enough to buy a place

Negative equity is owing more for your property than it is worth.
You still pay the mortgage on what you bought it for.
So if you buy/mortgage a house at say £200k and it becomes worth £150k, you are in negative equity of £50k.
Your mortgage is still payable on £200k as that's what you agreed/borrowed.

Negative equity though doesn’t really affect you if you don’t move.

When I was younger I had no problem in helping my older neighbours. I did not feel they were a liability, not did I feels sense of entitlement because I was physically fit, could hear and see well. I did not begrudge them any help because they were vulnerable and had helped others when they were able too. We safeguard the vulnerable in our society first and not those who have the potential and ability to do things for them selves. I recall ABOS being introduced predominantly for the youths terrorising estate and especially the vulnerable occupants. I would be notified if any part of society was prioritised over the vulnerable. No the young should not be prioritised. I was horrified when a clap for the children was suggested because isolation was hard on them. My daughters were also horrified about this post when we discussed if they thought it was fair or not.

No group of people should be given preferential treatment over another. We’re all in this together, and we will all have to deal with the fallout when it’s over.

Negative equity though doesn’t really affect you if you don’t move

Financially no, psychologically yes. Knowing you’ve lost a hard saved for deposit and are servicing a debt on a depreciating asset really pisses you off.

It was heartbreaking the amount of repos for sale in the 90's, the market was flooded, so prices were low. It was no help to many ftb though because they had lost their jobs, due to the recession. The EA either stopped telling you they were or not allowed to tell, I can't quite remember.
We were looking for our next one up, and the amount we saw where people had left things behind in a rush to go. Kids toys were the most depressing.
You didn't want to buy some you saw as you knew somebody had lost their home. We stayed put in the end, for the next 5 years or so.

We have been in negative equity. I never lost sleep over it.

Why would you.

You live in your home, you pay a mortgage.
Why would you be googling house prices and upsetting yourself when by the time the mortgage is paid off it will probably be worth more than you paid for it anyway,

You have to live somewhere.

We have been in negative equity. I never lost sleep over it

Good for you. We’re not all you.

I have far less sympathy for people in negative equity who depend on insane house prices to continue than I do for those priced out in the first place thanks in part to those who haven't done their sums properly. There is no reason why having bought a property should make you a protected class.

Why isn’t your friend buying a place they can afford then renting it out.

One fewer amateur landlord = a net positive.

Negative equity affects you if you have to move as some do due to job loss, divorce, etc. House prices are vastly more expensive than they used to be and there is barely any social housing. Outside the public sector there is no final salary pension lefts. Young people are f*cked and are going to spend years if not decades paying for the economic fallout of this lockdown. All for a disease which primarily (but not exclusively) affects the elderly. I agree op that it’s not fair.

Zsazsajuju

Even within the public sector the final salary pensions are not universal- in the NHS they’ve been changed to average salary. There are a few people who still are on the old pension scheme but mostly they’ve been frozen and transferred over.

Having thought about it more. Possibly nurses and Doctors on the front line should be rewarded first. Then the 1.5 million vulnerable who have been forced into quarantine for 12 weeks to protect their lives. Then the wider NHS, & care workers. Then OAPs and the unemployed. Then schools, the police and all the emergency services.

Considering 'younger' people are more likely to be covidiots who refuse to stay inside and are endangering everyone's life they are just not a priority now and they amongst all groups are the healthiest, have longest left to live and earn more money, to then buy a house.

No group of people should be given preferential treatment over another. We’re all in this together, and we will all have to deal with the fallout when it’s over.

I agree no group should be given preferential treatment. Older people were given preferential treatment through being able to buy houses cheaply, those that went to university did so free and in some cases with grants and many more had final salary pension schemes than those doing similar jobs now. Acting to reduce housing costs now is acting to reduce an unfair generational preference. We are not all in this together. Some people have significant wealth that they would not have had had they been born later and worked equally as hard. Some people have inherited vast wealth. Some people live in large inherited detached houses while others struggle living at home, in grotty studio flats or in poor quality flatshares, not to mention those on the streets.

Older people were given preferential treatment through being able to buy houses cheaply, those that went to university did so free and in some cases with grants and many more had final salary pension schemes than those doing similar jobs now

They weren’t given preferential treatment at all. They just happened to be born when conditions were more favourable. If they’d been born 50 years earlier they’d have left school at 14 and been sent to war. Nobody has any control over when they were born.

Having thought about it more. Possibly nurses and Doctors on the front line should be rewarded first. Then the 1.5 million vulnerable who have been forced into quarantine for 12 weeks to protect their lives. Then the wider NHS, & care workers. Then OAPs and the unemployed. Then schools, the police and all the emergency services.

I don't see why OAPs ( a term beloved of those looking to evoke images of destitute older people but which is more likely to encompass some perfectly well off people) should en masse be given any further advantages to further tilt society in an unfair direction. If working age people emigrated en masse following a post COVID depression, who would provide the cashflow to keep paying pensions let alone the labour for a functioning economy?

They weren’t given preferential treatment at all. They just happened to be born when conditions were more favourable.
They were given preferential treatment because the government could and should have intervened to stop house prices and rental stocks respectively rocketing and going into freefall, via alterations to stamp duty and reversing the 1980s sell-off of council houses. But they didn't, partly because the older generations were both a bigger and in some cases more selfish voting bloc, & they wanted those votes. The inaction when action could have been taken absolutely is preferential treatment.

Ordree.

Please read up on social history and tell me how it is worse now, rather than different.
Child poverty existed when I was a child in the 70's. It didn't affect me as we had the basics and a bit more, but many of my friends came from families who couldn't afford to feed them. They used to come to ours for something to eat. There were estates full of them.
There has always been a class divide, there always will be.
Some people are lucky and have a hand up, but many don't.

I’ve managed not to tell you what utter bollocks you’re talking up to now but you’ve pushed me too far now. We don’t live in a communist society and never have. If you find this country so unfair, piss off somewhere
This post is abusive. I understand people disagree with what I am saying but I don't think this kind of abuse is ever warranted. I also think it exposes your lack of counterarguments.

Older people were given preferential treatment through being able to buy houses cheaply, those that went to university did so free

What nonsense. Back when uni was free only around 10% were allowed to there. Now its more like 50%. So you could just as easily say "Younger people were disadvantaged in the past because less of them were allowed to go to university." FYI University is still free at the point of use, just like the NHS. Its just accounted for in a different way now.

You could also say younger people in the past did not have access to the internet so were disadvantaged compared to people today. Or young people in the past didn't have access to cheap goods from china. Or young people in the past didn't have access to IVF or Easyjet or mass produced food ....so should be compensated.

The past was DIFFERENT in many many ways. You cant pick one single thing like house prices in isolation and claim you should be compensated because its not fair. Ridiculous.

If you cant afford London MOVE.